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Ph by Mircea Sorin Albutiu

Nostalgia
Millepiani, Rome | February 2 – March 7, 2024

"nostalgia

A wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for return to or of some past period or irrecoverable condition"

The encyclopedic definition of 'nostalgia' takes us by the hand and guides us throughout the namesake group show open at Spazio Millepiani in Rome starting from the 2nd of February 2024. Even with some adjustments, variations in nuances, and purposes, the exhibition weaves a story that used to exist but doesn’t anymore. The photos, digital works, and videos shown here are created by a group of artists selected through an open call. On this occasion, they illustrate two different kinds of ‘the past’: on the one hand, the historical past, the one they and their generation never experienced, on the other, the one that is personal, involving themselves directly or the people they portray.

In other words, nostalgia is something missing that produces in us a somehow balanced yet ambivalent mix between sadness and pleasure, depending on the point of view. Overall, the exhibition “Nostalgia” fully mirrors this fluctuating up-and-down stretch between comedy and tragedy, tears and smiles, disappearance and reappearance. In this way, it becomes a delicate path along the emotions, lived by the artists and relived by the beholders through 2- or 3-dimensional pieces. Within this emotional maze, it is interesting to point out the way the artists got involved even from a technical angle by representing nostalgia more concretely thanks to expedients such as black and white, blurred shapes, or filters.

The sequence of art pieces exhibited here becomes a climax of feelings and visual fragments coming towards us, softly first and then as a punch in our face or stomach. This dimension, where memories are central, makes its way with the help of a gentle age like childhood - represented through iconic places such as sports fields and amusement parks - and then continues into still lifes where everything is where it used to be, exactly as we recall. The final chapter of this group show is the one we really can’t avoid, putting us one-to-one with other people’s suffering, which also becomes our suffering by virtue of the empathic power of the arts. Within these artworks, the artists raise traumatic as well as fragile topics that are particular and yet universal, like war and diaspora. On the other side of the picture, we relive them, feeling nostalgia for what we are paradoxically lucky to experience every day (as democracy, for example), but on which we ultimately need to reflect.

Text by Silvia Colombro

Works by Lisa Toboz; Cristina Candela; Andrei Haurylenka; Celeste Fernandez Moncada