Beyond the visible – Ships consists of a series of photographs showing different views of the Mediterranean Sea as seen from the shore. The images resemble postcards sent from a vacation; a metaphor evoking well-being, leisure and contact with nature. If we examine the images closely we find a script extending downward from the upper side of the postcards moving seaward, into the image. This script records the coordinates either of sunken ships or of the harbours and piers where those ships were loaded and where they departed from: Beginning in the nineteen-eighties many cargo ships loaded with toxic waste vanished into the sea with no visible signs of the reason for their sinkage.

Since the 19th century, we have known that the production of industrial goods usually produces toxic waste. Over time, industrial waste increases worldwide because in most cases it takes centuries or millennia to become harmless. If you mark the poisoned areas on a map, you realise that the poisoned environment covers a huge area worldwide.

The installation Beyond the visible – Receptacles consists of a number of ceramic sculpture containers. Each piece has a unique shape and colour, inspired by the morphology and history of the places it describes – polluted, poisoned lands that nevertheless retain their incredible beauty in most cases. Some ceramics are reminiscent of a decorative object, but whose colour seems a little too charged to be pleasing. Other sculptures resemble creatures that could have stepped out of a bizarre splatter film. The choice to emulate a pop or even kitsch object expresses the widespread trivialisation of a huge problem such as human alteration of the environment, a phenomenon not only linked to lack of information, criminal organisations and governments, but the basis of an unsustainable and farsighted economic system. The power of this economy lies in the seduction of the consumer through a constant and extreme simplification of complex contents and desires. (E.S.)

Through a reflection on the Partisan Memorial in Mostar by the visionary architect Bogdan Bogdanović, Hysteresis focuses of the gap between the attempt to build an ideal space of dialogue, remembrance, inclusion in Mostar and the real events occurring in that particular site since the sixties.

Hysteresis has been shown in the first institutional exhibition of the multidisciplinary research project MonuMed, curated by Alessandro Gallicchio and Pierre Sintès, which is dedicated to forms of monumentalization in the urban space of the Balkans and in the Mediterranean region.