The earliest work in Rossella Biscotti’s first institutional survey predates her training at the Naples Academy of Fine Arts by a decade. In 1991, when she was 12, the Vlora, a hijacked cargo ship carrying some twenty thousand Albanian refugees, unexpectedly docked in the Italian port city of Bari, near where Biscotti grew up. Many of the economic refugees were housed in a disused stadium. Skirmishes with Italian authorities ensued, resulting both in the refugees being repatriated and stricter border policies being implemented. A year later, Biscotti took a black-and-white photograph of the Adriatic Sea from Bari; using pen, she later superimposed onto this photo the outline of a hill, which she labeled “Albania,” also adding a fence, its central feature identified in Italian with the word cancello, or gate. Displayed in the first of six rooms devoted to Biscotti’s thematically fluid and research-intensive work, this untitled photo highlights the importance of the sea in the artist’s work. Far from being a hackneyed subject, the sea emerges—episodically rather than serially—as a space that has enabled Biscotti to develop and refine her central artistic gesture: the recovery and visualization of “untold stories and unrepresented people”. Take Clara (2016), a sculptural installation …

Long before we, as a species, were categorized as Homo sapiens, Plato proclaimed humans to be “featherless bipeds.” As a retort, Diogenes grabbed a chicken, plucked it, raised it aloft, and sarcastically declared “Behold: Plato’s man!” Not be outdone, Plato added “with flat nails” to his description. Aristotle later weighed in on the matter by declaring that we are communal beings who possess language, which we use to divide the world into categories available for rational and political inspection. Though a final decision was never reached in ancient Athens, one thing is certain: these dudes were obsessed with definitions. Considering that museums began as collections of objects grouped by kind, it could be said that they too are products of the urge to collapse reality into neat taxonomies. However, the world is a bit messier. While most humans share psychical features, we do not necessarily share similar minds, histories, or desires—and the reduction of these social characteristics into set and didactic narratives has led museums to misrepresent, and even marginalize, aspects of society and nature at the cost of privileging other figures. The group exhibition “Metamorphosis – Let Everything Happen to You,” curated by Chus Martinez at Castello di Rivoli, attempts …