Amnesia - reminds us not to forget / Tongues of Heaven and Things in Danger (ABCDE..)

Amnesia for an entire community, two cities, two nations, with a shared vision of rediscovering, reinterpreting, and celebrating cultural heritage.

A series of eleven site-specific solo exhibitions, curated by Elisabetta Zerial, as part of GO! 2025 – Borderless Nova Gorica Gorizia European Capital of Culture, under the patronage of the Municipality of Gorizia, in collaboration with PromoTurismoFVG, BCC Venezia Giulia Gruppo Iccrea, and the Associazione Sociale Culturale Dâ Arie.

Amnesie unfolds as a multi-faceted project that brings together eleven contemporary artists in four emblematic locations across the border: Casa Krainer, Palazzo Lantieri, Kinemax, and Vila Vipolže. Nova Gorica and Gorizia, once divided by political and ideological boundaries, today symbolize a Europe without barriers, traversed by shared memories and collective traumas.

Eleven site-specific solo exhibitions—by Stefano Cagol, Nina Carini, Federico Clapis, Massimo Gardone, Andreas Senoner, Desideria Burgio, Andrea Guastavino, Marco Bolognesi, Giordano Floreancig, Camilla Marinoni, and Marina Moreno—explore amnesia as a fluid condition of contemporary existence: loss, repression, oblivion, but also a fertile space for a possible regeneration of memory.

Amnesia, in fact, is not just a subtraction: it is a void that can become possibility. In Nova Gorica and Gorizia, cities once divided and now united, art bridges the past and the future, multiple identities and a shared feeling.

The Architectures of Memory The places that host Amnesie are not simple containers, but true architectures of memory: Casa Krainer, Palazzo Lantieri, Kinemax and Vila Vipolže tell stories of cohabitation and separation, of traces left by time and historical stratifications.

Their structures—medieval, Renaissance, or Secession-style—converse with the works, amplifying the suspension, emptiness, and reconstruction that amnesia brings with it: every room, every stone, every fresco becomes a trace of the past, ready to make itself present through contemporary art.

Palazzo Lantieri Built around 1350 near the city's southeastern gate, Palazzo Lantieri was originally a fortress to defend Gorizia. Originally known as Schönhaus ("beautiful house"), it served as a guesthouse for the Counts of Gorizia for guests attending jousting tournaments and hunting trips.

With the extinction of the dynasty, the building passed to the physician Pozzo and in 1505 was acquired by Antonio Lantieri. In 1513, Emperor Maximilian I confirmed the fiefdom to the Lantieri family, initiating its transformation into an elegant stately home, enriched with frescoes and decorative cycles.

Among the most significant rooms, the Hall of Frescoes preserves an important pictorial cycle attributed to Marcello Fogolino, commissioned by Gaspare Lantieri around 1540. The frescoes, of Renaissance origin, depict allegorical scenes and ideal landscapes that reveal the cultural prestige of the family.

Also of particular note is the Galleria delle Formelle, a portico decorated in the 18th century with a series of allegorical panels on the vaults, depicting moral virtues and ideals of government. During the 18th century, the palace hosted dignitaries such as Carlo Goldoni, Giacomo Casanova, and Pope Pius VI, who visited in 1782.

Over the centuries, it has been a landmark for the County of Gorizia and for all of Central Europe, a crossroads for travelers and cultural figures such as Goethe, Schiller, Metastasio, Da Ponte, and Napoleon. Still the residence of the Lantieri family, it is one of the most prestigious residences in the city.

In recent years, it has hosted permanent, site-specific installations by artists such as Jannis Kounellis and Michelangelo Pistoletto, establishing a dialogue between historical memory and the languages ​​of the present. As part of the exhibition, Nina Carini and Federico Clapis propose interventions that explore, through visual and sonic codes, the stratifications of time and the tensions between permanence and dissolution, activating intimate relationships with the spaces and memories of Palazzo Lantieri.

