TERRA PROMESSA: Renato Di Maggio Rodrigues

A city that gathers memories. An island that decides over lives. Between 2020 and 2023 he travelled to Palermo and Lampedusa, to those southern edges of Europe where the Mediterranean is at once a connection and a border. The search began within his own family: both his parents came to Switzerland as young migrants, their belongings packed for a new life. This story inscribed itself early in his memory and led him to trace the theme of migration in his artistic work.

For Ricordo Palermo, he returned to Palermo in the summer of 2020, as soon as the pandemic allowed travel again. He remembered an almost aggressive heat, a blinding light. What he found was a city that had changed while he grew up far away from it. His own family’s history would not let him go. In the years that followed, this question led him further, to Lampedusa, where migration no longer appears in the everyday life of a city, but as a struggle for arrival itself.

The series Terra Promessa was created in 2023, a year in which more people than at any time since 2016 risked the crossing to Italy, most of them from the Tunisian coast. Barely a day’s journey separates it from Lampedusa, and yet for many it was the longest journey of their lives, carried by the hope of work, of safety, of a life that can go on. In September, thousands reached the island within a few days, more than its small reception centre could ever have held. Europe responded with a state of emergency, with debates on control and new laws. For Di Maggio Rodrigues, Lampedusa is something else: a symbolic lighthouse for those desperately seeking safety. It is into this recurring situation that Di Maggio Rodrigues photographs.

His images do not show the state of emergency of the news, but what lies between the headlines: the waiting on the pier, coastlines against the light, faces in transit, gazes that look back. Where the photographic image reaches a limit in his perception, he turns to oil paint. For Di Maggio Rodrigues, document and memory are not in contradiction, but in dialogue.

Photography records what was. Painting carries forward what remains. In the interplay of the two, a language emerges that is neither entirely evidence nor entirely memory, but both at once. The artist is not concerned with an objective depiction of reality, but with the question of how an image can make visible what escapes the visible. For him, photography is therefore not an end point but a point of departure: between document and memory, he searches for a visual language in which photography and painting enter into dialogue, a space in which loss, hope and time become tangible. In this way, Ricordo Palermo and Terra Promessa resist the rapid consumption of news images. In the dialogue between photography and painting, an in-between space emerges: a quiet form of attention to origin, loss, uncertainty and what it means to arrive.

Curated by: Elwira Spachalska
Venue: Artstübli – Kunst & Kultur, Steinentorberg 28, 4051 Basel

Opening hours:
Thursday, Friday: 11 am – 6 pm
Saturday: 2 pm – 6 pm
Finissage: Saturday, 14 November, 2 pm – 6 pm

With the support of GGG Kulturkick.