Memory is not a repository, nor an archive, nor anything so reassuring. If anything, it is an investigation without method, built on uncertain evidence, fading traces, overlapping and dissolving details. The crime, after all, is everywhere: when one is young, every word spoken or endured carries the weight of a murder. In crime reports involving adolescents, they search the drawers for the ultimate proof—among hearts and glitter, the secret diary. Youthful writing is not confession, nor even testimony, but an exercise in interpretation conducted with makeshift materials—borrowed phrases, overheard words, impressions still too raw, the attempt to make sense of something that resists being seen from a distance. There is no time, no measure, no reassuring sedimentation; it is a tapestry observed too closely, where one sees the threads but not the pattern. At times, it is an attempt to reclaim a surface already inscribed by others, from the outside. It is an uneven struggle where writing is centered around a void, it’s all skin, porous, and unable to afford the luxury of nostalgia.

Time capsules are sealed with the intention of preserving history and meaning, sometimes buried underground or cast into space. But what truly reaches the future? Misplaced objects, incomplete notes, inexplicable relics, symbols, and rules. If all that survived of an era were a single room—a room like this—what could posterity ever conclude? How much can be deduced when everything is missing? But there’s only one way to remember: by omission, subtraction, and absence. You pull the sharpener away from your eye, slip your little finger inside, and turn.

– Stella Succi

This exhibition brings together brand-new works by Viola Leddi, created specifically for this invitation. The title Pupille refers to the etymology of the word, which in antiquity meant “doll” or “little girl,” referring to the small image of oneself reflected in another person’s eyes. This reference to a double of oneself opens intriguing perspectives on the mechanisms of perception and self-perception in human relationships, processes that are increasingly mediated by technology today. At the heart of the exhibition are two very large paintings representing domestic and intimate spaces, presumably the bedrooms of two young girls, alter-egos of the artist. While the first one is present through a fleeting shadow, the other is revealed by the reflection of her feet in a mirror — is she photographing herself with a smartphone?

These spaces also serve as places for nocturnal gatherings of young girls, as evidenced by the numerous traces left behind: objects, traces, and ghostly transparencies that open the way to speculations about possible pasts and forgotten female genealogies. Among the drawings created by the artist’s assistants, there are references to Italian artists active in the 1970s, such as Mirella Bentivoglio and Tomaso Binga, as well as feminist newspaper clippings from the same period found in a relative’s basement. The nocturnal and mysterious atmosphere of these works also refers to the representation of gender, particularly the feminine, in horror and gothic films, mobilizing motifs such as the haunted domestic space, insomnia, the duality of death and love, mental disorders, or self-narration.

The exhibition also presents three smaller paintings that revisit the tradition of the Veronica, a cloth that miraculously retained the imprint of Christ’s face. Viola Leddi replaces this face with images from other universes, particularly digital spaces and social networks, where the same concerns of embodiment in an image, self- representation, gaze, and identity construction emerge. Following a residency organized by the FRAC in November 2022 in Reims, the artist began to work with glass, drawing inspiration from the rich glassmaking tradition of the Champagne-Ardenne region (royal crystal works, stained glass workshops). In this exhibition, she presents a series of small glass sculptures, whose transparent and fragile nature evokes the semi-transparent and ghostly veils in her paintings. These small, precious objects again emphasize the necessity of an intermediary in the construction of the self-image. Whether it is a mirror or, as in this case, the gaze of the beloved.

Exhibition made with the support of Pro Helvetia, Swiss Arts Council.

Acknowledgements:

Glassmaker: Vetroricerca Studios Bolzano
Jeweller: Elisa Machado Vendeiro
Painting assistants: Kelechi Amaka Madumere and Melissa Steenman

Debbie Alagen (b. 1997 in Kinshasa, lives and works in Geneva) explores the tension between the mutually conflicting expectations of the individual and the society. To Alagen, physical and psychic places and times—what happened or what might have happened—are transitory. What remains is their impact on bodies and things, and on interpersonal relations.

In her sculptural paintings, Sarah Benslimane (b. 1997 in Besançon, lives and works in Geneva) combines various elements to surprising effect, challenging the limits of the medium and questioning the status of the artwork, reflecting on its trivialization.

Sebastian Davila (b. 1992 in Lausanne, lives and works in Lausanne) creates works that address the legacy of colonialism which still impacts life in his native Puerto Rico and elsewhere. Conjuring up characters and rituals, fictional yet plausible, Davila offers a form of critical, surreal escapism.

