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

Il vostro cielo fu mare, il vostro mare fu cielo is an immersive, site-specific installation by Albanian artist Adrian Paci that reimagines the heart of the museum, the Agora.

The installation transforms this monumental space 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.

Adrian Paci searches through Italian and international newspapers from the early 1990s to the present day to create a necessarily partial archive of the tragedies that occur to those who seek a new life through exile and often find death instead.

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

The artist’s cut-outs 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.

For the second time, the intervention on the glass surface changes the status of David Chipperfield’s architecture. The mosaic technique, dear to the artist’s heart since the beginning of his practice, is here applied to the modular rectangles of the stained glass windows of the Agora, covered with thin, transparent printed films through which atmospheric light passes.

The sequence of tones, combined with the variations of light and shade that naturally accompany the Agora throughout the day, transforms this space. The organic shape itself recalls a wave in the backdrop of an artificial sea: an aquarium.

Albanian artist Adrian Paci (b. 1969)—who represented Albania at the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale and participated in Manifesta 14, 2022 in Prishtina—was one of the first to introduce travel/movement into artistic practice, understood as a profound and existential experience that changes many human lives, using media such as painting, photography, video and installation. Real and symbolic journeys, migrations, the transitory states of the individual and society, the games of personal and collective memory: all these are at the centre of Paci’s attention. His art is deeply political, and in this sense the project at MUDEC is a true synthesis of Paci’s method.

After Cory Arcangel and Mariana Castillo Deball, Adrian Paci’s project is MUDEC’s third production by a contemporary artist in dialogue with the museum’s space of the Agora. 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 inability of the mass media to deal with this tragedy.

As part of the museum’s focus on contemporary issues and practices, MUDEC—Museum of Cultures presents its third site-specific project for autumn 2024 which is a teaser for the upcoming exhibition Travelogue. Stories of travel, migration and diaspora, scheduled for March 2025.

The exhibition Travelogue reinterprets the museum’s collections as a space of objects linked to travel: from artefacts brought back by travellers and researchers, to genuine souvenirs, to objects linked to the “materiality” of travel: means of transport, personal effects, suitcases.

There will be a reflection on the theme of ceremonial, mythical, metaphorical journeys, while the theme of migrations and diasporas, past and present, will be addressed through significant contributions by contemporary artists like Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi in the exhibition rooms and Adrian Paci with his site-specific installation.

Il vostro cielo fu mare, il vostro mare fu cielo is curated by Katya Inozemtseva and Sara Rizzo with the support of 24 ORE Cultura and the Deloitte Foundation.