SULLE FORME DELL’ABITARE

Opening: 11 Ottobre 2017 – dalle ore 18.30
11 Ottobre / 15 Maggio 2018
Dal Mercoledì al Sabato su appuntamento
Residency 80121 – Via Martucci 48, 80121 Napoli

HOW TO SEND A MESSAGE
Zehra: The messenger, disguised, heads to a different dimension, flees from a door, a window, something that he wants to channel in a single direction, towards an image. Perhaps an abstraction, an imaginary landscape. He does not want to be defined, does not wants to be inserted into a prefabricated box. He wants to participate but it is necessary to move away and look back in order to discover the figure as a whole. He heads out with his mind open, with a hole in his pocket. Mind and eyes open, to a direction beyond. Beyond that defined by his history, his family and his heritage, his sexual gender and his social class. He is aware of this and moves with security. Lightly.

Raffaela: When someone says goodbye to a space, something remains. The space is abandoned but it still exists, almost searching to hold on to something that contains a memory. When you dream or think about what happened in the past, you can never find the particular detail that has been forgotten. You try and try to rebuild the moment that has past, in a memory, a dream, a vision. However it becomes impossible and the more you think about that portion of space and time where we have left an energy. In that corner of the room. That mysterious object. The words perhaps not even spoken, almost like an obsession.The floor/roof is unfinished, it’s broken, yet tries to self-preserve itself, to indicate connections between space and time. The remains of an inhabited roof. A destroyed but recreated roof. A restored past. It’s just covered by a clear transparent surface, perhaps a present time without any more structures and secrets.

An abandoned apartment, emptied of family histories and the ghosts of the past, is reactivated by the will of a dialogue with the space itself, with its own historical and social peculiarities, and from the invitation of Naldi Rossano to share the possibility of “inhabiting” in order to experience first hand the setting and recreate its narrative, one that is present and open to a continual redefinition. The first to intervene in the dialogue, with site-specific installations is Zehra Arslan, who traces the foundations of a meeting with the Other Unknown. The stranger, who allows the creation of new meanings on what remains of the maternal house.

In the first video installation, Naldi Rossano, imposes a faded vision of an altered domestic archaeology. At times disturbing, a symbol of a social reality from which the artist comes and who intends to put into question, wanting to emphasize the obsolete features, with a delicate eye. “A Post-Historical Present”, part of a series of self-portraits, puts on stage an ironic ambiguity of gender in which the artist wears his grandfather’s military clothes, barefoot, in a composition where the relationship between the human image and that of the objects takes place in both gravitational and social terms.Arslan responds to the invitation to transform the space by tracing, across the incisions; the only human presence in the discourse. The almost comical but eloquent gesture of wearing a “outfit” that refers to a certain “time” in space. The 1960’s adornment, contrasts with a figure that is otherwise anonymous, without identity. Perhaps a phantom presence which seems by chance to be walking towards nowhere or in an imaginary landscape. In a debate between internal and external space, the reflection of the marine horizon communicates with the domestic structure.

The figure observes, with a certain distance, a small bed-frame, in which Naldi Rossano creates a collage of three generations, which wear the same clothing but exist in a confrontation in which the face of the artist is covered. The face is covered in the definition of belonging as well as the figure drawn by Arslan which has it’s head open to the imagination. The sculptural presences that are created by cuts in the walls, become reproductions of new figures that exist in the empty spaces. These are the points where we stop to look and where the attention is tense; such as the windows, new ways of travelling. The grape, a still life, is a pictorial, ritualistic element, which refers to the idea of a space that has already lived, without wanting to be the actual meaning.The creation of a floor installation where there is a reversal of the collapsed roof in the abstract layout of an infant’s bedroom, in which a failed experiment of rebuilding and preserving a floor/roof on which to rest its bases becomes an opening exercise to the novelty of the present. In this way, through a fragmented restoration, the memory of the past time is turned into possibilities.

Arslan and Naldi Rossano thus work on a process of self-definition, and of self in relation to the each other and the space in a narrative between emptiness and fullness, redefinitions of memories now lost and the imagination of an ideal place yet to be discovered.

Zehra Arslan (Hamburg, 1985) lives and works in London. Recent exhibitions and projects include Programa de Arte Público Independiente presents: Zehra Arslan, Mexico City (2017), Homeland at Gesellschaft für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Osnabrueck (2017), In due parti: Perchè la signora K corre all’impazzata? at the Center of Contemporary Arts, Modica (2017), Wored at Fondazione Zimei, Pescara (2016), Honesty Is the Greatest Fidelity at Yamakiwa Gallery, Niigata (2016), The London Open at the Whitechapel Gallery, Londra (2015), The Observer Effect at Gemak, The Hague (2015), Valid at Tenderbooks (2014), Are You Coming in or Going Out at the De La Warr Pavilion (2014). She is currently preparing for a project at Body and Soul in Geneva. She is a co-founder of the sound and choreography research group YATTA and a visiting lecturer since 2015 at the University of the Arts London.

Raffaela Naldi Rossano is an artist from Naples, Italy. She lives and works in Naples and London where she concluded an MA at Goldsmiths, University of London with a research about post-historical identity and generational transmission called “Say Hello Back to a Phantomatic Present: Perform Heritage and Inhabit History”. Graduated in Psychology, her artistic practise is based on a psychoanalytic, social and humanistic theoretical background. Her work try to provoke a discussion about various themes such as identity, human relationships and social culture, through a range of mediums, from installation to video, printmaking, text and photography, in order to create and re-create meanings, individually and collectively. Recent exhibitions include: How to avoid Trauma, SOMA, Mexico City (2017), Elusive Archeologies, Biquini Wax, Mexico City (2017), XV, Goldsmiths University, London (2016), Forecasting Future, LCC, London (2016). Raffaela is the director of Residency 80121.Residency 80121 aims to cultivate a dialogue between artists and various spaces to support the discussion and exhibition of contemporary art through a direct approach and engagement with each setting to encourage a cultural, but also interdisciplinary exchange.

Residency 80121 was founded by Raffaela Naldi Rossano, Mariagisella Giustino and Gianluca Picone. The programme received the Matronato from the Museo MADRE.