The airbrushed paintings of Viola Leddi (b. 1993 in Milan, lives and works in Geneva) are rather gloomy and hallucinatory, condensing references from Italian art history, the history of feminism, the internet, and the reality of her daily life. Her ceramic works are vehicles of related memories, recreating the settings of love episodes told to her in confidence by friends.

Through painting, sculpture, and installation, the artists in the exhibition negotiate identity, feminism, political structures, technology, and art historical references within the current overflow of information, history, images, and styles. Despite the wide diversity of their practices, all share a keen attention to the ironic details present in social and personal relations, as well as a penchant for the demystification of the perceived restrictions and predominant traits of today’s world and of what is expected from art. The exhibition architecture, commissioned from b.b.—Fabrizio Ballabio and Alessandro Bava—emphasizes the divergence of languages and the convergence of focuses at play in the show.

In I saw stars turn into dark coals, Leddi brings together new paintings and ceramic sculptures that blur the lines between imagination and memory. Her use of diverse subject matter evokes a fragmented sense of reminiscence. Titled after a text by 12th century Benedictine nun and polymath, Hildegard von Bingen, the exhibition draws inspiration from a passage describing an otherworldly vision in which von Bingen’s field of sight was crowded by sparks that collapsed into ‘black coals’ as a migraine took hold. Self portrait with migraine (2023) and Girl with migraine (2023), depict female figures in a state of intense suffering, imbuing the scene with a sense of fractured chaos. The subjects are consumed by their pain which can be understood as a metaphor for the emotional affliction and sense of disenchantment after the end of a love affair.

Leddi’s artistic practice is rooted in inquisition. Her imaginative, figurative paintings are the product of a laborious and intricate process. The artist begins with preliminary sketches on paper before transposing them onto Photoshop to experiment with an array of colour palettes. Leddi then works with an airbrush technique to meticulously translate the intricately detailed composition onto canvas.

An inquiry into the psyche is present throughout Leddi’s painted works. Titled after the term used to describe an intense fear of pregnancy and childbirth, her Tocophobia paintings are replete with symbolism. Within this series, the spiders serve as harbingers of irrational terror. In each scene, Leddi deploys symbols associated with marriage and fertility, which are retraceable to genre and still life painting. The artist couples this symbolism with a palette derived from the aesthetics and narrative abilities of 3D horror video games. Leddi’s visual language is a mediation between reality and fantasy, building compositions that play with the idea of collective and personal memories. A trace of architectural modernism runs through the ceramic sculpture series entitled First Times, rejecting ornament in favour of asymmetric compositions and geometric forms. Fired using a process derived from the technique of raku, the sculptures’ surfaces incorporate the burnt imprint of organic materials such as dead plants, tobacco, and women’s hair, leaving behind their ghostly touch. The sculptural cityscapes are translations of intimate moments recounted to Leddi by her friends, each inspired by the architecture of the locations where significant romantic experiences took place, for example First time I made love on a terrace (2023) or First time I kissed a girl (2023). Reminiscent of ruins, the sculptures pay homage to the power of memory and the nostalgic connections we make to a place. The ceramic sculptures sit atop plinths specially designed for the exhibition by Andrea Magnani.

The artist thus reflects on a certain conception of madness and deviance attributed in a Western and patriarchal power system to female subjects, with the series Pill Boxes, dedicated to each of the “female types” imagined by the painter Casorati in the painting Le Signorine (1912). Combining research on statistical data in the field of mental illness treatment in Italy with a reflection on the form of character delineation adopted by Casorati’s gaze, the artist conceived each pill box to contain specific drugs, thus placing alongside the idealized “personalities” a specific mental disorder. In this way, Viola Leddi reflects on the processes of stereotyping and demonization of women that have acted and still act within patriarchal power dynamics, aimed at imposing a predetermined role on the female subject.

Finally, Leddi exhibits Memories Vessel, a ceramic vase inspired by Gio Ponti’s Vaso Prospettica (1925). Inside some of the perspective cells painted on the vase are placed some recurring elements in the artist’s recent paintings. In others, however, holes are visible: in fact, spy cameras are inserted inside the vessel, arranged to observe and record the surrounding environment and transforming the object into a kind of eerie, and at the same time familiar, surveillance device.