Giulia Cacciuttolo’s objects are time travelers; artifacts in reverse. Instead of becoming artifacts 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.
The objects 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. It is through this ambiguousness that they maintain their autonomy – Cacciuttolo emphasizes that her works are not a comment on her personal history, but rather an attempt to channel histories of multiple individuals and generations.
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, Giulia Cacciuttolo’s practice is a longing for physicality. At the same time, there is a desire to materialise the immaterial; to preserve and archive something formless and fleeting. Haptic memories aren’t ‘storable’, you 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 the memory itself. However if you 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.
Giulia Cacciuttolo’s installation deliberately blurs the borders between readymades, 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 your own. 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 could be seen as a kind of testimony to a memory that has never been recorded.
However there is another aspect to Giulia Cacciuttolo’s work, that 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 tranditional 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 qualities of materials themselves. Sculpted out of need to excorcise the pain, objects take over when the words are lacking and bring a much-needed closure.
Giulia Cacciuttolo is a visual artist based between Italy and the UK. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts of Rome, the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs (Paris), Wimbledon College (London) and Central Saint Martins (London). She has had several group and solo exhibitions in Europe and Asia and her work has been acquired in art collections in the UK, Hong Kong, Italy and Switzerland.
In her artistic research, Giulia Cacciuttolo draws on her interest in the mechanisms and dynamics of memory and the concept of the contemporary archive to explore and reveal the emotional and mnemonic potential of objects. Through sculpture, installation and analogue photography, Giulia Cacciuttolo’s practice investigates the relationship between memory and object and between individual and collective experiences.
