You Don't Go Anywhere

You Don’t Go Anywhere is the first solo exhibition in Europe by Lydia Ricci (born and raised in Pennsylvania). Exiguous, her sculptures are made from discarded materials and debris salvaged from an infinity of objects accumulated by her family for over thirty years. These sculptures are the result of dilated time that seems to function like Proustian memory. Lydia Ricci’s works are familiar because they reflect the way we exist and relate to the world. They are real-not-real reworkings of objects, small, even useless, mostly miniature things. They live in contingency. That is why they are melancholic, bittersweet and imperfect. They are also a reflection of the stasis of existence that we have shaped according to constructed feelings, to which we have forcibly attached forms, places, labels. Lydia Ricci fabricates her objects with maniacal care, zeroing the scalar difference between her and them: they exist in relation to her gaze, which is divorced from dimensional scales and specs. This is why she photographs her sculptures in tableaux that distort the criteria of size and transport the objects into a time which lives in a feeble memory. From this dense dialogue she weaves daily with these things, she develops a series of animations that beyond visual divertissement conceal a discomfort pertinent to everyday, domestic life. Before they are static, her objects are thought of in motion, in a dialogue on par with our existence, so the textual fragments in each multimedia production function like the punctum of a photograph, they become fundamental remnants of thought that overpower objects and images. Objects inhabit our lives because we decide so, until they become part of our own physical and mental landscape. Things remain if we continue to give them a space in which to exist, whether they are rooms or mnemonic archives, as opposed to us. And it is precisely this attitude, at times manic, to accumulate and occupy the space surrounding our infinitesimal existences that relegates us to a condition of paralysis. We never really go anywhere.