Martina Melilli

“The artist launches an investigation into the memory of the former laundry that houses the Elpis Foundation, of the people and stories that have inhabited it and that have built its identity. The little that it has been possible to reconstruct what took place at number 25 in via Orti is due to the testimonies of the historical inhabitants and the owners of the shops in the neighborhood, the only ones who still today preserve the memory of this space. This is the case of Signor Ercole, born in 1940, from whose stories the title of the exhibition is also taken, “Chì ghe pù Nissun!”. To fill what their memory cannot remember, the artist relied on a medium, Cristina Pasqualini, and a metaphonist, Antonio Fois, to bring out the stratified memory of this place by digging into its “other” historical dimensions.

To symbolize this parallel research, three sentences emerge from some walls. They are quotations taken from foundational texts of the spiritualist discipline and beyond, which evoke the idea of ​​tangibility and contact with other dimensions. Some of these texts can be consulted in the exhibition space and form a small library. The photographic composition on the ground floor portrays a ghost walking on the border between light and shadow in full contrast through the streets of Castrignano de’ Greci. If, as Avery Gordon writes, “behind every ghost there is a wound to heal”, the artist wonders if this wound can also apply to a place.”