Upon entering the space, we are met with the work of Šejla Kamerić, who continues to build her aesthetic of remembrance, deeply rooted in her own experience of war. Her works in this exhibition are not explicit representations of violence, but rather incisions into the everyday—gestures that are as delicate as they are politically charged. By refusing to depict trauma and instead sustaining its silence, Kamerić does not offer an image, but opens a space of absence. Within this framework, resistance is not an act of negation; it is the persistence of remaining in a world that has lost its continuity.
The exhibition Spaces of Resistance - Spazi di Resistenza opens in Rome
Padiglione 9b, Mattatoio
curator: Benedetta Carpi De Resmini
12 September – 12 October 2025
Spaces of Resistance: on anthropology of presence
Located withn Padiglione 9b of Rome's Mattatoi, the area of the former slaughterhouse, the exhibition Spazi di Resistenza grapples with a central paradox of contemporary art: how to display (and represent) unexhibitable phenomena like pain, loss, memory...that what remains after the war. The exhibition , curated by Benedetta Carpi De Resmini, is conceived as a network of memory and sensual gestures, which does not build a narrative about the past but maps traces of survival; as a process of healing, facing and constantly questioning the boundaries of ethical and aesthetic.On the occasion of thirty years since the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the siege of Sarajevo and the genocide in Srebrenica, this exhibition does not intend to reconstruct history, but rather to map traces of survival through the quiet persistence of individual (art)works. Earth, water, grass, ash, sound and breathing are some of the elements of resistance that permeate the works of six artists: Šejla Kamerić, Smirna Kulenović, Mila Panić, Romina De Novellis, Simone Barzaghi and Gea Casolaro.
The Mattatoia's repurposed industrial space, with its embodied memory of labor and flesh, functions as a powerful metaphor for the post-socialist condition. Here, art is not merely displayed but deposited, forming a stratigraphy of memory. Thus why the installations of Spazi di Resistenza act as layers in this "archaeological" field, required to be perceived somatically rather than just optically.
Installation view, Spazi di Resistenza, Mattatoio, Padiglione 9B, Rim. Courtesy of: Latitudo Art Projects. © Monkeys Video Lab.
Installation view. Down to Earth, 2025 (detail), Smirna Kulenović. Spazi di Resistenza, Mattatoio, Padiglione 9B, Rim. Courtesy of: Latitudo Art Projects. © Monkeys Video Lab.
Installation view, Šejla Kamerić. Spazi di Resistenza, Mattatoio, Padiglione 9B, Rim. Courtesy of: Latitudo Art Projects. © Monkeys Video Lab.
In Smirna Kulenović's work, the earth is not a metaphor but a pulsating material. A pile of soil, exhibited in the center of the space, emits an inner sound; to hear it, visitors must bend down, almost to bow. This act of bending is not merely a physical gesture but a ritual correction: the audience must humble themselves in front of something that transcends reason; in front of memory. The sound that emanates from the earth's center establishes a relationship of listening rather than seeing, of presence rather than interpretation. In this physical proximity between body and ground, Kulenović erases the boundary between the living and the inanimate, between a person and the space that shapes them.
The third artist from the Balkans, Mila Panić, addresses the question of legacy as a burden. In a video-performance piece, the act of burning her inherited plot of land (a place that could one day be called a home) becomes an act of liberation and destruction at the same time. The burning becomes a radical gesture of cleansing, not to negate the inheritance but to enable the creation of the new ground. Ground that creates the conditions for something new... for a space not defined by trauma, but saturated with it.
Benedetta Carpi De Resmini's curatorial structure is based on rhythm, not linear narration. Each work functions as a "cell" of a larger structure: the rhythm of a performance that repeats the ritual of cleansing, erasing, and attempting the "impossible" purification of space. In this sense, Spazi di Resistenza is not a mere homage to memory but a laboratory of presence; a space where trauma is not depicted, but renewed through daily micro-actions: walking, bending, breathing, cleaning.
To speak in the language of Filiberto Menna, one could say that this exhibition constructs a "semiotics of the trace"; a sign that is no longer a representation, but a trace. This is an example of what might be called the phenomenological aesthetic of experience: art that exists only as long as the encounter between the observer and matter lasts. In Spazi di Resistenza, that encounter is not an aesthetic event but a relationship of responsibility; a witnessing that cannot be delegated.
Spazi di Resistenza is not just an exhibition about Bosnia, about women, or about the war. It is an exhibition about the limits of empathy, about how capable we are of feeling another's pain without turning it into our own narrative. In this sense, the exhibition is not merely a "memorial," but an act of breathing; perhaps the most fundamental, yet also the most radical, form of resistance.
Installation view. Spazi di Resistenza, Mattatoio, Padiglione 9B, Rim. Cortesy of: Latitudo Art Projects. © Monkeys Video Lab.
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