Interferenze by Sara Dolfi Agostini
In his novel Exit West, the Anglo-Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid portrays migration as a pervasive, inexorable phenomenon capable of constantly reconfiguring the world. In order to migrate, it is necessary to walk through different “doors”, which are everywhere, but while those in poor countries are accessible to everyone, those in rich countries are militarily manned. The border between rich and poor, stable and dangerous, is thin, if not negligible, until the moment when everything changes.
Nicolò Degiorgis' first solo exhibition, E se l’orizzonte non fosse il confine? [What if the horizon was not a border?] at Galleria Eugenia Delfini, echoes this literary effort to emancipate the phenomenon of migration from the media and propaganda, to re-humanise and to remove it from the univocal – and functional – interpretation of the West. Degiorgis was born and raised between Ticino and South Tyrol, two border regions where multilingualism imposes, from an early age, an awareness of the gap between belonging to a dominant culture or to a cultural minority.
His artistic practice explores the impact of power – in its political, social and economic manifestations – on the lives of individuals and communities. In particular, he focuses on the production of images that aim to highlight and often subvert the ideological and propagandistic contaminations that permeate media and cultural platforms. For Degiorgis, there are always two points of view in any story: one external to a community, which imposes an experience of exclusion that can lead to marginalisation or stigmatisation, and an internal one, as in Hamid’s story, in which survival instinct, cohesion and collective action converge.
The question in the exhibition title poetically emphasizes two concepts which are semantically similar but belong to different worlds: the horizon and the border. The horizon is a natural line between the land/sea and the sky, created in the eye of the beholder, while the border exists within a civilisation and is intertwined with the territorial sovereignty of a state, a modern legal principle thrown into crisis by migratory flows, but also by the systemic impulses of capitalism, technological progress and globalisation.
Degiorgis formulated this question in 2017 in response to an invitation to conceive a solo exhibition at the Plessi Museum, an institution built with European funding to enhance places of transit and borders, in this case the Brenner Pass. For the occasion, he stuck a sheet of paper with the question translated into three languages – the same ones he speaks (Italian, German and English) – on the mirror of the museum's bathroom. Upon leaving the bathroom, visitors could take postcards and answer the question anonymously, then post them in a box, thus reconsigning them to the artist.
The exhibition project is based on these anonymous verbal contributions from a heterogeneous audience, a potential distillation of opinions, hearsay and direct experience. Degiorgis synthesises this babel of languages and ideas to produce a wall installation, a conceptual map that faithfully reproduces the same calligraphy, punctuation and use of white space as on the postcards written by museum visitors.
This work is also available in an expanded and new version published by Rorhof, the independent publishing house founded and run by Degiorgis, which has produced since 2014 projects of his own and books by other artists. For him, books are a means of artistic dissemination and a refuge from a sometimes stagnant and limitative art system. Today, Rorhof is undergoing a period of transformation – from a publishing house to a social cooperative – which marks, at an institutional level, a desire to commit not only artistically but also socially and politically, and to offer a ground for debate outside the museum walls.
This transformation crystallises the guidelines for a path of synergy between art and militancy. In fact, Degiorgis began by investigating the rigid state of marginalisation of the Uyghur minority in China (Oasis Hotel, 2014) to then move closer to home, to north-eastern Italy, to recount the difficulties faced by Muslims in exercising their constitutional right to freedom of religion in Italy (Hidden Islam, 2014) and the frequent episodes of racial hatred to which they are subjected (Hidden Islam - 479 Comments, 2014, and Lo Sceriffo e la Moschea Itinerante, 2017).
Invited by the Museion - Museum of Contemporary Art in Bolzano to curate his first museum exhibition, Degiorgis tackled the issue of the border from a socio-cultural and geological perspective, investigating the combination of civilisation and nature (Heimatkunde, 2017 and Peak, 2014). In the same period, he developed his first artistic and social intervention project, creating a parallel between the museum and the prison located a few metres away, where he taught inmates to express themselves through the language of photography, in a powerful reflection between art and life (Prison Photography, 2017 and later Prison Museum, 2021).
The current exhibition continues with a series of works related to the topic of migration by sea – a research started in 2017 and still ongoing. After the exhibition at Museion, Degiorgis was selected for a residency at the Italian Cultural Institute in Paris, a stone's throw from the Italian Embassy and the French Prime Minister's residence. In his view, the fundamental principles of solidarity and cooperation between peoples – which is symbolised by the European Union flag – are being undermined by the migratory emergency in the Mediterranean and the frictions between different countries over the management of the humanitarian crisis. Hence the idea of triggering visual short-circuits aimed at attacking the democratic message entrusted to the representations of a sovereign power, such as maps, flags and statistical events.
In Blue as Gold, which Degiorgis considers to be the matrix project of this line of research, an incalculable number of small boats – emblems of the fragility of the migrant's life – are piled up in a transparent envelope with a double background: blue on the front and gold on the back. In Ein eiland, the flag placed at the entrance to the gallery, the Wikipedia map of Lampedusa, southern border of Italy where the artist spent several months, is multiplied until it forms a dense grid recalling the military camouflage. Military symbolism recurs in the title of Mare Vostrum, conceptually juxtaposed with the flag and the boat in a series of four digital collages created by artificial intelligence based on stock images. Finally, in the next room, finally, there’s Europa, a photographic image of a fragment of the European flag in inverted colours, with blue stars floating in a golden sky.
Two pieces – whose status as an object and as an image, respectively, seems to merge in the eyes of the spectator – require a comparison with reality from the point of view of the migrants. The first is Opera di reato [Work of Crime], a collection of two motorcycle tyres used as lifebelts and left on the coast of Lampedusa, among many others. The object, however, is not a Duchampian ready-made. It is rather a body of crime and, at the same time, symbolizes the difficulty to remove such waste, opening up an ecological debate about bodies, objects and migration. Degiorgis's critique of the strategy of artistic appropriation in sensitive socio-political contexts is expressed by the tyres, nailed to the wall.
The second work is a small-format, documentary-style photograph that takes its title from an inscription written by a migrant on a hut in the Dunkirk refugee camp: My Head Under Water but Breath Fine. Despite the words, the image conveys a strong sense of apnoea, emphasized by the fact that this temporary home no longer exists, having been engulfed in the flames that destroyed the refugee camp a few years ago. Suddenly, the reaction of the father of the protagonist in Mohsin Hamid's book comes to mind, when he tells him that he has decided to go through one of the doors in search of a better future. After pausing momentarily, he says: "Let's hope”.
Sara Dolfi Agostini (1983) is an Italian American contemporary art curator, writer, and lecturer based in Naples (Italy) and Malta. Over the years, she has researched visual culture, the politics of representation and the theory of image circulation, and curated exhibitions offline and online, public art commissions and a digital residency program – all expanding an interest in different formulations of site-specificity in the virtual domain and in real life. She has worked as co-curator of the public art project ArtLine Milano for the City of Milan (2013-16), curator of the Contemporary Art Centre Blitz Valletta (2018-23) and she is currently curator of the Fondazione Paul Thorel in Naples (2021-ongoing). Since 2008, she has been a guest contributor for international newspapers and magazines, including Il Sole 24 ORE, Flash Art magazine, and Art Basel. In 2024 she will co-curate the Pavilion of Malta at the 60th Venice Biennale.
