GARD Galleria Arte Roma Design, founded in 1995, which has always focused on the promotion and dissemination of emerging art and self-produced design, in collaboration with the cultural association Soqquadro, with which it has been collaborating for years, presents the exhibition ‘Travelling - avoiding the hardest potholes’.
On the occasion of the Giornata del Contemporaneo (Contemporary Art Day) promoted by AMACI (Association of Italian Contemporary Art Museums) on Saturday 12 October at 5.00 p.m., the performance ‘Segni opposti’ (Opposite Signs) by and with Monica Argentino will be presented: a tribute to the ‘decomposed’ people who are victims of violence, daily abuse of self and the complexity of managing conflicts that are more intimate than human understanding.
‘Si viaggiare’ is one of Lucio Battisti's most popular songs with lyrics by Mogol. The song is ostensibly about a car journey, but the content of the lyrics clearly has a broader meaning that speaks of the journey of life.
‘Illuminating the road to know where to go’ - “Scintillating the people, the clear one from the no” - “With a flowing rhythm of life in your heart” are clearly allegorical phrases.
The title of the exhibition refers to the phrase ‘Avoiding the hardest potholes’, i.e. the need to get around/overcome the obstacles we find on our way, a phrase chosen as an imprint of the perilous journeys migrants face to land in the rich West, the journey as risk. There are, however, journeys that coincide with joy, curiosity, growth, exploration, knowledge, discovery. Between Marco Polo's voyage by sea and that of the cruise passengers, there are obvious differences in comfort and enjoyment as opposed to discomforts and fears, but there is also a different sense of exploratory curiosity, the impelling desire to find other paths, a departure from which one may not return, but which is necessary, unavoidable, inescapable in order to unveil the unknown. So we have very different journeys: migrants, cruise passengers, explorers, they are people who express and live different narratives, emotions, experiences, discoveries, unknown to each other. What they all have in common is the need to set out again, ‘certainly not to fly, but to travel’.