Exhibition
The exhibition itinerary, which presents an important nucleus of works, including photographs, videos, sculptures, mosaics capable of analyzing the artist’s different creative periods, begins with some works in which the artist uses photography, such as the diptych The Line, a line of people waiting for a plane that is not there, on a deserted take-off runway, or like The Encounter, a composition in which, in the courtyard of a church ancient we see the simple and usual gesture of the handshake multiplying, in a ritual capable of crossing time and becoming a symbol; and continues with the recent My song in your kitchen, a video in which daily activities, such as singing or cooking, become condensations of stories and memories, and transform an impersonal place, such as the kitchen of a canteen, into a space of intimacy and relationship.
Among the works on display there will also be the sculpture Home to go, in which Paci portrays himself as a sort of traveller, stripped of everything, carrying the roof of a house on his shoulders. The Portinari Chapel hosts Klodi, a video-portrait of an uprooted man, forced to wander for years, in a dramatic and absurd journey, the conclusion of which is unknown, and Brothers, a mosaic created starting from a fragment of an archive film. The fleeting image, translated with this obsolete technique, acquires monumentality and an enigmatic intensity that fits well into the context of the chapel in dialogue with Foppa’s frescoes.
In the Early Christian Cemetery, however, two works will be presented with which Paci rereads the history of his country, evoking the drama of the dictatorship, which for a long time closed off Albania from the outside and attempted to suffocate it internally by banning all freedoms, including those of expression and faith. Despite everything, it is a series of photographs of the graffiti still present on the walls of the cells of an ancient monastery that served as a prison, today partially transformed into a museum: fragile but resistant signs, which reveal suffering experienced in silence, but also an inalienable need for expression.
The Guardians tells the story of a Catholic cemetery abandoned during the dictatorship and later reclaimed, brought to life by children paid to maintain it. Their vitality gives the work a poetic force and testifies to the country’s unstoppable, if contradictory, renewal and the many facets of our relationship with life and death. The exhibition continues in the Museo Diocesano Carlo Maria Martini with Rasha, a video arising from Adrian Paci’s encounter with a Syrian woman recently arrived in Italy. Shown in close-up, Rasha tells her story, which is expressed on her face even before it takes shape in words. Rasha explores the complexity of storytelling and how lived experience can be conveyed through body language as well as speech.
