Adrian Paci: Il vostro cielo fu mare, il vostro mare fu cielo

Il vostro cielo fu mare, il vostro mare fu cielo [Your sky was sea, your sea was sky] is Adrian Paci’s (b. 1969) site-specific installation planned for MUDEC’s Agora in 2024 and a teaser for the exhibition Travelogue. Stories of Travel, Migration and Diaspora (March 2025).

The installation transforms the space of the Agora with a mosaic of blue-green hues that refer to the colours of the sea. Each fragment of this seemingly abstract composition is actually a detail taken from photographs published in newspaper articles about migrant shipwrecks in the Mediterranean.

Inspired by his own personal experience, and starting from the end of the Soviet bloc to the present day, Adrian Paci searches through Italian and international newspapers to create a necessarily partial archive of the tragedies that befall those who seek emancipation through exile and often find death instead.

The artist does not show us the disaster, nor the drowned and the saved, he chooses the detail that unites all the stories told, sometimes the subject of the photograph, sometimes relegated to the background: the sea.

The cutouts made by the artist isolate a poetic detail from a dramatic image, showing out of scale the rough, grainy rendering of the printed paper, where the screen is deliberately made visible, a distinctive feature of the composition.

The mosaic technique, dear to the artist’s heart since his training, is applied here to the modular rectangles of the stained glass windows of the Agora, covered with thin, transparent printed films through which atmospheric light passes.

The succession of tones, darker in the lower bands and lighter in the upper ones, combined with the variations of light and shade that naturally accompany the agora throughout the day, transform this space – whose organic shape itself recalls a wave – into the backdrop of an artificial sea: an aquarium.

Paci’s installation can be compared to panoramas, the large circular paintings that were popular in Europe in the 19th century. This time, however, the immersive space documents not a real landscape but a political one, composed of 250 tiles that testify to the quest for freedom, the harshness of reality and the ethical reflection of which we are all a part.

Curated by Katya Inozemtseva and Sara Rizzo with the support of 24 Ore Cultura and Fondazione Deloitte, with the participation of ACACIA – Associazione Amici Arte Contemporanea Italiana and of nctm e l’arte, a project of ADVANT Nctm.