Private Atlas, Chiara Dynys – Chapter III – 12/12

Chapter III – Viaggio in Italia
September 2025 – January 2026

Texts by Alessandro Castiglioni

 

This third chapter of the exhibition Private Atlas, with its four installations for BUILDING BOX, highlights an ideal conversation between the artist, the history of art and the personal histories that punctuate it, in a series of unexpected and seminal interweavings and overlaps. The past for the artist is, in fact, living matter that is often shaped into a futurability in which eternal return is but one of the possible options. Thus we find surprising encounters between possible pasts and presents yet to be explored: images and references to classicism dialogue with metallic surfaces, baroque references with experimental plastic materials.
But Viaggio in Italia is also a journey inward, between the folds of the biography of Chiara Dynys and of each viewer, as in Roberto Rossellini’s masterpiece, in which the imagery of the vernacular tradition, of art history coexist with references to poetry, to the use of words and rhetorical figures such as metaphor and metonymy.
One could, finally, succinctly note how the last four works of Private Atlas address as many historical and theoretical issues, all of which are significant within Dynys’ practice: Canova and classicism for the first work; the word, the book, and more generally the relationship between language and image in the second and third appointment; the Baroque and popular culture in the large installation that closes the entire project: a memento mori even if, after all, “è del poeta il fin la meraviglia” (“it is of the poet the fin the wonder”).

 

Chapter III- 12/12

From November 27th to January 6th, 2026, BUILDING BOX hosts the fourth and last installation of the third chapter that presents Presepe (2023) by artist Chiara Dynys.

 

Chiara Dynys’s poetics are deeply rooted in the history of cinema. Among the most influential films in the artist’s journey is Viaggio in Italia by Roberto Rossellini, which also lends its title to the third chapter of the Private Atlas project. With a kind of psycho-geographic attitude, the artist often travels to Naples in search of inspiration and discovery: Presepe (2023) is the result of these explorations. The work was created in Naples, reinterpreting a 2001 piece titled Delitto Perfetto (2001).
The installation features 16 terracotta sculptures depicting an imperfect nativity scene: the Neapolitan tradition, suspended between baroque allure and vernacular devotion, sheds its purely religious connotation and, through the slow dissolution of each figure, speaks to an individual existential condition — a vertical journey within oneself, much like Ingrid Bergman’s character, Katherine Joyce, in Rossellini’s masterpiece.

 

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Private Atlas is a solo exhibition that unfolds over time, an experimental project tracing thirty-five years of the artist’s research and activity. The exhibition represents a journey composed by a series of appointments that reveal and highlight poetic aspects of the artist’s work, delving into her biography, her obsessions and her artistic exploration.

As curator Alessandro Castiglioni observes, the exhibition is presented as: “an historical, but also emotional geography of Chiara Dynys’ work.”

 

The exhibition project, conceived as a private atlas, is structured around three main chapters entitled La Disseminazione della memoria [The Dissemination of Memory], Attraversamenti [Crossings] and Viaggio in Italia [Journey Through Italy], presenting, on a monthly basis, historical works and new productions by the artist in site-specific installations designed on purpose for BUILDING BOX’s space.

 

The first chapter, La Disseminazione delle memoria [The Dissemination of Memory] (from January to April, 2025), gathers works where space, atomized and fragmented, reflects on the relationship with forms of Western culture in constant dialogue with one’s identity.

 

The second chapter, Attraversamenti [Crossings] (from May to August, 2025), addresses one of the central themes in the artist’s work: the threshold, conceived as a place, a limit, in both its material and immaterial dimensions.

 

The third chapter, Viaggio in Italia [Journey Through Italy] (from September, 2025 to January, 2026), referencing Rossellini’s iconic masterpiece, explores cinematic imagery, the relationship with the ancient and classical, as well as with popular and vernacular culture.

 

These narratives, like a kaleidoscope—another archetypal form dear to the artist—intertwine, juxtaposing images and imaginaries in a circular continuity over the course of a year. This approach offers a new historical-critical perspective on Chiara Dynys’ work, as suggested by Castiglioni.