At MUDEC, a site-specific installation by Adrian Paci transforms the Agora into a body of water

For the MUDEC - Museum of Cultures in Milan Adrian Paci (Shkodra, Albania, 1969) has created a site-specific installation, visible until September 21, 2025 in the museum’sAgora, as a preview of the exhibition Travelogue. Stories of Travel, Migration and Diasporas, which will open in March 2025. Curated by Sara Rizzo and Katya Inozemtseva, the installation Your Sky Was Sea, Your Sea Was Sky transforms the Agora’s large glass window into a powerful body of water thanks to greenish-blue chiaroscuros that evoke the colors of the sea.

The texture of these blues is that of the typographic screens of images printed in newspapers: images associated with tragic news of shipwrecks that tell of lives broken in the attempt to cross the seas. By enlarging the portions of the sea featured in these news photographs, Adrian Paci the artist erases all informational elements, transforming the Agora into a large aquarium laden with implied tragedies that amplifies the human drama behind these stories. Paci emphasizes the media’s powerlessness in the face of human pain.

Adrian Paci’s works, influenced by art history and a strong sense of social observation, focus on themes such as travel, waiting, crossing, and the relationship to place and time of origin. Through this installation, Paci wants to create a delicate but profound intervention that can integrate harmoniously with the architecture of the MUDEC, but also push the audience to reflect on the human condition.

“Mine is not a work on the theme of immigration. I don’t believe in art about anything,” Paci stresses. “I think art is born from an encounter, a crossing that gives experiences, fantasies, images, stories, sounds, forms (even illusory ones). Bringing these experiences into the territory of the tactile form of the work and making the work itself a source of a new experience both aesthetic and of thought and reflection has been one of the main concerns in my work as an artist.”

This project was made possible thanks to the support of 24 ORE Cultura, collaboration with Fondazione Deloitte, with the participation of ACACIA - Associazione Amici Arte Contemporanea Italiana and nctm e l’arte, a project of ADVANT Nctm.

“After the installations by Cory Arcangel and Mariana Castillo Deball, the MUDEC in collaboration with 24Ore Cultura and Deloitte realizes a third work of monumental scale referring in this case to the theme of migratory travel and in particular to the tragedies of the Mediterranean crossings,” said Marina Pugliese, director of the Museo delle Culture. "With Il vostro cielo fu mare, il vostro mare fu cielo, Adrian Paci transforms the Agora into a giant surface historiated with fragments of shipwreck images. The audience immerses and loses itself in a blue space in which to float and reflect. A work at once delicate and tragic through which the Museum of Cultures rethinks a central theme for ethnographic museums."

“Adrian Paci does not show us the disaster, nor the submerged and the saved; rather, he chooses the detail that unites all the stories told, sometimes the protagonist of the photograph, sometimes relegated to the background: the sea. The cuts isolate a poetic detail from a dramatic image and restore out of scale the rough and grainy rendering of the printed paper, where the screen becomes deliberately visible, a distinctive feature of the composition,” explains curator Sara Rizzo. “It is possible to liken Paci’s installation to panoramas, the large circular paintings in vogue in 19th-century Europe. This time, however, the immersive space documents not a real landscape but a political one, composed of 250 tiles that testify to the search for freedom, the harshness of reality, and the ethical reflection to which we all belong.”

“Adrian Paci was one of the first to introduce travel/movement, understood as a profound and existential experience that changes many human lives, into artistic practice. Real and symbolic journeys, emigration, the transient states of the individual and society, the games of personal and collective memory: all these are at the center of Paci’s attention. His art is always aimed at the contemporary, it is deeply political, and in this sense the project at MUDEC actually represents a concentration of Paci’s method,” concludes curator Katya Inozemtseva.

Hours: Monday from 2:30 to 7:30 p.m.; Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Sunday from 9:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m.; Thursday and Saturday from 9:30 a.m. to 10:30 p.m.

Photo by Sara Rizzo.

At MUDEC, a site-specific installation by Adrian Paci transforms the Agora into a body of water

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