Atavistic, the beginning, an exhibition by Lucia Calabrino.

Every journey has its origin, its starting point, that moment of introspection and deep inquiry. This is the beginning of my path, of my family and territorial history. My father Luigi Calabrino, born in Ischia, Naples, Italy; and my mother Giovanna Chillemi, born in Lentini, Sicily, Italy, arrived in Argentina in the 1950s. They were escaping from the poverty caused by the Second World War and settled in Mar del Plata.

My intention is to address the issue of migration and the relationship with the territory as the seat of the emotional and the human. Mar del Plata was the destination of many immigrants from Ischia and Sicily, who settled in the port area in “Little Italy”. The history of my family takes place in that context. With this project I wish to investigate my identity, family ancestry and the artisan traditions assigned to women. Understanding that the individual leaves a mark of the era that transcends it and becomes a group history. This visual arts proposal crosses the historical-territorial, links my hometown in America and those of my ancestors in Europe. In this way the journey creates an aesthetic trip that goes from the map to the territory and from the present to the roots.

I seek to develop my own grammar, with its units of meaning made up of: an archive of familiar and contemporary photographic images, letters and cartographies, dialogues with distant relatives, cultures, natural environments, landscapes, languages, dialects and an endless number of tangible and intangible atavistic encounters. A conceptual narrative through the re-signification of images proposing a meta-reading of the work.

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