Life and Death are Wearing me Down. Giovanni Ozzola

Presenting works created through a wide variety of media, including video, photography, performance and sculpture, the exhibition gathers several long-standing interests in Giovanni Ozzola’s (Florence, 1982) practice, releasing them into a renewed significance. Temporary Structure, a video work, stands as a visual monument, a tribute to the things destined to vanish. For a few minutes, we are transported to different places around the world. The work unveils both individual and collective reality as a total immersion in a temporary structure—an environment that is as dense and enveloping as it is fragile, shaping and etching our existence only to ultimately fade away. In the absence of any cardinal points, in the dark, what are we left with? During a performance, a woman’s hands draw new lines on a slate. Through an instinctive and ancestral language, each scratch traces a new course with an uncertain destination, new paths to follow when the conditions of our habitual reference systems, now depleted, leave us no choice but to leap into the void. All we have is our own tone and the impressions left by time, elements made present by a nautical bell which once marked the position of a ship in the vastness of the sea. In front of us, infinite directions unfold. Immersed in this uncertainty, the urge to move towards a new horizon struggles with the fear of leaving our comfort zone, a duality embodied by the images on the walls.These photographs place the viewer within a heavy, enclosed structure, a bunker marked with spray-painted graffiti. From this space, an opening allows a glimpse of where sky and sea meet. This visually saturated yet calm and expansive environment invites us to step beyond the confines of our inner refuge, the narrow safety of the interior space, and merge with the horizon, a distant place where one might finally feel present. Ozzola’s exhibition appears as a living organism, a composite symbol of experience in which each work resonates with the others, ultimately offering a vision of regeneration, an endless journey.

Text by Giorgia Gigliola.