AMNESIE – ANDREAS SENONER, FROM THE ABSENCE, THE FORM, edited by Elisabetta Zerial

On the occasion of GO!2025 BORDERLESS Nova Gorica Gorizia European Capital of Culture and the Amnesie festival, the site-speci fic intervention From absence, the form by Andreas Senoner is grafted onto a reflection on identity and memory, with particular attention to the phenomenon of amnesia not as a void, but as a possibility of transformation. 

AMNESIE

a project by Zerial Art Project

curated by Elisabetta Zerial 

GO!2025 Borderless Nova Gorica Gorizia European Capital of Culture

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

Zerial Art Project presents the exhibition Amnesie, curated by Elisabetta Zerial, as part of GO!2025 – Borderless Nova Gorica Gorizia European Capital of Culture. Amnesie is developed as a widespread project that brings together ten contemporary artists in four emblematic places of the crossborder territory: Casa Krainer, Palazzo Lantieri, Kinemax and Vila Vipolže. Nova Gorica and Gorizia, once divided by a political and ideological border, today become the symbol of a Europe without barriers, crossed by shared memories and collective traumas. Ten site-specific solo exhibitions — by Stefano Cagol, Nina Carini, Federico Clapis, Massimo Gardone, Andreas Senoner, Desideria Burgio, Andrea Guastavino, Marco Bolognesi, Camilla Marinoni and Marina Moreno — explore amnesia as a fluid condition of contemporary existence: loss, removal, oblivion, but also a fertile space for a possible regeneration of memory. Amnesia, in fact, is not just a subtraction: it is a void which can become possibilities. In Nova Gorica and Gorizia, cities once divided and now united, art becomes a bridge between past and future, between multiple identities and a common 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 strati fications. Their structures — medieval, Renaissance or in the Gorizia Liberty style — dialogue with the works, amplifying the suspension, the void and the 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.

Casa Krainer

Also known as Casa Sticsa, it is a symbolic building in the historic center of Gorizia, documented as early as 1769 but with medieval origins, as evidenced by the ancient stone well in the internal courtyard. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the architect Gerolamo Luzzatto renovated the facade in refined Gorizia Liberty style on behalf of Edoardo Sticsa, blending modernity and Central European memory. The name “Krainer” comes from the historic family hardware store that operated on the ground floor until 1912, a point of reference for the city community. Today, under the management of the company ViaRastello43 S.r.l, Casa Krainer is a dynamic cultural center that hosts events, exhibitions and initiatives dedicated to regional crafts and culture.

The selection of five artists for Casa Krainer works as a microcosm of the theme Amnesie, because each one – from a different perspective – investigates the relationship between memory and oblivion, intertwining languages, materials and expressive modes that dialogue with the historical space of the building. Stefano Cagol invites us to reflect on collective responsibility: he pushes us to recognize that environmental and geopolitical memory is never neutral, but the result of our choices. Andrea Guastavino brings to light traces of a war-ridden past that remains fragmented yet very powerful: the fragility of its memory together with its ability to bear witness and connect. Desideria Burgio with her intervention underlines how the past reappears in the present, teaching us that memory is not a burden, but a force that renews. Andreas Senoner introduces the dimension of regeneration: amnesia not as a sterile void, but as the “raw material” of new narratives, capable of transforming itself rather than simply being passed on. Camilla Marinoni completes the cycle by bringing attention back to the ritual act of remembering, both daily and poetic, reminding us that even the most fragile memory can become an act of resistance, every day.

Together, these five exhibitions reactivate Casa Krainer as a living space of strati fications, dialoguing with the history of the building and its many souls, transforming amnesia into an opportunity for rebirth and a meeting between past and future.

The declinations of Amnesia

In this review, amnesia unfolds in four overlapping and intersecting areas. On a historical and geopolitical level, amnesia acts as an instrument of power: by choosing which events to pass on and which to erase—world wars, imposed borders, genocides, or resistance movements—it 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 the deep 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 past that resists. Lastly, in the area of archives and identity: who are you if you have been prevented from remembering where you come from? Often, identity is built 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, questioning the construction of the self when roots are denied.

Amnesia 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.

AMNESIE – ANDREAS SENONER FROM THE ABSENCE, THE FORM, curated by Elisabetta Zerial

On the occasion of GO!2025 BORDERLESS Nova Gorica Gorizia European Capital of Culture and the Amnesie festival, the site-speci fic intervention From absence, the form by Andreas Senoner is grafted onto a reflection on identity and memory, with particular attention to the phenomenon of amnesia not as a void, but as a possibility of transformation. 

It is precisely on this tension that Senoner's work develops: his sculptures, suspended between the natural and the unnatural, between the corporeal and the symbolic, become poetic tools through which to read amnesia not as a sterile loss, but as a generative space of new forms and meanings.

Senoner's works offer a paradigm for reflecting on a territory that has experienced profound fractures, but which today can transform its memory into an active resource. Amnesia should not be seen as a traumatic caesura, but as an opportunity for redefinition: it is the blank space in which a collective identity can be rewritten that is no longer anchored exclusively to painful memories or divisive logics, but open to the construction of new shared imaginaries.

From absence, the form reminds us that forgetting is not always an act of removal, but can be a creative gesture, a form of regeneration. Through materials, forms and figures that evoke tension, suspension and metamorphosis, Senoner opens fundamental questions: what remains when the past dissolves? How do you reconstruct a shattered historical identity? It is precisely in these cracks that his work fits, like a lens capable of showing the ambiguity of time, where the repressed continues to exert an underground force.

His works suggest that amnesia is not only a condition to be feared, but also a mechanism of transformation and an act of resistance. Absence thus becomes a fertile space for new narratives; loss, a possibility of rewriting. From absence, the form welcomes fragmentation as a formal and conceptual principle, and invites us to contemplate the imperfect beauty of traces, of scars, of what has been erased but not completely forgotten.

His sculptures do not tell a linear or closed story, but evoke a flow of time that erases and modi fies, leaving behind mutable, imperfect, yet meaningful traces.

They are silent presences of a historical identity that is never fixed, almost suspended, that inhabit the space with delicacy and intensity, always balanced between what we remember and what we inevitably forget.