Africa per sentito dire e varia umanità (Africa by rumours and various humanity) is the first solo exhibition in our gallery of the artist Lucia Pescador, curated by Marta Sironi.
Lucia Pescador’s work focuses on memory, especially since the early 1990s when she started the Inventario del Novecento con la mano sinistra (Inventory of the 20th Century with the left hand), within which all her artwork can be ascribed. Fragments of culture – from the European historical avant-garde to other cultures, from Africa to the East – collected and copied on pages of books and notebooks, invoices and commercial registers, generally papers fulfilled with the ‘noise of the 20th century’. As the artist explained, “When I hear people say ‘the last century’, I think of the 19th because, having been born in 1943, the 20th century is my century and for me, it has not yet passed. But in this imaginative inventory of mine, thirty years old now, it is clear that it seems a lost time that we carry within us, that culture has no time” says the artist. Pescador’s works are conceived as an orchestration of many fragments that she continually rearranges, mixing the voices following her will: “A multitude of images, too close together, tend to overlap, like an orchestra while tuning its instruments. But if you have the patience and keep watching and listening even distractedly, a single song can emerge, the voice of the choir.”
