Niccolò Masini´s practice and research can be taken as a political act of seeing and feeling, in which he articulates central themes such as the politics of displacement, memory, language, temporality, identity, and territoriality. For years he has been collecting and documenting many of the processes that manifest themselves in history through an empirical method of observation and analytical study; in his latest works, he focused mainly on the phenomenon of diaspora.
As for all things tending towards infinity takes its title from Masini’s diaries, which he wrote in 2021 during his residency at amaneï, as a result of a long period of research spent in theAeolian Islands. Masini landed in the archipelago to investigate the specificity of the Aeoliandiaspora (second half of the Nineteenth century-first half of the Twentieth century) bycollecting interviews and consulting public and private archives.
Researching, writing, consulting, and collecting archival records are methodologies widelyadopted by contemporary art and post-colonial theorists, a practice that amaneï's residencyprogram has been promoting and facilitating by hosting artists and researchers since 2016.
The exhibition opening on 3rd June is the first artistic product of the research period spent in the Aeolian Islands. A body of works on paper, video, and site-specific installations, typical of Masini's multidisciplinary approach, is on display in the gallery spaces. A recurring symbol in this body of work is the ladder, which carries for the artist the peculiarity of the Aeoliane migration: it was not always a motion to escape poverty; in fact, the islands were fertile and full of profitable activities from winemaking to fishing, from pumice mining to trade. In this context, the Aeolian migrant initially emigrates by choice and views travel as an elevation of status and social mobility/advancement, but also as a spiritual and moral understanding. With its movement of ascent and descent, and especially of balance, the ladder is also an admirable expression of tension and conjunction between sky and earth, between finite and infinite, transcending the distance between past and future by "eternalizing" the space of memory. Indeed, its performative and dynamic character makes possible the process of re-framing its socio-cultural identity in other places. Memory's performative and dynamic characteristics make possible the process of construction/re-construction. The feeling of belonging to a place/territory within a set of spatial and historical references, is found through memory, the type we build when we are distant from imaginary or physical "places" we come from, and in some way, we might find ourselves belonging too.
amaneï |via risorgimento 71 | santa marina salina – isole eolie