Amnesie - Reminds us not to forget / New memory

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 merely a subtraction: it is a void that can become possibility. In Nova Gorica and Gorizia, cities once divided and now united, art becomes a bridge between past and future, between multiple identities and a shared feeling. The Architectures of Memory The places that host Amnesia are not simple containers, but actual architectures of memory: Casa Krainer, Palazzo Lantieri, Kinemax, and Vila Vipolže tell stories of coexistence 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, welcoming guests to tournaments and hunting trips. With the extinction of the dynasty, the building passed to the physician Pozzo and was acquired by Antonio Lantieri in 1505.

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 welcomed 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: 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's 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 context of archives and identity: who are you if you've been prevented from remembering where you come 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.

New Memory is a site-specific digital work by Federico Clapis, conceived for the Salotto Rosa of Palazzo Lantieri as part of the Amnesie exhibition on the occasion of GO!2025 – Borderless European Capital of Culture. Through the language of NFT, Clapis activates a visual and sensorial process capable of reawakening the separation amnesia that has inhabited the human soul for centuries.

In the intimate and layered heart of Palazzo Lantieri, the installation unfolds as a reflection on the lost memory of our original unity. Two futuristic creatures, hybrid and conscious entities, shyly observe each other in a delicate gesture of mutual recognition.

Their presence fits into a space steeped in history and portraits, where "previous degenerations"—metaphors for our confusion, humanity's failures, its forgotten fragments—become both backdrop and mirror. The silent dialogue between these two figures becomes an introspective journey, a dance of gazes and reawakened memories.

It is not just a meeting between two beings, but the staging of a possible reunion between the disintegrated parts of the human being, a reminder of what unites us beyond apparent distance, beyond centuries of internal and collective divisions. The journey unfolds in the vision of a white time capsule, a symbolic and suspended place, containing not objects but possibilities: it is an invitation to regeneration, to awakening, to rewriting a new shared memory.

On this threshold between past and future, New Memory becomes a meditation on the contemporary condition: on the need to remember who we really are, to question the very meaning of our existence, and to transcend the state of amnesia into which we often take refuge.

Clapis's work, poetic and profound, unites technology and spirituality, irony and intensity, and finds in the Salotto Rosa—a place of elegance and historical stratification—the ideal container for an experience that speaks to time, consciousness, and the human desire for reconnection.