Curated by Manuela Liette
A Breadcrumb Trail, the first solo exhibition at Capsule Venice by Luca Campestri (born in 1999 in Florence; lives and works in Bologna) leads the viewer along the path followed by Hänsel and Gretel in the eponymous fairy tale made famous by the Brothers Grimm. The works on display - previously unpublished prints made on long-pile velvet and reflective fabric along with a video - visually transpose the narrative climax of the German folk tale through a landscape that unfolds before the eyes of the two siblings after their second night in the woods. Turning their disconsolate gaze in search of the bread crumbs that have now disappeared because they were devoured by the animals, all that the two unfortunates find is evidence of the failure of their attempt to orient themselves. In this specific case, the fragments of the animal and vegetal microcosm portrayed in the works echo, and amplify, the children's sense of bewilderment, dislocation and loneliness. This feeling is shared by the public when they traverse the exhibition space through the same impervious forest and contemplate the feasibility and meaning of returning home.
Is there a home to return to, a reassuring and compact family hearth which to tend, or is the individual destined for an eternal pilgrimage that leads from one state of Unheimlichkeit to another, a physical and emotional nomadism?
Owls and roe deer - subjects taken from photographs obtained using photo traps, or analog shooting, are the absolute protagonists of the series The dreamer slept but didn’t dream (2024) and Like velvety scars (2024). It doesn’t matter if they are alert and have a curious look (as with the owls), or are absorbed in moments of placid suffering among the brambles, or experiencing tenderness with their own kind (the roe deer), these animals do not seem to empathically participate in the fate of the two brothers, and, by extension, the visitor. The latter seems to be suspended between being the object of predation or indifference, between the threatening gaze of the owls and the uninterest of the roe deer.
Even though the visitor activates the works, especially those on reflective fabric which take on different hues depending on the viewer’s observation point, a feeling of distance persists between the animal/vegetal and human worlds. There are several reasons for this. On the one hand, because once one enters the space, they occupy a different reality, in an elsewhere with a fairy-tale atmosphere, as if enveloped in a spell that all the creatures of the forest - especially the birds of prey - help to cast. In this regard, the coherence between the Latin term strix, striga with the corresponding Greek word stryx, strygòs to indicate the witch, and the striga, understood as a nocturnal predatory bird, is not entirely coincidental. On the other hand, the sense emerges because even though the images of fauna and flora are linked to a memory and arise from the initial desire to fix it in time, once they are used for artistic creation they lose their personal dimension, shying away from intimacy and become totally objectified, therefore distanced from a purely personal feeling in order to become a narrative scheme, a topos.
Luca Campestri’s forest is dominated by ambivalence, by aesthetic and semantic dichotomy: the softness of velvet does not envelop, does not reassure, and does not repair. On the contrary, taking on the ripples that the artist gives it recalls wounds, scars; a caress is processed like a cut, the boundary between the inside and outside of which is constantly renegotiated and, thus, never heals. Likewise, the iridescent nature of the reflective fabric does not illuminate to improve visibility, instead, at times, it dazzles, almost as if to blind. The images on the different types of fabrics are the positives and negatives of each other. The artist's language therefore alternates between two poles: between hot and cold, between a nocturnal, saturated, metallic aesthetic and the daytime one of matter and different tactilities.
To complete this dreamlike journey, the video Spettri (2022) whose metallic sound permeates the space without giving the viewer the opportunity to readily understand the nature and origin of what they are listening to. Images, processed and converted through the use of a spectrograph, renounce the descriptive and narrative dimension which, disintegrating completely, becomes realised in sound. The crumbs laid by the two children are evoked by a few “recognizable” images that appear beyond their ghostly dimension: a man on a horse, two figures that seem to move elusively in the forest landscape. The ghostly being evokes a residue of a past to which it is not possible to return, but is also a fragment of a future that has never existed, a hauntological mirage to use Derridean terms.
If the Grimms’ fairy tale, concluding with the return home of the two siblings, identifies the house with self-redemption, the exhibition seems to confront us with a different “ending” - perhaps with precisely the impossibility of an ending - wherein being itinerant, constantly lost, devoid of a sense of belonging allows us to maintain a liminal nature, endowing all things with regenerative potential, but also with a constant haunting, ghostly power.
©️ Capsule
