Untitled (Atlas)

“I’m writing you all this from another world, a world of appearances. In a way the two worlds communicate with each other. Memory is to one what history is to the other: an impossibility.”

“I will have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining.”

[Chris Marker, Sans Soleil, 1983]

On March 25th at 7 pm, Fondazione Morra Greco will open an exhibition of artists Özlem Altin and Carlotta Sennato who will present the works they produced during their residency at the Foundation last February.

Untitled (Atlas) is the title of the exhibition that concludes the one-month residency of Özlem Altin and Carlotta Sennato at the Fondazione Morra Greco in Naples.
Untitled (Atlas) takes its cue from a reflection on image and memory, on Palazzo Caracciolo di Avellino and the possibility to interpret and to communicate its character and its charms. The work, a fuzzy collection of images, builds an atlas regulated by internal references in which the forms inhabit an undefined area.

The works of the two artists reflect the boundary between representation and non-representation, visibility and invisibility. They explore concepts of finding and disappearing, of building and preserving the memory starting from an ambiguous space, whose story fades away in a vague time frame: between its past as aristocratic palace and its present as the permeable and propped decadent building that houses the Foundation for contemporary art. On the different floors of the building, in the apartments, along the stairs and in the exhibition spaces, every trace is an intermediate element that is neither true nor false, it is a possibility and at the same time an uncertainty: it is what remains after everything else has disappeared. Every trace evokes a memory in a space marked off by oblivion.

Özlem Altin developed a research on images and the representation of the body, and produced an installation based on the concepts of disappearance, shadow and memory: Ianus (my memory of what happened is not what happened), which contains a quote from John Cage. The entrance to one of the rooms on the first floor is marked by the presence of a wall on the right-hand side. On the two sides of this structure the artist places small paintings, collages and gouaches on paper, alternating zones of light and shadow. The ancient italic god Ianus, whose name lends the work its title, was the god of material and immaterial passageways, of beginnings and endings. Similarly, the wall that the artist builds in this room marks the passage to a cosy environment in which the artist places other images taken from old books, making up a gallery of individual and group portraits, of corporeal presences which fade away thanks to the pictorial or the collage intervention that erases their features. During her residency, the artist – who set up a publishing project in Berlin, called Orientpress – started working on her new artist’s book, Umbra.

All images Courtesy Fondazione Morra Greco, Napoli
© Danilo Donzelli