Dora Budor's Exhibition at Progetto in Lecce

Dora Budor, born in Zagreb in 1984 and based in New York, was invited by artist Jamie Sneider to reflect on the past of Salento. Budor focused on social and economic issues, particularly the history of local tobacco factories that until a few decades ago supplied all of northern Italy, employing hundreds of women. Sneider notes that 'devices of domestic domination permeated the production line, and one order imposed the other.' The exhibition at Progetto features a large work table from a disused tobacco factory, about six meters long, which interrupts the flow of one room. Its monumental proportions occupy, fragment, and rhythm the space, presenting a relic of a vanished world, reproduced in papier-mâché in a new copy a few meters away. The show also includes a constellation of presences, with site-specific interventions on the roof of Progetto, in close contact with the sky of Lecce's historic center. Small roofless rooms on the terrace host assemblages by Los Angeles-based artist Ser Serpas, made from waste materials recovered from Salento's roadsides. These works share a principle of self-reduction of physical bodies and senses, characteristic of other interventions in the space, suspended between reality and imagination.