Exhibition realised in collaboration with the Festival Grenze Arsenali Festival, with the essential support of the Istituto Italiano di Cultura di Belgrado, and book published by Studio Faganel.

The story is the result of hours of walking, observing, and listening to all the living elements that make up the island: the land, the stone, the people. In this precise order, I sought to build a series of events that have characterized and made this place unique. I started from the land that men dug to bring the stone to light. I arrived at the land that is now preserved in the cavities that give rise to the underground gardens. In this place, the real past and present blend with facts, legends, possible truths, and distant mythologies: the literary contribution of Marilena Renda is essential in conveying these words, as she was invited to participate in the project by drafting unpublished texts. Photography and words translate and strengthen the meaning of the cavity, understood as a generative space.

Alessandra Calò

Word and image have always been in a mutually generative dialogue. The image evokes absence, while the word brings it to life and sustains it. The twentieth century turned this into a drama – a creative conflict over what forms, settles, and becomes the artisan or material of an imaginary. The installation at the Italian Cultural Institute in Belgrade prompts the relationship between iconographic text and narrative text in the realm of myth, where “high” and “low” vie for the kingdom of storytelling and memory. A tale without an incipit, development, or conclusion unfolds linearly along the walls of the room, without interruption. The visitor is on an empty island. This allows every “once upon a time” to begin anew from the perspective of the frontal viewer, reflecting in the circularity of their own archetype, whether celestial or maritime, earthly or divine. Here, texts emerge from the image like the voice of a sibyl from the cavity plunged into the unspeakable. The culture of syntax distills the wild chaos of nature. In the disordered secret garden, the voice of reason gathers the remnants of ancient regenerative metamorphoses. A fierce darkroom, magma and repository of found iconographic fossils, made visible only by the hand, the craftsmanship bent to the reasons of the artistic process, like ghosts: before the final immersion in the popular archive.

Simone Azzoni