Nicolò Degiorgis Curates Hämatli & Patriæ at Museion Bolzano

Nicolò Degiorgis, guest curator at Museion in 2017, conceived Hämatli & Patriæ as an immersive exhibition that fuses photography, installations, drawings, and artist books into a single large-scale work. The show takes its cue from a Flemish painting, Simon De Myle's The Ark of Noah on Mount Ararat, revealed at the end of the visitor path. This rare iconography of the ark's landing finds a contemporary counterpart in Luca Turi's large photograph of the first migrant landing from Albania aboard the ship Vlora in the port of Bari. The crowd of bodies spilling onto the pier extends into Luca Trevisani's installation—a giant puzzle covering floor and walls that visitors walk across, entering the work itself. Eugenio Tibaldi's installation Romeno è Giulietta (2015, at Studio la Città, Verona) uses opera to tell the tragic story of a Romanian migrant from the Vlora who died during a sex-change operation. The theme of migration, borders, and transformation continues with Superflex's video Kwassa Kwassa and Philipp Messner's Flash Flag, which rapidly sequences 191 UN-recognized national flags, dissolving boundaries. Henrik Håkansson's installation of stuffed birds suspended mid-flight—killed at an Italian airport to prevent collisions—reflects on airspace as a zone of confinement and freedom. The exhibition concludes with a large camera obscura that inverts the gallery space, leading viewers back to De Myle's painting as the unifying thread.