Rebecca Moccia’s environmental atmospheres at Fondazione Zegna

Rebecca Moccia riflette sul tentativo umano di addomesticare le stagioni per un comfort artificiale con una nuova mostra a Fondazione Zegna

17 hours ago

Giorgia Massari

While the new society strives to be as sustainable as possible, we can hardly give up the artificial comforts of contemporaneity. In particular, it is artist Rebecca Moccia – with her new exhibition at Fondazione Zegna – who reflects on the human attempt to domesticate the seasons. “Bending the outside for our inside is destroying our planet,” Anna Zegna explains unfiltered during the preview, within the walls (and glass windows) of Casa Zegna, a beautiful place nestled in the Natural Oasis generated by her grandfather Ermenegildo almost a hundred years ago. Right here, in this natural setting, the Neapolitan artist, born in 1992, investigates the concept of interdependence between human beings and the environment as opposed to the desire to domesticate the seasons through constant conditioning and heating.

The artist, whom we had already seen at Fondazione ICA, focuses her research on the exploration of temperatures and atmospheres, proposes here a site-specific project by getting in touch with the place and the people who inhabit it. ATMOSPHERIC, Seasons and Temperaments – curated by Ilaria Bonacossa – proposes in this sense an experience that is both visual and sensory, conceiving two different atmospheres that will change following the rhythm of the seasons. But let us explain further.

«I have been working on the change and succession of seasons and thus temperatures-which are embedded in the works themselves in the exhibition-and the atmospheres these changes bring with them: their practical/symbolic value in the era of climate crisis, especially in the mountain environment; the feelings of loss and nostalgia related to their gradual disappearance; and the gestures/actions of resistance to reverse this trend that enhance the interconnectedness of humans and nonhumans.»
Rebecca Moccia

Two different fabric ambient atmospheres

If we read Rebecca Moccia’s words, it is easy to perceive the different layers of which her talk is composed. The first revolves around a discourse that sees the climate at the center, bringing back on the fabrics – sewn by San Patrignano – the thermal mappings of the place; the second is articulated instead on the sensory properties of the fabrics, here investigated together with the nearby Lanificio Zegna from the perspective of visual and tactile impact. If the first installation in fact, the one that runs from May to September, tends toward a cooling of the place by cold colors and lighter textures, the second one, which will be installed in winter, wants instead to warm the environment following the same logic. Two environmental atmospheres consisting of small and large tapestries that “transform the thermographs into works that are both documentary and symbolic of the physical relationship between places, bodies and temperatures.”

Not only textiles, but also sound and video environment

Everything is amplified by the presence of video installations and the suondscape created by sound artist and composer Renato Grieco that serves as a soundtrack. The videos played by the monitors are close-ups of the hands of people interviewed by Rebecca during her research on Oasi Zegna. The gestural narratives return to the audience all the experience, nostalgia and passion of the professions and communities that inhabit the place, sketching the changes in habits, landscapes and temperatures that they “experience in their daily horizon.”