This two-person exhibition featuring the artists Federica Luzzi, an Italian born in Rome, and Naoya Takahara, a Japanese born in Ehime but domiciled in Rome since 1977, is first and foremost an investigation in their search, confrontation and dialogue, characterised by a stubborn fidelity to childhood vows and life as disarmament.
Separated (soul is never accessible), each works for the other; each dreams of the other’s respective East and West. Two cultures and a shared search for propitious places. Federica Luzzi through the constant trepidation of the body, the paralysing feminine sense; Naoya with the only comfort of being childlike. Both with a fear of dispossession (the exhibition itself is merely a brief concession of ground), and in the awareness that not even art is enough.
All of Luzzi’s and Takahara’s works, in their desire to obey the world, disregard the world’s commands (the precepts of family and school, the assured happiness of conformity, the trust in advertising) and become lost and enchanted in the attempt to understand why this happens, why, as the poet Guidacci said, the unknown and solitude deepen when one would wish to be like everyone else. What is the grace of diversity? Or the happiness, at a certain point, of knowing that the last ones, of whom we are a part, will, fortunately, remain the last.
Sculptures, installations, fragile sheets, fabrics, stitching, and false monuments transform the pavilion of the former Slaughterhouse into a visual journey in which each piece is a song and a constant fear of suffering violence to the body, to one’s own body, and to its play.
Objects, sculptures and textiles, everything is, at the same time, a sign of obstinacy and stubbornness and the actual impossibility of abiding by the laws of the world as it is.