Curator: Vittorio Parisi
From a feminist perspective that interweaves the geological and the political, the collective and the individual – if not the very personal – this exhibition by Saodat Ismailova and Elena Mazzi examines ‘liquid soil’, a concept dear to the philosopher Luce Irigaray, set out in her 1980 essay, Amante marine de Friedrich Nietzsche, which is both dense with theory and poetry.
Conceived as a declaration of love addressed to the German philosopher, the text is full of exhortations, including the one that gives the exhibition its title: ‘Souviens-toi donc de sol liquide’ (‘Remember liquid soil’). In an attempt to (re)reconcile Nietzsche philosophically with water – an element whose absence from the work Irigaray emphasises – and, by symbolic extension, with the feminine, the author proposes that we remember our past as aquatic creatures, the essential state of ‘water body’ that humans and all living beings on the planet share.
A term from the vocabulary of geology, referring to any type of body of water – from the ocean to a lake, from a river to a puddle – ‘bodies of water’ (or ‘bodies of water’) has been transformed into the 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 indissociable element of the natural world and, through its own aqueous constitution, in continuity with all other living things.
This continuity between the human, the living and water is particularly present in the works of Saodat Ismailova (1981-), an Uzbek artist and film-maker working at the crossroads between documentary and fiction. For Liquid Grounds, she is presenting the audiovisual installation Stains of Oxus, produced by Le Fresnoy in 2016.
The work recounts the relationship between the Amu Darya River – one of the vital arteries of Central Asia, formerly known as the Oxus – and the communities that live along its banks. Flowing between Lake Bulunkul in Tajikistan and the Aral Sea in Karakalpakistan, the river is witness to a morning ritual shared by the 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 veritable collective “body of water”: revisiting their dreams and destinies, the people we meet become one with Oxus.
For Liquid Grounds, Italian artist Elena Mazzi (1984-) presents a body of sculptures and a photographic installation, entitled Becoming and Unbecoming With (2018-2020) and Self-portrait with a whale backpack (2018) respectively. The works were born of the artist’s personal experience, marked by an accident during a dive from a cliff, resulting in the rupture of several vertebrae, and a period of forced sedentariness. Feeling the need to create a new connection between her body and the seascape, Elena Mazzi made a long journey to Iceland, settling in a fjord.
The dialogue that emerges between the two artists’ works is that of two perspectives that are geographically (and geologically) distant, but close in their shared, feminist way of talking about the environment and humanity.
So the ultimate aim of Liquid Grounds, both in the works and discourses it shows and deploys, and in its curatorial presuppositions, is to present a double narrative of transformation and mixing. Or, to put it better, the liquefaction of the individual in the collective, of the body in space, of the self in the other-than-itself.
Practical information
Dates: 8 May to 24 August 2025
Opening times: every day except Tuesday, 2pm to 6pm (2pm to 7pm in July and August).
Admission free, no reservation required.