La Spezia, Sabrina D'Alessandro's exhibition recovering lost words

From Oct. 9, 2021 to March 20, 2022, the CAMeC - Modern and Contemporary Art Center of La Spezia will host the exhibition Resurrections, Insurrections, Actions 2009-2021, a solo exhibition by Sabrina D’Alessandro (Milan, 1975), an artist and linguist known for her “URPS - Ufficio Resurrezione Parole Smarrite,” founded in 2009, a project that searches for obsolete or little-used words to bring them back to theattention, transformed into visual and performance art works (videos, sculptures, installations, actions), but also into books and illustrated columns. At the La Spezia exhibition, therefore, the Milanese artist’s many years of research and popularization work is staged, creating a new union between art and lexicography, also contributing substantially to inspire interest in the topic of rare or endangered words, which today is increasingly prevalent in academic, editorial, and media circles. The exhibition traces the pivotal moments of the artist’s work from the year of the founding of the Resurrection Office to the present and is organized in the Center’s floor 0 spaces.

The itinerary opens with Talking Words (2001-2021), through which Sabrina D’Alessandro restores to rediscovered words (such as “seperoso,” “raplaplà,” “redamare”) their value as works of art. In the same room can be found the marble, steel and brass work entitled Farlingotto, a “polyglot sculpture that teaches silence in 12 languages” (2020, coming from the Santa Maria della Scala Children’s Art Museum in Siena). Still on the wall is a painting-archive containing beloved words “though not yet resurrected” (2010). In the next room, it is possible to see works based on the anthropological and psychological dimensions, such as the “personality portraits” (2010-2016), “psychomagic” machines produced by Sabrina D’Alessandro after living for two days in the house of the portrayed subject and participating in his daily life: portraits of the soul, in which the relational process becomes an integral part of the work. Then the 16th stage of the Terricular Peculiar Census is set up, a traveling installation that invites the public to choose “the word from the past that expresses the most widespread human defect in the present.” The installation, taken by the artist to various European cities, as well as among prison inmates and monastery friars, is accompanied by a documentary video and Computations, which translate the results of the Census into chromatic works. Closing the room is the previously unseen installation Redamare, a verb that means “to love and at the same time to be loved,” and the word with which D’Alessandro composed the game of the bell, “an invitation to walk through the pattern by spelling out the verb, and to make it one’s own through the playful dimension.” Lastly, Room 3 presents an overview of Sabrina D’Alessandro’s video works, from the poetic video-words (2010-2013), “fragments of beauty” filmed by chance and then associated with a word, to the linguistic binomials mimicked by the “Mutophone Division” (2015), passing through the polyglot Parole al balcone (set up in Suzzara in 2018 and declaimed by a musical band) and the visionary Guizzìpeda, a running-linguistic race held in 2021 in Sardinia and in which runners gave their breath and legs to the words of breath. Until the very ancient and very modern word found during the 2020 quarantine, “Affatato,” or “invulnerable by enchantment.”

“Sabrina D’Alessandro’s research,” writes Pietro Gaglianò, author of the critical text in the catalog, “unhinges disciplinary partitions and questions the taxonomies of the contemporary to the point that this dérèglement becomes form itself. The declination of the word, and its ramified symbolic bearing, into tangible formats results in a series of outcomes that instead of closing in the definiteness of the work open up to reverberate in many other worlds.”

Sabrina D’Alessandro’s work explores the relationship between the word and the imaginary, combining art and linguistics. In 2009, the artist founded the URPS (Ufficio Resurrezione Parole Smarrite), “an entity in charge of recovering lost words although very useful for life on Earth.” His work, reported by the Enciclopedia Treccani, has been exhibited in public and private places of art and culture in Italy and abroad and published by, among others, Rizzoli (Accendipensieri, 2021 and Il Libro delle Parole Altrimenti Smarrite, 2011), the Domenica del Sole24Ore (Dipartimento Parole Imparavolate, 2016-2017), Sky Arte (Divisione Mutoparlante, 2016). In 2018 the 50th Suzzara Prize awards and produces his public art works Parole al balcone and Fannònnola. Since 2016 he has been carrying out a census on human flaws in the form of a traveling installation, hosted by various Italian and European cities including St. Petersburg on the occasion of the XVI Week of the Italian Language in the World. In 2020, two of his works became part of the Farnesina Collection, and the Treccani portal dedicates a special issue to the work of the Resurrection Office analyzing its various fields of action (from lexicographic research to the staging of words through visual artworks and performances, from editorial products to educational projects in collaboration with schools and museums). For more information, visit Sabrina D’Alessandro’s website and theoffice’s website.

The Center’s Education Department also, through Sabrina D’Alessandro’s latest volume, entitled Accendipensieri, published by Rizzoli in 2021 and aimed at children, has designed paths dedicated to raising awareness of the Italian language aimed at elementary school. The Museum is open to the public Tuesday through Sunday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. (closed Mondays, Christmas, New Year’s Day). Full admission euro 5, reduced euro 4, special reduced euro 3.50. The catalog, accompanied by a critical text by Pietro Gaglianò and a rich iconographic apparatus, will be presented during the exhibition. For information: tel. +39 0187 727530, camec@comune.sp.it, or visit the CAMeC website.

Pictured is a room in the exhibition. Photo by Enrico Amici

La Spezia, Sabrina D'Alessandro's exhibition recovering lost words

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