(IT)

Introduction

In such a delicate historical moment, characterized by a scenario of crisis and skepticism, in which Europe has understood more than ever the need to make a common front to solve the current global health, but also social and economic emergency, it is necessary not to forget but rather reflect on the common past that has united the countries that make up the Union, the cultural and emotional baggage of all its citizens.

“The presence of ancient or recent traumas relating to wars has an impact across generations that weighs on life and relationships, not only among neighboring peoples but also within societies. So taking them up, revising and archiving them, lightens this weight, which is otherwise handed down from generation to generation”.

These are the words of the psychoanalyst Paolo Fonda, expressed in an interview in 2015, which explain the fundamental importance of the collective reviewing of a traumatic experience, useful for “neutralizing” its negative impact, otherwise destined to be perpetrated.

For its “ability to probe the places where rationality does not reach, and bring out the unconscious matters”, it is precisely art, according to Fonda, that constitutes one of the most suitable tools to illuminate the dark corners of traumatic luggage of humanity, transforming them into a shared narrative and teaching.

Many of the works that animate the collective exhibition From a Common Past are the result of personal and family experiences linked to the dramatic events that, especially in Europe of the 20th and 21st centuries, have overturned the fate of entire populations: totalitarian regimes (with the tendencies that they have entailed, such as anti-Semitism, anti-Gypsyism, xenophobia), revolutions, Shoah and holocausts, and the violence with which citizens of some parts of the world, even today, are forced to live together on a daily basis.

With the works on display, 10 international artists have identified and reviewed the “gray areas” that these events continue to project onto the contemporary world, invisible and never untied knots that intrude – at an unconscious level – even on the new generations.

If some of the artists present were directly touched by these events, others have made the topic of conflicts and the way in which these are narrated and remembered – through rituals and memorials – the focus of their research.

The itinerary of the exhibition proceeds by gradually widening its geographical panorama and meanings: if the first part, with the works of Lesya Pchelka and Vasilisa Palanina, Manca Bajec, Katarzyna Pagowska and Sylvia Griffin, the protagonist is the Jewish holocaust, in the second room, with the works of Marcela Avellaneda, Jason File, Mircea Ciutu and Boris Beja, the vision extends, reaching to include other holocausts and the narration of slices of life of Nations in which the wounds caused by political choices are open, or not yet heal.

Strong, in this second group of works, is also the image of the bare earth and burials in mass graves, deprived of any sacredness. The ground, tormented and violated with cigarette butts, is the only horizon that we can observe in one of Ciutu’s works, which evokes the violence perpetrated in Romania under the government of Ceaușescu; the fragile installation by Avellaneda instead tells the brutal reality of the Colombian mass graves, while the series of works by File refers to mass burials in the former Yugoslavia.

Always underlying in From a Common Past are the universal themes of life and death. Not surprisingly, the “mobile” installation by Boris Beja closes the exhibition, with its archetypal representation of dance: a reflection on the eternal flow of time, conveys a message of hope and trust that, in the incessant progress of history, the memory of the past can always be kept alive.
Also represented in the online exhibition is the work of Israeli artist Dan Allon, who with his performances – in which he portrays, for days and days, the fictional character of a dictator – reflects on the dangerous power of charismatic leaders to influence the masses, on totalitarian regimes and on systems of political repression.

The exhibition is part of the ArtForRemembrance project co-financed by the European Union program “Europe for Citizens”

exhibition artworks

On the Holocaust

Inspired by the discovery of a Holocaust memorial in the Jewish cemetery on Kozma Street, on the outskirts of Budapest, this video is the result of extensive research into documents relating to her family members who have been its victims. In “No, No, No” the artist’s hand writes every variation of her mother’s name – in all the ways that she found it written in the archive documents – and then repeatedly erases it.

This action, ritual for the elaboration of a personal mourning, symbolizes the removal and loss of individual identity and the thousands of family vicissitudes within a vast collective historical narrative that is generally handed down.

