text by Mixta 

Nicolò Minisi's research stems from multiple questions and develops through a multitude of languages. The heterogeneity of his research tools inevitably corresponds to a heterogenesis of ends that, although invisible, is the artist's distinctive trait. Cartography of the Margin began as a project, well delineated in its beginnings, of exploration of urban margins (corners between one alley and another, obligatory turns) and their symbolic value. It ends up, today, as evidence of a slow process of getting to know a specific portion of space, the one in which for the time of the opening the relational installation is set up, outside Florìda, at the intersection of vico dei Fregoso and vico del Campo. That precise portion of space, an urban corner in which a variety of vectors meet, is the subject of visual, anthropological and philosophical investigation. Minisi presents us with a process, his personal process of exploration and knowledge of this kind of space that in his utterly personal figure ends up resonating, naturally and empathetically, in our sensibility. The work is tripartite in moments of research, sharing and restitution. The small pamphlet, an artist's book with an extremely limited print run, documents in poetic form the path of research carried out during the residency: this is the key element of the entire work, the access to the other two moments, which are the relational installation outside and the installation inside Florida. What can we extrapolate from a street corner? Minisi worked on it for the entire residency. He photogrammetrized it, recorded it with a contact microphone, made plaster casts of it, frottages, and many other things. He then reprocessed the collected material, studied and compared it. The result, then, is several restitutions that are a constellation of approaches, an invitation to rethink not only the margins but especially cartography in more open and processual terms.

Artist Bio

Nicolò Minisi (Genoa, 2000) graduated in Painting and Visual Arts in 2022 and is now concluding a two-year degree in Visual Arts and Curatorial Studies at Naba in Milan. His research is developed through a reworking practice of memory and the city. Transformative devices of contemporary reality and the reinscription of history, and it is precisely the archive that he interprets as a potential tool in identifying traces, anecdotes, episodes, and archaeology that thus become the focus of each work. Therefore, His intervention is a reasoned unearthing of history at the margins of the removed, characterizing his entire job with a solid communal and anthropological. If, in fact, his narrative often dwells on the architectural imprints of the urban, for the artist, it is inevitable to dwell on how urban equals inhabited: this motivates the production of performances. Recently, the subject of exhibitions at the Triennale di Milano (Voicing the Archive,2023), Società Umanitaria (Collectivities and Cities, 2023) and the Istituto Svizzero di Roma (Curating shadow knowledge, 2023). 

photos credits: Francesca Migliorin