Water as a metaphor for movement and flow, but also an opportunity for action and reaction.

Tracking individual stories and calling to mind facts and transformations which have made recent history, Paci transcends his personal experience and addresses migration and mobility as ontological conditions, a highly-topical enquiry at a moment in history in which the very concepts of ‘home’ and ‘identity’ (cultural, political and social) are continually brought to the fore and questioned. Existence is interpreted as a continual search, as unceasing movement, and water is the taken as metaphor for human drifts and flows.

‘Di queste luci si servirà la notte,’ Adrian Paci explains, ‘began as a work centring on the Arno river, a performance action; but the focus soon shifted toward a reflection on the dialogue and the tensions that exist between light and dark, between surface and depth, between the visible and the invisible. Man’s presence seems to be the spark that ignites this dialogue without ever pretending to bring it to a conclusion.’

At the Museo Novecento, Paci is showing a video installation produced expressly for the museum in the wake of the novel action on the river in September: the huge skeleton of a boat dominates the main hall, together with a video presentation of the action from which the exhibition takes its name, a performance in which the protagonist was a small boat trailing luminous tentacles in the water, which as it rode the Arno revealed the river’s deepest, darkest dimension. Alongside these works are a selection of video productions centring on the cathartic, symbolic meaning/power of water, such as The Guardians and The Column. 

On the second floor of the museum, within the spaces of the Alberto Della Ragione collection, the artist presents pictorial works, videos and photographs (among which paintings and the photographic works Turn On and Back Home) which, as they make a home in the museum rooms, establish a point-by-point repartee and a dialogue rich in suggestions with the works in the permanent collection. At Le Murate. Progetti Arte Contemporanea, the exhibition inhabits the first and third floors and offers an extensive documentation room on the ground floor. The sculpture entitled Home to Go occupies and lends a new significance to the Sala Colonne, while the cells of the former prison are given a new voice thanks with the video entitled Rasha, a delicate, ‘absolute’ work that speaks strongly and symbolically in and with this space of past pain and hopelessness. The cells on the first floor are the exhibition spaces for pictorial works and installations by Davide d’Amelio, Gianni Barelli and Lori Lako. three young artists residing in Tuscany and personally selected by Adrian Paci following the workshop held at Le Murate last year under the auspices of the Progetto Riva.

Montelupo Fiorentino, the Cioni Alderighi brickworks hosts the video installation entitled The Encounter (2011).
The former carpet factory in the San Francesco locality of Pelago is the venue for the video installation entitled One and Twenty-Four Chairs (2013).