Liquid Grounds Exhibition
Opening on Wednesday, May 7, 2025 at 7 PM
Curator: Vittorio Parisi
From a feminist perspective that intertwines the geological and the political, the collective and the individual – if not the very personal – this exhibition by Saodat Ismailova and Elena Mazzi explores the “liquid ground,” a concept dear to philosopher Luce Irigaray, articulated in her 1980 essay, both dense with theory and poetry, Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche.
Conceived as a declaration of love addressed to the German philosopher, the text is rich with exhortations, including the one that gives the exhibition its title: “Remember, therefore, the liquid ground.” In an attempt to philosophically (re)concile Nietzsche with water – an element whose absence Irigaray emphasizes in his work – and, by symbolic extension, with the feminine, the author proposes to him and to us to remember our past as aquatic creatures, the essential state of “bodies of water” that humans and all living beings on the planet share.
A term from the vocabulary of geology, designating any type of water mass – from ocean to lake, from river to puddle – “bodies of water” (or “water bodies”) has been transformed into a pivotal concept of the so-called “hydrofeminist” current by theorist Astrida Neimanis in her 2019 essay Bodies of Water. Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology. Here, Neimanis invites us to consider the human body as an inseparable element of the natural world and, through its own aqueous constitution, in continuity with all other living beings.
This continuity between human, living, and water is particularly present in the works of Saodat Ismailova (1981-), an Uzbek artist and filmmaker working at the intersection of documentary and fiction. For Liquid Grounds, she presents the audiovisual installation Stains of Oxus, produced by Le Fresnoy in 2016.
The work tells the story of the relationship between the Amu Darya River – one of Central Asia’s vital arteries, formerly known as Oxus – and the communities living along its banks. Flowing between Lake Bulunkul in Tajikistan and the Aral Sea in Karakalpakstan, the river witnesses a morning ritual common to inhabitants of different villages, consisting of whispering their own dreams to the water. The river thus becomes not only a living archive of stories, identities, and collective resilience, but also and above all a true collective “body of water”: revisiting their dreams and destinies, the people we encounter become one with Oxus.
For Liquid Grounds, Italian artist Elena Mazzi (1984-) presents a corpus of sculptures and a photographic installation, respectively titled Becoming and Unbecoming With (2018-2020) and Self-portrait with a whale backpack (2018). The works arise from the artist’s personal experience, marked by an accident that occurred while diving from a cliff, resulting in the rupture of several vertebrae, and a period of forced sedentary life. Feeling the need to create a new connection between her body and the marine landscape, Elena Mazzi undertook a long journey to Iceland, settling in a fjord.
The dialogue established between the pieces of the two artists is that of two geographically (and geologically) distant perspectives, but close in their common and feminist way of talking about environment and humanity.
Thus, the ultimate goal of Liquid Grounds is, both in the works and discourses it shows and deploys, and in its curatorial assumptions, to present a double narrative of transformation and mixing. Or, to better say, of the liquefaction of the individual into the collective, of the body into space, of the self into the other-than-self.
The Art Center thanks Pascale Pronnier – Le Fresnoy – National Studio of Contemporary Arts for her contribution to the conception of the exhibition and the Artopia Gallery, Milan, for its support in the production of Elena Mazzi’s works.
Practical Information
Dates: From May 8 to August 24, 2025
Opening Hours: Every day, except Tuesday, from 2 PM to 6 PM (from 2 PM to 7 PM in July and August).
Free entry, no reservation required.