The martyrdom of other groups of the Nazi victims has been acknowledged and commemorated by the Polish government in the form of omnipresent monuments and memorials, and regular honouring ceremonies. Those monolithic monuments shape Polish national memory and identity on a conscious level. Nevertheless, for various reasons, including political and religious ones, the black triangle victims have never been officially acknowledged up to this date; the memory of their martyrdom is destined to remain peripheral, latent, subconscious. The glass panel is placed on a black wall; despite being translucent, it reveals the form of a black triangle thus acting as a work of memory. The black triangle is accompanied by the sound of a honorary rifle salute. It was fired by the Polish army to commemorate nationally established martyrs; now the sound of the salute has been “borrowed” by me to individually honour the black triangle victims.

The glass surface is shiny, one can see her/his face mirrored; this reflection represents one’s identity that grows more comprehensive as the suppressed, dormant memory becomes acknowledged. The Black Triangle is a monument founded by the awakened memory.

The work on display is inspired by the artist’s discovery of the diary of her great-aunt survivor of a concentration camp from the Second World War. The installation, made up of silver balloons floating in space, constitutes an ephemeral “talking” monument, which disseminates the oral, invisible and intangible testimonies relating to various conflicts in recent history that the artist has collected.

Moving away with its silver globes from the traditional aesthetics of war memorials, Manca Bajec gives shape to a real transitory and fluctuating “counter-monument”, which becomes a sounding board for not one, but many wars, with voices records of Holocaust survivors and people who have lived in conflict areas such as the former Yugoslavia and Iraq.

Today very few people are aware of the history of this place as a concentration camp, the location of which the collective was able to find through an accurate archive of photographs dating back to 1941. In their performance, the artists plant crosses, which are then sprayed with water, to symbolically cultivate the memory of human tragedy. With their action, they restore the commemorative value to the place and recognize the victims who are buried there, drawing the attention to the dangerous erasing of the remembrance of the historical events, including the most recent ones.

exhibition artworks

TOTALITARIAN REGIMES IN EUROPE AND IN THE WORLD

At the center of the A4-sized works in “The Hole Truth” series lies a single piece of paper hole-punch waste, generated by the hole-punching function of printers at the ICTY (International Criminal Court of the former Yugoslavia) used to crate ring binders of evidence presented at trial. Therefore, each work corresponds to a specific sheet filed at the Court.

Moreover, the canvases are placed under tension in a way that might indicate the places where mass graves and other relevant points were found, as indicated on maps used at the ICTY.
The bright stripes recall colors of the circus tents: some of the first mass graves excavations in Bosnia-Herzegovina took place right under these structures, at the time the only means available to protect the sites from the elements.

Marcela Avellaneda

1975 / Colombia

Vueolos Mutilados

Mixed media installation / 2018

For decades, the Colombian people have lived uncertain of their fate, in the fear of being kidnapped, imprisoned in inhumane conditions and of disappearing forever, without ever being found by their loved ones. The work tells the horror of the mass graves hidden in his country which, gradually found, emerge from oblivion.

The protagonists of his great expressionist canvases are the sacred men, lost and alienated young people, creatures with no rights and no duties who wander around waiting for someone, anyone, to take away even that, the only thing that still belongs to them, bare life. In archaic Roman law, homo sacer is someone who for a crime committed against the divinity or the structure of the state was abandoned to the revenge of the gods, and expelled from the social group. In Ciutu’s works, this figure is embodied by the victims of tyranny and political conflict.
The canvases of “Reeducation” are the altarpieces of a lay altar which contains within itself, at the same time, both sacred and cursed. The use of color and shapes are an expression of the tormented state of mind that has long characterized his country.

exhibition artworks

A hint of hope

With these clay forms, Beja has engraved the images of the famous medieval iconography of the dance macabre (recurring topos in art, re-proposed by many authors especially after the dramatic events of the world wars), which evokes the relationship between life and death, and warns of the incessant passage of time and the cycling of history. Losing your memory is dangerous, and preserving it for future generations is a must. The clay rolls engraved by the artist are therefore configured as a way to leave a testimony in the matter of time that passes and of what has been.
The cylinders showcased hanging on the wall were furthermore used by the artist as patterns from which he created prints-memories documents arranged on the floor.
The representation of dance and movement, associated with the spirituality of Tibetan scrolls, at the same time conveys a joyful meaning, a good omen for the times to come.

Exhibition Video-tour