by Enzo Distinto
LAB.oratorio space
“Wall Water”, the exhibition by Enzo Distinto, curated by Valentina Apicerni, at the Lab.Oratorio space, the project space of the Made in Cloister Foundation dedicated to research, experimentation and exposure of the contemporary art scene.
“Wall Water” is the trace of two rivers that intersect, the Sebeto, the secret river of Naples which, springing from Monte Somma, crossed the city and poured into the Mediterranean, and the Nile. The rivers are represented as two walls of water that rise upwards, constituting a liquid surface with gradual colors that turn from green to yellow, symbolizing the encounter between different civilizations, unified by a common element that marks the utopian disappearance of political borders between countries and allows you to visualize the Earth as a single large continent, freely traversable by all.
Enzo Distinto's artistic research starts from cartography, from the study of geographical and hydrographic maps on which he works with clippings and sculptural compositions, giving new configurations to cities and borders. This overlapping of real —existing territories— and imaginary —possible territories— is also reflected in the stratification of the reading planes: they are mental and non-geographical spaces.
His traces of the Sebeto and the Nile merge history and legend, places and non-places, geopolitical and sacred dimensions, memory and current events. Because they are the symbolic traces of two river gods and two continents, of the ancient intercultural dialogue between peoples and of their mobility across the Mediterranean: here the barriers are just a wall of water.
“Enzo incorporates all these aspects in a very rich poor art installation, made of marble scraps, steel bars and water. What was already a blocked passage is now even more blocked, so that every movement must be conscious. Everyone is obliged to have their own experience of stone waste. Everyone has to negotiate with the old walls [...] It's the kind of exhibition that makes you want to experience it in itself, and everyone is rewarded by the impossibility of doing so" Jimmie Durham
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