Project

Labrys is a project of contemporary art, diffused in time and space.

Labrys is a project, divided into nine parts created by visual artist Maria Rebecca Ballestra, and loosely based on the writings by Julien Friedler, The Truth of the Labyrinth.

Each one of the nine stages of the project is based on one of the forty-four essays written by Julien Friedler: artist, writer and psychoanalyst, born in Brussels in 1950.

The aim of each stage is to investigate the meaning of the object “labyrinth” by unfolding every time a different symbolism.

As a matter of fact, from a historical point of view, literature, mythology, art, and society have always associated the labyrinth as a topic with alternative meanings. With this project, Maria Rebecca Ballestra precisely aims at investigating, step by step, a different macrotext linked with the image of the labyrinth and with the relationship between man and conscience. In this particular case, the themes the project deals with are those of memory, death, the body, immateriality, the game, dream, mystery, pilgrimage, sacrifice: ancestral issues that inhabit the thoughts of intellectuals and artists since the origins of humankind, even before the invention of writing itself. At the same time, however, they never cease to be relevant, since they keep populating contemporary thought as well.

Following this spatial and temporal itinerary, traced by the artist for us, we can benefit from contemplating themes related to the myth of the labyrinth, such as the knowledge of the universe, the self exploration of conscience, religious beliefs, the relationship between the body and the soul, and so on.

As a matter of fact, technologies, historical circumstances, and the relationship between humankind and nature can change, but society and the individual will always face the same existential and cognitive questions, as if caught in a never-ending, amazing labyrinth in which we are taken by the hand by an artist who knows how to live and inhabit her time.

This itinerary begins in the spaces of Parco Basaglia and then spreads out in time and space through other places in the city of Gorizia. Maria Rebecca Ballestra, in fact, transforms Gorizia into a real labyrinth and invites the audience to discover and visit the different steps of this exhibition in unexpected places, that are usually not home to the exposition of contemporary art, and in different moments in time. For these reasons, Labrys is a project of contemporary art truly diffused in time and space.

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LABRYS
Maria Rebecca Ballestra
curated by Giorgia Gastaldon

Centro di Salute Mentale, Parco Basaglia, Gorizia
Other places in the city of Gorizia

October 2017 – March 2018

Labrys is a project by Maria Rebecca Ballestra and Giorgia Gastaldon, promoted by Altreforme Udine