ALICE GRASSI
RoundTrip

Curated by Arianna Catania

Sicily is still a land of emigration. Every year, thousands of young people leave, heading to northern Italy or elsewhere in Europe to study and work. They leave behind the place where they were born, to which they return only rarely. For them, childhood and adolescence are not only a time in the past, but also a distant place. RoundTrip, a project conceived during the first edition of Gibellina Photoroad in 2016 and now expanded, emerges from this context and develops as a participatory narrative around the themes of belonging and distance. The artist invited a number of young people from Gibellina, during their brief returns to the town, to choose the place they feel most intimately connected to: precisely that first image that comes to mind when thinking of an emotional space or a loved one; a very specific image, one that has always been there, held in our mind. In the portraits, taken together with them, these young emigrants metaphorically become inhabitants of their town once again, while the new town becomes a place of memory, just as the ruins of old Gibellina were for their grandparents. RoundTrip is both a participatory narrative and an investigation into the social issue of migration, into the loss of young energies and intelligences that southern Italy continues to suffer. But it is also a mapping of the imaginary, a kind of mnemonic archive in which individual memories are transformed into a collective narrative and become a constitutive element of the city. Because cities are made not only of streets, houses and their inhabitants, but also of memory and of emotions.

BIO

Alice Grassi (Catania, 1981) is a multimedia artist working with photography, video and installation. She studied at the Accademia di Brera, IED, Bauer and the Politecnico di Milano. She has taken part in several national and international exhibitions and has shown her work in galleries, museums, foundations and unconventional spaces. Among her exhibitions, she has presented work at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, the New Music Festival in Hong Kong, and PhotoVernissage in St Petersburg. She won the Intersection KunstArt Prize and was among the finalists for the Premio Cairo and Premio Celeste. With the collective NonRiservato, she created the light installation Borderlight. She has been invited to take part in several artist residencies, including A.C.A. in Florida, where she was selected by J. M. Bustamante, and has curated exhibition projects for the Capture Photography Festival in Vancouver, Canada.

Thanks to

Agostino Polizzano, Alessia Di Giovanni, Anna Fontana, Beatrice Verde, Enza Maria Ienna, Erica Binaggia, Fabiola Benfatto, Francesca Bilà, Francesco Benforte, Giuseppe Padronaggio, Giulio Di Girolamo, Ignazio fontana, Ilaria Scarcella, Luana Inzirillo, Maria Bonanno, Marilù Di Girolamo, Nino Scordato, Oriana Benfatto, Paolo La Monica, Pietro Di Girolamo, Rachele Zummo, Roberta Ferro, Salvatore Bonanno, Salvatore di Girolamo, Selene Maltese, Soemia Zummo.