Sara Basta's 'Tesoro Carissimo' at Iuno in Rome Explores Writing as Mourning

Sara Basta (b. 1979, Rome) presents 'Tesoro Carissimo' at Iuno, an independent art space and research center founded in Rome in 2021 by Ilaria Gianni and Cecilia Canziani. The exhibition uses writing to process grief, inspired by Virginia Woolf's imagined epistolary correspondence with Vita Sackville-West. Basta wrote two autobiographical letters in 2024, published in a small catalog, which serve as the conceptual foundation. The works, mostly created after the letters, evoke emptiness and anger from a painful separation, touching on themes of dwelling and slowness. Objects like pudding, walnuts, and rotting fruit are drawn directly from the letters. Two 2023 works, 'Raccogliere l’acqua' (a bowl and a hand), explore care and the attempt to hold onto something elusive like water. Giulia Gaibisso notes the works resemble illustrated alphabets, forming a grammar of emotions. The exhibition also includes 'La materia dell’amicizia', an audiovisual installation co-created with Mariana Ferratto (b. 1979, Rome), featuring the two artists in a tight shot of their hands intertwining red thread, symbolizing friendship. The audio expands to include friends answering questions about friendship, giving the work an anthropological character. Basta uses rewriting as an act of resistance and reappropriation, and inhabiting new existences allows reversing perspectives to describe the past through others' eyes.