Following the exhibition Stories of Stones (2023), Villa Medici is continuing its exploration of the elements with a journey around the theme of water, featuring works by around 30 internationally renowned contemporary artists. Ten of these creations have been specifically designed for the occasion.

On the ground and in the atmosphere, as both an element and a resource, water constitutes us and overflows the world. Protean in form – rain, seas, droplets, dew, streams, clouds, fog, and tears – it is the essential source of all life. Diverted, extracted, and polluted, water has now become a vital issue in the ongoing ecological crisis. But although it has been conquered, the abyssal depths remain today more mysterious than the Moon, land of dreams, inhabited by fantastic monsters.

This exhibition follows the cycle of water, from sunken civilizations to ritual practices and the troubled waters of trade routes. The hybrid figure of the siren or mermaid, by turns malevolent and protective, half woman, half animal, acts as a guide to navigate between these worlds, from the depths to the surface. Her ambivalence resonates with that of water, a space of metamorphoses, between waters of rejuvenation and of doom.

Hera Büyüktaşcıyan, An ode to a Distant spring, 2023

In her practice, Hera Büyüktaşcıyan unfolds ways in which memory, knowledge, and architecture are shaped by deeply ingrained, yet constantly evolving waves of history.

The installation titled An Ode to a Distant Spring, looks into the dynamics of erasure and the aquatic nature of memory within spaces, through unfolding the question of what the ground remembers. Taking the hammam as a reference, a place of collective purification of bodies and a space with a slippery ground, the piece alludes into the correlation between the volatile nature of memory and the uncanniness of the foundations we stand upon; that keeps shaking through ruptures of time, trauma, and contested histories. Looking into the cyclic movement of forgetting and remembering, the piece resurfaces as a musical score that streams with an unexpected flow within the space, meandering with scattered fragments. The overflowing constellation of soaps refers to the constant repetition of erasure and the recollection of our own material memory of unstable places and traces they bear . The fabric where the mosaic-like soap pieces overflow, is called Tulbent in Turkish (Tsantila in Greek) used for distilling and removing the dirt through scrubbing the skin - creating a surface tension whilst taking a bath. Büyüktaşcıyan refers to this surface tension as an element that reveals the contrast between the seen and the unseen, remembrance and oblivion as well as purification and contamination. The softness of the soap transforms into a concrete element, acting as a decomposed pavement, flowing in an aquatic manner, vocalizing petrified histories co-existing over ever shaking grounds.

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