The title of the exhibition immediately brings to mind the eponymous novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky. In the interweaving of the story, a man wanders in a small room explaining the reasons that led him to the decision to write his memoirs, and also those that should keep him from doing so. It is overbearing when it claims the need to be free and out of any convention, and then it makes tenderness, almost, when it shows all the defects, which abound and manifest themselves both in the acceptance of things and in the attempts to change the course.
On display is the new series of site-specific works – sculptures, installations and settings, scattered all along the first floor of the Museum – by Antonio Marras that illustrate the climate of Dostoevsky’s novel. All realized in Mondovì, the works were born directly from the rooms of the Museum of Ceramics of Mondovì, from the basements and from the dusty deposits that preserve forms and moulds, from fragments of projects, from sheets of archives, from laboratories and from meetings held in the area.
Antonio Marras uses ceramics and looks at the classics of the museum collection: it is the desire to represent something wonderful to move it. For Marras, ceramics become a form of patient inquiry into the world, capable of establishing links, giving answers, identifying relationships. A way to give and take shape, to contain its confusion, to open horizons that dig into life, without ever claiming to close the conversation.
On display are sculptures, installations and settings, all made inside UP, a production unit of the Museum of Ceramics in Mondovì. A catalogue will be created in which the photos of Daniela Zedda will reproduce the setting and the exhibition installed.