Thus, between ancient frescoes and contemporary languages, Palazzo Lantieri continues to be a cultural crossroads, a place of poetic resistance and a renewed focus on art and reflection in a Gorizia that looks to the future with deep roots. The declinations of Amnesia In this exhibition, amnesia unfolds in four overlapping and intersecting fields.

On a historical and geopolitical level, amnesia acts as an instrument of power: choosing which events to perpetuate and which to erase—world wars, imposed borders, genocides, or resistance movements—creates fragmented identities, suspended between memory and oblivion. On a psychological and emotional level, it is a defense mechanism of the unconscious: forgetting to protect oneself from trauma, but risking losing parts of oneself, leaving open wounds.

On the environmental and landscape front, we have lost our profound connection with nature, the rhythm of the seasons, and ancient knowledge, while the landscapes themselves become silent archives of submerged memories—ruins, abandoned sites, traces of a persistent past. Finally, in the realm of archives and identity: who are you if you've been prevented from remembering where you came from?

Identity is often constructed precisely from what has been forgotten or distorted, in an attempt to mend what has been separated. Amnesia manifests itself in the dispersion of documents and the erasure of stories, calling into question the construction of the self when roots are denied.

Amnesie is a journey through these languages ​​and territories, a mosaic of visions that gives voice to what has been silenced and transforms the void into a space for reconstruction, in a poetic act of resistance and rebirth.

On the occasion of GO!2025 BORDERLESS Nova Gorica Gorizia European Capital of Culture and as part of the Amnesie project, Nina Carini presents two installations at Palazzo Lantieri that explore the concepts of time, fragility, and loss.

Her works are part of a process that, at the heart of the cross-border program, reflects on what is forgotten, erased, and removed from the dominant narrative—in the cultural, political, and social spheres. A process as silent as it is pervasive, which the artist deconstructs through a poetic and material writing of space.

"Lingues of Heaven," a site-specific installation for the Sala degli Affreschi, engages with a place deeply marked by history and representation. In a space embodying the traces of a collective time—that of aristocracy, power, and preservation—Carini introduces a suspended and meditative intervention, inviting us to look upward and inward, toward a fragile yet meaningful dimension.

The work unfolds as an ethereal and visionary tension, a threshold between the visible and the invisible. Lingue di cielo (Lingues of Heaven) is installed on the floor of the Fresco Room, creating an intimate contrast with the decorated surfaces and enriching the space with a sense of solemnity and silence.

A narrative constructed through the investigation of several fossil fragments, a study begun during her residency at the Fonderia Artistica Battaglia in 2023, testifies to her need to go beyond the human scale of time—functioning as a memento mori, harking back to the silent destruction wrought by man on nature, but also to the possibility of a gaze that holds, cares for, and protects—because, as the title suggests, the sky is given a voice.

The Hall of Frescoes, with its decorations imbued with a classical and idealized imagery, thus becomes a place of counterpoint: celebratory beauty is accompanied by an aesthetic of vulnerability, where the sky becomes language and memory takes the form of a silent song. In the adjacent garden, the sound installation Things in Danger (ABCDE..) continues this reflection, extending it to the landscape and the experience of listening.

The work is composed as a four-channel polyphony, in which groups of elementary school children pronounce lists of words from ancient languages: names of places, idioms, peoples, elements of reality about to vanish. Language becomes sound, a poetic babble, an evocation of a fragile and elusive heritage.

This work was born from an encounter with Simona Menicocci's poem Glossopetrae, which inspired Carini to construct an emotional archive of loss. The garden, conceived as a place of transit and transformation, amplifies the visitor's sensorial experience, as they traverse the space following an invisible path marked by voices, silences, and memories.

In the context of Amnesia, the two works present themselves as acts of intimate resistance: against oblivion, against the flattening of time and differences, against the erasure of minor identities. It is not an explicit denunciation, but a poetic gesture that restores dignity to what is about to disappear.

In a society that imposes on us models of perfection, immortality, and consumption, Lingue di cielo and Le cose in pericolo (ABCDE..) remind us that the true meaning of life may lie precisely in its precariousness—in the fragile tension that makes us, in its most ancient sense, dramatically unique.