Lito Kattou

Whisperers

cur. Chiara Nuzzi

Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro, Milan

05 April 2023 — 09 June 2023


Whisperers is the first solo exhibition in an Italian institution by Lito Kattou, whose research is influenced by the natural, social and political context of the Mediterranean region. Inspired by local mythologies, stories and archaeologies, into her practice the artist has inserted themes such as the reconciliation between life and death and acceptance of the linearity and circularity of time, through which she reflects on the coexistence of different realities. Her works – bodies, hybrid and abstract creatures, anthropomorphic or animal, incorporated within which are natural and cosmic elements - analyses the process of changing matter in time, the theme of otherness and unknown space-time scenarios. The series Whisperers from 2022, like the previous Harvesters focuses on the idea of community in a timeless setting that identifies new strategies of coexistence.

For the spaces of the Fondazione Pomodoro the artist has created Whisperer I, II, III and IV, four imposing sculptures made of aluminium, steel, acrylic, nickel-plated copper and biodegradable plastic, representing four components of a community – linked together by symbols, signs and fragments composing a familiar grammar – connected to Whisperer V, a fifth sculpture mounted on the façade of the Fondazione ICA Milano, an intervention acting as a bridge between the two institutions, thus solemnly establishing the collaboration.

In the sculptures, Kattou assimilates human and non-human elements, figures deriving from nature and the animal world, in an attempt to imagine a new form of existence constantly adapting and transforming with the surrounding environmental forces. All endowed with the same face, in a frozen landscape at sunset, the black surfaces of the bodies, arranged so as to mark out the space structuring the route for the public, are interrupted by painted parts that highlight some of their gestures, accompanied by figures of animals, flowers and butterflies, woven baskets recalling not only the artist’s origins, but also the Cypriot colonial period.

The basket is the cue for a broader reflection on the cultural evolution of humanity: as writer Ursula K. Le Guin states in The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (1986), “the first cultural device was probably a recipient ...and that the earliest cultural inventions must have been a container to hold gathered products”. A vision that disempowers the object-weapon as the main element of evolution and instead tells a story of support and collaboration, of intelligence and common practice used to the benefit of the community.

Whisperers represents a space where it is possible to accept coexistence with different entities and to imagine alternative approaches and methods for living together, within a perspective that places the community at the centre and increases the awareness of the needs of other species and for the safeguarding of the planet.



Chiara Nuzzi





photos: Tiziano Ercoli | Andrea Rossetti