The Gallery Apart is proud to repropose Mariana Ferratto’s exhibition Libertà clandestine, originally presented at MAD – Murate Art District in Florence during 2024 under the curatorship of Valentina Gensini.

This is the first time that the gallery has hosted, in a partly reduced and partly different version, an exhibition that was already the subject of museum programming, moreover, committing itself to guarantee the full enjoyment and possibility of interpretation of the mother exhibition. The reason for this choice is related to the exceptional nature of Ferratto’s project both from an objective and a subjective point of view.

The exhibition was created as part of the project Memoria de la materia, supported by Italian Council, XI edition, 2022 – General Directorate for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture. In the first phase, Ferratto was able to carry out his research between Florence, Buenos Aires, Santa Fe, Cordoba and Rosario. The artist then obtained a long residency at MAD – Murate Art District, which finally commissioned her exhibition Libertà clandestine. A project, therefore, objectively complex, articulated on two sides of the Atlantic Ocean and between two cultures, with the involvement of numerous witnesses of the dramatic events that characterized the era of the dictatorship imposed in Argentina from 1976 to 1983 by Rafael Videla and with the participation, in Italy, of numerous students enrolled in the workshops that Ferratto conducted during her residency.

There is then a personal motivation that makes the project and the exhibition extraordinary, something that the artist brooded in her innermost self and that makes the exhibition in question “the exhibition” that Ferratto had been planning for years. A second-generation Italian and the daughter of Argentine political exiles who had personally known the reality of Argentine prisons, Ferratto went in search of other direct witnesses of those experiences of deprivation of freedom, collecting their stories and memories. The result is a selection whose common ground is the somewhat artistic attitude that some of these people found in manual dexterity, in the production of small objects, in the invention of clandestine modes of expression, the possibility of communicating with other prisoners and with the outside world, in order not to be crushed by the despair of isolation.

Ferratto made several bodies of work. One series of drawings constitutes as a whole The Abecedary of Prison Language and reproduces the Tumbero, the sign language that ordinary prisoners had taught “politicians” to communicate with each other. Other drawings form the Archive of Clandestine Handicrafts and reproduce the objects made by political prisoners using the very poor materials they were able to obtain, such as ossobuchi, towel threads, and buttons. Ferratto then made three large ceramic flowers, at MAD poignantly set up inside the prison’s former rigor cells, inside which he concealed as many speakers that return fragments of excerpts retrieved from the book Memories of darkness built through letters, diary pages and testimonies of 112 women who lived together in the Devoto prison. Stories that also become the subject of videos filmed by Ferratto using the unusual format of the tutorial, as the protagonists recall their experiences of detention while repeating and explaining the production of objects made in prison. The elective affinity between the artist’s narrative and the place Murate, a former women’s prison, is rendered in the gallery exhibition thanks to the only work not in the Florentine exhibition because it was made later. It is a series of pairs of photographs, one in black and white and the other identical in color, of places inside the former prison, photos superimposed by the artist and cropped by hand in such a way that, where an exterior is reproduced in the photo due to the presence of windows or other openings, the color of the exterior imposes itself but coexists with the black and white of the interior.

For the series Quaderni di residenza of MAD – Murate Art District, on the occasion of the Florentine exhibition, the book Libertà clandestine has been published by postmedia books, collecting images of the works and texts by Valentina Gensini, Angel Moya Garcia, Laura Gonzalez and Serena Castellotti. The book will be the subject of a presentation in the gallery during the duration of the exhibition, while at the opening there will be a performance based on the use of the Tumbero and interpreted by performers Laura Bisio, Giulia Vigo and Federica Damiani from the dance company 668 ControchiaveDanza.

Produced as part of the project Memoria de la materia supported by Italian Council, XI edition, 2022 Directorate General for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture In collaboration with: Murate Art District, Accademia di Belle Arti di Firenze, Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma, APM Archivo Provincial de la Memoria de Córdoba, Biblioteca Popular Constancio C.Vigil, Casa B, Facultad de Bella Artes de la Universidad del País Vasco/Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea UPV/EHU, Museo Provincial de Bellas Artes “Rosa Galisteo de Rodríguez “dependiente del Ministerio de Cultura de la Provincia de Santa Fe, Museo Artes Plásticas Eduardo Sívori, Ciudad de Buenos Aires, Pilot, Villa Romana, Carico Massimo.