Introduction by Letizia Ragaglia, 2017

Born in Bolzano, Nicolò Degiorgis carries out ongoing research into the territory, meant as a dimension within which to analyse and identify the changes that characterise the whole. Through the mapping of specific communities both inside and outside his territory of reference, he registers the changes that determine and question the concept of identity.

At Museion, Nicolò Degiorgis put forward a project entitled Hämatli & Patriæ. ‘Hämatli’, which lies at the root of the word ‘Heimat’ (a German term which does not have a direct translation into other languages), denotes the sense of belonging of an individual to a social, cultural and geographical context. This context is countered by the Latin term ‘patriæ’, deliberately declined in the plural, i.e. the concept of nation and homeland, interiorised and idealised. Nicolò Degiorgis’s biography, that of a perfectly bilingual figure who constantly moves between the German-speaking and the Italian-speaking worlds of Alto Adige and beyond, underlines just how much the act of curating is also a personal one, bound up in one’s own training and life experiences. Structured as a dialectic relationship, ‘Hämatli’ is in fact an attempt to retrace Nicolò Degiorgis’s sentiment of belonging to a cultural, geographical and social context, while ‘Patriæ’ deals with the recent political, economic and social issues crossing Europe, also with regard to the migratory waves.

In Ten Fundamental Questions of Curating, Adriano Pedrosa underlines how the curatorial practice is linked on one hand to one’s own journeys, the books read, one’s own archives and memories, and on the other hand to one’s own network of colleagues, curators, artists and intellectuals. He adds, “yet the register is not just territorial but also temporal; one travels in geography and in history. There is no clear, singular, ultimate map, plan, route, or record of this intricate process, which necessarily unravels and unfolds in multiple fragments. It is through an unstable amalgamation of different readings and positions that one constructs one’s singular, at times shifting, standpoint.”5

Indeed, Nicolò Degiorgis’s exhibition is linked to a concrete and virtual map of his experiences, but also to his activities as a publisher and photographer. It is therefore introduced and prepared by the production and ensuing exhibition of a series of unpublished artists’ books, as well as by a series of correlated photographic works.

Every curatorial project is bound up in research, discoveries and teachings. During his research for ‘Hämatli & Patriæ’, Degiorgis came across a Flemish painting by Simon de Myle (1570), depicting Noah’s Ark on Mount Ararat. The particularity of the painting lies in the fact of representing the disembarkation from the Ark: a subject usually portrayed instead in the moment of its departure. Nicolò Degiorgis calls upon us to look at this painting in an unconventional manner: the disembarkation of the animals becomes a contemporary one, as we have seen all too much of in recent chronicles. The metaphorical and allegorical interpretation of the single animals becomes the object of a dramaturgy that structures the exhibition as a multitude of dialogues between various works and artists, selected by the curator with the aim of touching on themes inherent to the complex issue of identity. In the internal dialogue of the couples, Nicolò Degiorgis proposes a daring – and perhaps unprecedented – interpretation of the works chosen, but that does not mean he is imposing a hard-and-fast reading of how they should be looked at. As Filipovic once again points out,6 putting works together is not an algebraic operation that leads to a single result; on the contrary, it suggests multiple possibilities of interpretation.

The tables are literally turned on the dialogues in another section which consists of a great camera obscura: here the artist-cum-photographer joins the tradition of the artist-cum-curators and approaches the exhibition as his own medium of expression. The immersive installation invites the public to enter a space that pans out across the surrounding exhibition area, thus harking back to the Noah’s Ark on Mount Ararat painting. However, the upside-down world of the camera obscura also corresponds to the subjective world of the curator, to the world of those who work with this device and who have seen the potential to speak in transversal terms of migratory waves, as well as of populism and identity.

Thus with the camera obscura, Nicolò Degiorgis completes the various narratives activated in the project ‘Hämatli & Patriæ’, providing the public with further scope within which to interpret a work: a subjective reading which is not an imposition, but the offer of an unprecedented sensorial experience that, through art, might just alter our point of view on the reality surrounding us.