AMNESIE - GIORDANO FLOREANCIG, THE ART OF FORGETTING, curated by Elisabetta Zerial

On the occasion of GO!2025 – Borderless Nova Gorica and Gorizia European Capital of Culture, within the Amnesie review, Vila Vipolže welcomes the exhibition The Art of Forgetting by Giordano Floreancig in its intimate spaces on the main floor.

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 - GIORDANO FLOREANCIG, THE ART OF FORGETTING, curated by Elisabetta Zerial

On the occasion of GO!2025 – Borderless Nova Gorica and Gorizia European Capital of Culture, within the Amnesie review, Vila Vipolže welcomes the exhibition The Art of Forgetting by Giordano Floreancig in its intimate spaces on the main floor.

The artist presents a series of invented portraits, created with a highly material, dense, almost sculptural painting technique. They are anonymous faces, yet full of presence: inner existences that emerge from the canvas like disturbed apparitions, distorted memories, identities in search of definition.

The portraits do not refer to any recognizable model, and it is precisely in this absence of reference that they reveal their evocative power. They are images of what remains when identity is stripped of its foundations, when memory ceases to be a shared narrative and becomes fragment, stammering, ruin.

Who are you, if you have been prevented from remembering where you come from?

Who do you become, if what you were is denied to you, erased, rewritten?

Floreancig’s painting moves precisely in this liminal space, where the subject is still present but already transformed, where identity tries to recompose itself starting from what has been removed. His figures seem to directly question the viewer, forcing him to reflect as intimately as collectively on the relationship between face, history and belonging.

In this tension between what emerges and what is missing, the pictorial material becomes the language of unconscious memory: pastes, scrapings, stratifications are transformed into traces, into visual wrecks of a personal and universal history at the same time. As if the artist were digging into time – in his own time, but also in everyone’s time – in search of a truth that is no longer whole, but still alive.

Floreancig’s work fits perfectly into the heart of the Amnesie exhibition, which investigates the border between memory and oblivion, between identity construction and loss. His portraits are icons of being lost, but also stubborn witnesses of a desire to mend, to remember, to be.

In the pictorial gesture, in the distorted face, in the material that resists, lies the possibility of a rebirth. Because sometimes, precisely in the territories of oblivion, the most authentic need to know who we are is born.