Quasi una retrospettiva
03.12.2023 – 25.02.2024
Inaugurazione sabato 2 dicembre 2023, ore 17.00
Con performance di Barbara Kiener a cura di Noah Stolz
> Museo Casa Rusca

The word “quasi” (translated in English with “almost”) is what is known to be a false friend. Since 2018, Aldo Mozzini has titled some of his artworks using this prefix – this is the case, for instance, with the series Quasi cani, Quasi una cattedrale, Quasi una villa, Quasi un’apparizione and Quasi un pupazzo – all of which are featured in the exhibition.

Mozzini was born in Locarno, his father was a Ticino customs officer and his mother a housewife and self-taught painter of Onsernone and Bernese origins. By calling his most important exhibition Almost a Retrospective, Aldo Mozzini intends to reveal the deep roots in his way of conceiving the relationship between biography (or reality) and representation. Far from being an ironic gesture, this exhibition is “almost” a homecoming. The uncertainty of one’s own identity often involves a traumatic experience because it does not allow one to lay the foundations for becoming rooted in the host culture and in some ways ends up making even one’s homeland origins alien. Mozzini refuses the idea of allowing himself to be integrated into a dominant culture, he reacts by defending himself, carving out a role for himself as an outsider, on the margins of the Swiss art scene. Being on the margins, however, does not necessarily mean being marginalised, and in fact Mozzini teaches at the Zurich art school and actively participates in the cultural life of the Zurich scene.

This retrospective aims at exhibiting for the first time a representative portion of the artist’s graphic and pictorial work, the many facets of which are compared here to the path most familiar to the public in the field of environmental installation.

Having left painting behind (1994), Mozzini began a cycle of sculptures and installations composed of the remains of objects, building materials and waste mostly related to his life or his acquaintances. This process of upcycling, i.e. the reuse of materials to obtain objects of higher quality, goes far beyond a moral or ideological gesture. For Aldo Mozzini, recycling discarded materials means embracing the memory with which each fragment is imbued. Each installation is therefore made in situ and according to the materials available, which in turn are disassembled at the end of the exhibition and can be used to create new installations. Noah Stolz

> RSI – TV Reportage
> RSI Alphaville – Audio/Podcast
> Communicato stampa / Medienmitteilung (PDF)
> Vademecum / Handout (PDF)
> Barbara Fässler im Kunstbulletin 1-2 2024 (PDF)