terzo gusto
mango and black sesame
Opening, 10.07.2025, 6pm
10.07. – 21.09.2025
A walk 3/7
by Salvatore Lacagnina
One of the most “joyous” walks in European literature surely comes from the fragile, precise, intricate, clear, and marvelous mind of Robert Walser. “A walk is always filled with significant phenomena, which are valuable to see and to feel. A pleasant walk most often teems with imageries and living poems, with enchantments and natural beauties, be they ever so small. The lore of nature and the lore of the country are revealed, charming and graceful, to the sense and eyes of the observant walker, who must of course walk not with downcast but with open and unclouded eyes, if the lovely significance and the gay, noble idea of the walk are to dawn on him.”
His Spaziergang, published in 1917, is almost contemporary with The Road not Taken by Robert Frost:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
According to Umberto Eco—semiotician, scholar, novelist—reading is like a walk in the woods: at every tree, at every “transitive verb” one must choose a direction. Eco loved the lucid and intricate play of mirrors, allusions, and metaphors of Jorge Luis Borges.
Through plants, herbs, trees, flowers, fruits, small and large birds whose songs are more or less shrill or melodious, and which will sooner or later have to be described precisely, LAVINIA’s walk is a walk through narrative gardens that, over time and in time, we hope will at least resemble small woods or chains of hypotheses. We proceed, we choose, we try, we turn back. After all, in literature as in art, there is nothing to win: “In real life, time is a resource we are stingy with. In literature, time is a resource to be disposed of in a casual, leisurely fashion—it’s not a question of crossing some finish line first. On the other hand, being thrifty with time is a good thing, since the more time we save, the more we’ll be able to lose. Quickness of style and thought means above all nimbleness, mobility, and ease—all qualities that go with writing that is prone to digression, to leaping from one topic to another, to losing the thread a hundred times and finding it again after a hundred twists and turns.”—wrote Italo Calvino, in his admirable and all-too-often overused lectures on literature.
Jimmie Durham
Vorrei Vivo
Vorrei vivo sugli fioresta.
Boschi di frassino, biancospina,
Tiglio dolcesogno, cilegio.
Vorrei mi casa sugli boschi olmo,
Eleagno, lauro. Vorrei mi camara di letto
Sugli leccio, sorbo gelso pero.
Vorrei una fioresta in my cucina.
La Donna olivo, acero, acacia.
Vorrei boschi fioresta in my casa,
Il Olivo Della Strega,
Uno dei piu vecchio in Europe.
La cronometrista of our time.
E il monumentale
Castagno Dei Cento Cavalli.
Faggio, pioppo, rovere salice.
Vorrei quercia betulla between
The walls. Pino.
2013 Roma
Artist, poet, performer, essayist, activist: Jimmie Durham (1940-2021) is a unique figure in the international art history of the last half century. His work addresses the foundations of European and North American culture, deconstructing received ideas and accepted categories. Across a career spanning more than fifty years, Durham dedicated his practice to the critical decoding of the naturalised images and symbols that underpin dominant cultural systems. His works, marked by a strong vein of humour, range from sculptures to videos, poems, performances, installations, paintings, drawings, collages, prints and essays. Constructing "illegal combinations with rejected objects," across natural and industrial materials, Durham generated ruptures within conventions of language and knowledge.
Monika Sosnowska
Fence
LAVINIA does not always follow linear paths; it favors uncertain wandering, seeks to untangle certain threads, loves pauses, digressions, returns. We raised the question of the large iron fence that today surrounds the Loggia dei Vini right at the opening. It is such a prominent element that it alters the reading of the pavilion.
Monika Sosnowska’s work has the capacity to transform our perception of architecture and space, even of those elements that become so familiar as to be almost invisible. This new intervention on the fence, like the handle on the gate installed for the first flavour, integrates into the architectural context in a subtle, almost silent way. Like an error of vision that then, with irony and playfulness, reveals the architectural language, power relations, fears, and stories that an iron fence can tell.
Sosnowska’s sculptural language emerges from a process of experimentation with, and the appropriation of, construction materials such as steel beams, concrete, reinforcing rods, and pipes. These elements—the solid and rigid foundations of buildings—are manipulated and warped, taking on an independence in which their former functionality is implied yet defunct.
In her recent works, Sosnowska has incorporated elements of modernist architecture and recognisable details including staircases, handrails, gates, and window structures to create unexpected, even uncanny, encounters. She treats buildings as a site of memory and is adept at conveying both political and psychological significance through her work. She quotes architectural irregularities, collaging different elements together to form a whole that appears at once confused, yet intentionally and attractively designed. Space is encountered as a psychosomatic quality, as political as its experience is personal, forever veering in the mind of the viewer between the uncanny and the sublime.
Born in Ryki, Poland, Sosnowska's work has been exhibited in international exhibitions and museums, such as: 13th Sharjah Biennial, Sharjah, Lebanon; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis MN; The Contemporary Austin, Austin TX; Indianapolis Museum of Art; Zachęta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw; Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw; Galleria Civica, Modena; Shanghai Biennale; Venice Biennale; Kwangiu Biennale; Manifesta 4, Frankfurt; Den Haag Sculptuur, Den Haag; Witte de With, Rotterdam; Schaulager, Basel; Centre Pompidou, Paris.
Still on view: Ross Birrell & David Harding, Enzo Cucchi, Piero Golia, Gianni Politi, Monika Sosnowska
Still on view: Ross Birrell & David Harding, Enzo Cucchi, Piero Golia, Johanna Grawunder, Gianni Politi