Careof presents WHAT HAS LEFT SINCE WE LEFT by Giulio Squillacciotti, on display in Milan from 20 April to 23 May 2021.

The exhibition project explores the value and meaning of European identity, the language question, and apparently marginal players of important moments of History. By discussing collapse, migration, conflict, and hope, as well as points of view, neutrality, distortion, impartiality, and translation, the project deals with themes related to legacy, separation, abandon, and divorce.

Through a video work, a few sculptures, light boxes, and scenography displays installed in the spaces of Fabbrica del Vapore, Giulio Squillacciotti stages a plausible narrative and builds a fiction that could be documentary. But the fate of Europe isn’t sealed yet; the portraits of political figures are just pictures of actors; the objects that we see are nothing but ceramic molds.

Indeed, the artist’s work is based on the alteration of real historical-anthropological events, addressed through video, audio, and scenography. One side of Squillacciotti’s investigation deals with the idea of staging and set-ups. The other focuses on points of view, on a role inversion between protagonists and bit players, on a shift not only in language but also in meaning as political discourse becomes an allegory to talk about personal, sentimental, and family problems.

The exhibition concludes research that the artist has been conducting on those themes since 2019, when he was an artist-in-residence at the Van Eyck Academie in Maastricht. He has further developed his project thanks to the support of ArteVisione and the Italian Council, while the project’s production was managed by Careof.

During the exhibition period, Bergamo’s modern and contemporary art museum GAMeC will be screening at Spazio Zero a selection of video works by Giulio Squillacciotti, who was selected by the museum to participate in Artists’ Film International, a prestigious network for video art created in 2008 and involving some of the major contemporary art institutions in the world.

In June 2021, WHAT HAS LEFT SINCE WE LEFT will be presented at Museo Civico di Castelbuono, who has acquired the work into its collection.

The project is accompanied by a volume published by Onomatopee with graphic design by Studio Temp, which offers in-depth analysis by Ayşe Zarakol, Marwan Moujaes, Federico Lodoli, Marina Lalovic, and Erica Petrillo, as well as a European timeline from World War II to Brexit curated by Enrico De Gasperis.