Rituals

“Giulia Cacciuttolo’s objects are time travellers; artefacts in reverse. Instead of becoming artefacts in a conventional way, through the passage of time and the layering of history, they are purposefully made to take place of a relic yet to exist: a potential embodiment of a collective memory. For her exhibition “Rituals”, the artist presents a collection of objects sensitively and deliberately placed in dialogue with architecture of the Pragovka exhibition space. Materials are steel, clay, wood, felt, lace, analogue photoprints – in a world that is increasingly digital, Cacciuttolo’s practice is a longing for physicality. The works are never explicit, always elusive, as if seen out the corner of an eye or by watching a passing landscape through a hazy train window. At the same time, there is a desire to materialise the immaterial; to preserve and archive something formless and fleeting. It is through this ambiguousness that they maintain their autonomy – Giulia Cacciuttolo emphasises that her works are not a comment on her personal history, but rather an attempt to channel histories of multiple individuals and generations. At a first glance, the photographs shown at the exhibition seem as if a camera shutter was accidentally pressed at a family gathering: a lock of hair, a half-full glass, someone’s hand, gesturing to an unseen conversation. However, the impeccable metal frames emphasise that these shots were selected deliberately and direct attention to the delicate balance of the transitional moments. With her work, Cacciuttolo asks what is remembered, but also what isn’t, and addresses absences and gaps in the archive. Ambiguous objects, transparent and changeable materials can be seen as a kind of testimony to a memory that has never been recorded. A clay bowl, filled with salt-saturated water, is placed in the exhibition space: as the water slowly evaporates, we are left with a residue, a visual record of time. The hardships and joys that filled that time remain respectfully hidden, the object being only a silent sentinel of its passage. Giulia Cacciuttolo’s installation deliberately blurs the borders between ready-mades, new sculptures and found objects, gently altered by the artist. The resulting impression is of an undefinable time frame – the objects seem vaguely familiar, as if coming from a recent past that could easily be our own. Haptic memories aren’t ‘storable’, we can’t remember how something felt like to touch – perhaps due to our language having so few words to describe it, perhaps due to the ephemeral quality of memory itself. However, if we were to touch it again, the sensation immediately comes back: sandpapery dryness of unglazed clay, dusty warmth of a wood branch, a cold touch of metal. Lace fabric hanging in the exhibition space sags under the weight of an unknown material. A light dusting of a familiar white substance right underneath it reveals the secret: flour. Memories themselves are weightless, but their most intimate details are often the physical ones. How the dough sticks to the kitchen table. How the bed springs under a familiar body. We are, after all, physical beings, with our bodies shaping the way we perceive the world. However, there is another aspect to Giulia Cacciuttolo’s work, which takes us back to the exhibition title. In “Rituals”, the physicality and hand-made quality of the artworks is also an attempt to give form to a difficult emotion. Giulia Cacciuttolo explores how we process grief and loss, considering traditional votive objects as well as accounts of personal mourning rituals. Loss is something we often struggle to find words for – in “Rituals”, Cacciuttolo skips language altogether, attempting to communicate through the qualities of materials themselves. A small red clay sculpture as well as an object based on a wood branch are both inspired by personal accounts of dealing with recent loss, adopted by the artist into her own practice. Sculpted out of need to exorcise the pain, objects take over when the words are lacking and bring a much-needed closure. In Brothers Grimm’s fairy tale, The Frog Prince, the king’s servant Heinrich had been so saddened by his master's misfortune that he had had to place three iron bands around his heart to keep it from bursting in sorrow. But the joy of his master’s long-awaited redemption makes the bands break one by one, each with a loud crack. They too can be found in Giulia Cacciuttolo’s exhibition: three steel bands, placed on a metal trolley. Their hand-hammered surface is softer and more organic than its surgical surface, as if they indeed could have come from the inside of a human body. The bands seem larger than we imagine a heart to be, silent and cool – a reminder that grief will pass, but its memory remains.”