Ella Littwitz
Correnti I – Animalia
Rita Urso artopiagallery
Milan, Italy
Sep 29 – Nov 18, 2022
Opening: Sep 29, 6-10pm

Curated by Giulia Bortoluzzi

To speak of “correnti” (currents, flows, streams, trends) is to imagine movements, comings, and goings, not necessarily in tune. The idea of the Correnti project, which consists of several exploratory and expository phases, stems from the need to reflect on these movements, be they anthropological, geopolitical, physical, historical, metaphorical, and so on. The first chapter of this investigation Correnti I – Animalia is dedicated to animals, including humans. Hence, the suggestion in the title, able to recall the general concept underlying the research, and a more specific subtitle that would evoke the scientific classification of the Kingdom as given by Linnaeus (1758).

Ella Littwitz and Elena Mazzi are the artists invited to make this first navigation. With their works, they cross parts of the globe questioning the state and future of the relationship between humankind and the natural environment. Littwitz follows the traces that human streams imprint, more or less consciously, on the territories they traverse showing the evidence of this passage. Mazzi seeks to find balance between the human dimension and the animal and vegetal worlds by relying on the harmony of a landscape in which living beings are in greater harmony with their ecosystem. On the one hand, the lands emerged from and bathed by the Mediterranean Sea, on the other those lapped by the North Atlantic Ocean. In fact, Correnti I – Animalia moves on several fronts, looking at humans and the natural environment on different scales and at different latitudes. Littwitz engages us in the movements that are generated around the Mediterranean and that pursue the transcendence of its boundaries: the human migratory routes across the sea and those of sand particles in the Sahara Desert. Or again the “knots,” which in navigation are units of speed measurement and tools used to safely join two lines, evoke the paradox of an entity that simultaneously conducts movement and creates stability. Mazzi tells us about the intimacy of a specific personal experience in search of a renewed attunement between body and landscape, a reconciliation with the nature of her own body – which has suffered a tragic accident causing the rupture of some vertebrae – through the immersion in the vaster nature of an Icelandic fjord. These lands reveal a rare harmony between man and the environment: natural pools, discovered to practice rehabilitation, are fed with hot water from geothermal sources, specifically from a volcano; the bones of floating cetaceans, collected by inhabitants in vernacular collections of houses and gardens, create an encounter with another species in the act of rebalancing form and matter, placing the stability of the skeleton vis-a-vis with its own fragility.