Deborah Schamoni

The works shown at Artissima extend Dala Nasser’s lines of inquiry into the histories of ecology in South Lebanon. Made on the land of her family’s home, the works focus on her material-based practice and the history of territory in the region. Made over several months, Nasser pieces together her canvases using discarded fabrics – curtains, bedsheets and pillowcases sourced from her great grandparents’ home. She creates charcoal etchings over flintstone terrace walls and olive trees planted two hundred years ago. Left outside, her canvases are formed by rain and wind which wash away her rubbings. By returning to create her etchings once more, she gestures to the ways in which her process is involved in temporal practices of caring, tending, staying, and enduring. The materials of her works appear thin, almost fragile, their many folds bearing witness to the repetitive and durational way they were shaped, through time passed. Their pink and red hues owe their color to the dyes she makes from drying wildflowers that grow on the land. These soft and sharp tints signal the life, both human and non-human, which these temporal practices sustain.

Davide Stucchi presents a set of new works following his approach to manipulate and dematerialize properties of the fashion industry. While fashion is usually understood to indicate the presence of bodies, the artist traces a choreography of movement, happening in different scales with the dressing and undressing. Materializing the presence of objects thanks to the absence of the subjects.The new works presented at Artissima, Walkwear, are a series of works carried over by the artist where pieces of clothing are transformed with the idea of walking. In this case, wrecked pairs of jeans are signifiers of pedestrians where pieces of puzzles resembling human figures are walking. The puzzle usually standing for completitude and united standard, here is taken as a paradigm in which a single piece can free itself and get out of the grid and walk on a new topology and landscape.