February 21 - March 30, 2025
San Servolo Island

Friday February 21 -  5pm-6pm - Talk and Opening

A special guided visit to the exhibition and meeting with the artists has been organized for all VIU students on Thursday February 20, at 10am.
Please register at the Front Office by Wednesday February 19, at noon.

From 21st February to 30th March 2025, on the island of San Servolo, owned by the Metropolitan City of Venice, it will be possible to visit Riscritti e rimossi (Rewritten and removed), a solo exhibition by the artistic duo Zeroscena (Elisa La Boria and Luka Bagnoli), curated by Carmelo Marabello. The exhibition, promoted by San Servolo srl (an in-house company of the Metropolitan City of Venice) and VIU – Venice International University, addresses the theme of memory within the archive of the former San Servolo asylum.

During a research carried out at the Historical Archive of the Asylum, the artists found more than two hundred documents, dating back to the first twenty years of the twentieth century, attributed to as many internees and never catalogued before. These materials, mostly never-sent letters or messages addressed to the hospital staff, constitute valuable findings: an intimate look into the internees’ lives.
The project, based on the master's degree thesis of Elisa La Boria and Luka Bagnoli, both graduated at Iuav University of Venice, consists of a graphic rework of the documents, from which words and phrases are extrapolated in order to compose a new text made of fragments. For the exhibition, a selection of these fragments has been related in an unprecedented way with the corpus of photographic portraits preserved in the archive. Two levels are at stake: the word and the face, the profound and the surface.
Riscritti e rimossi, therefore, acquires the form of a visual and poetic work that goes beyond the simple compendium of letters to invade the field of photo collections, atlases and research-based artworks.
Through the re-elaboration of the documents and the juxtapositions generated among them, personal and collective trauma are highlighted. These memories, although preserved within the archive, suffer the forgetfulness of time: they ask to be recalled and it is our duty to make them emerge.