This catalogue is published on the occasion of the exhibition Petrit Halilaj. Shkrepëtima curated by Leonardo Bigazzi and held at Fondazione Merz from 29th October 2018 to 17th February 2019.

“In recent years, Petrit Halilaj has succeeded in transforming his own biography and the recent history of his nation, Kosovo, into living matter for his works. Despite working with a public and collective dimension, his work often originates from a personal experience, and is usually the result of an intimate process shared with the people dearest to him. Using sculpture, video, performance and drawing, Halilaj has developed a deep reflection on the construction mechanisms of cultural identity, on the value of memory and on the role of art in the shaping of collective consciousness in contemporary society.

This small publication has been printed on the occasion of the exhibition Shkrepëtima by Petrit Halilaj (29 October 2018 - 17 February 2019) held at Fondazione Merz.

The Shkrepëtima project presented at the Fondazione Merz continues the artist’s investigation into the historical roots of Runik, the little Kosovar town in which he grew up, from its Neolithic origins to its recent past. The exhibition is the culminating and conclusive moment of the project, entirely produced by the Fondazione Merz. The first and fundamental chapter of the project was the performance held on 7 July 2018 in the ruins of the Runik Culture House, which for over thirty years had been the symbol of the cultural identity of its citizens. This show was followed by another, at the Zentrum Paul Klee in Berne, Switzerland (20 July - 19 August 2018).

The exhibition presents a new series of sculptures and monumental installations that re-contextualise the settings, costumes and stage props of the performance inside the exhibition space. In the work of Halilaj the ruins of the Culture Centre take on a voice to recount history, becoming the expression of a precise will to remember the past in a context in which the desire for removal of memory is very strong. Through his dreamlike and visionary language, Halilaj has achieved a surprising balance between the weight of the history of these fragments and the physical lightness arising from their suspension.

The first cycle of exhibitions and events proposed by RADICETERNA closes with an exhibition by Ignazio Mortellaro. The creator, together with Valentina Bruschi and Vittorio Rappa, of the entire project for the promotion and dissemination of contemporary art hosted in the eighteenth-century spaces of the Calidarium of Palermo’s Botanical Garden, Mortellaro is an eclectic and versatile artist in the Renaissance sense, a man of letters and an engineer. For the exhibition entitled E già sono deserto – which is complemented by this book full of texts and references – he conceives a new objectification for the term desert, understood as landscape, a place of extreme atomisation, free space and ever-changing labyrinth. The reflections on human and cosmic natures, the literary and geographical references, become narratives on time and its many forms and dimensions.

The third volume of the RADICETERNA series, which accompanies the programme of exhibitions and events inspired by Mario Merz’s Se la forma scompare la sua radice è eterna (While form disappears its Root is eternal), is dedicated to the new project for the Palermo space conceived by the German artist Björn Braun. Braun’s works oscillate, in search of balance, between Nature and Culture, the natural and artificial, proposing collages and sculptures in which the artist’s working method gives no ground to waste, to the unused, and instead proposes a continuous and careful re-elaboration and dynamisation, even of the smallest elements and residues of life, experience or creation. This new project strengthens the relationship between the project room in the eighteenth-century Calidarium, which houses the works of contemporary artists, and the luminous reading room, which contains the books on art and nature that are forming a specialised library open to all, thanks to donations from private citizens, artists and Italian and international institutions.

On the 50th anniversary of the protest movements of 1968, this exhibition provides food for thought concerning a period full of creative ferment, which triggered new processes of transformation and renewed vision of the future. The artist experienced this period as a protagonist, together with many of his travelling companions, with the aim of redefining the cultural and ideological canons. The exhibition presents a dozen works created by Merz between 1966 and 1973.

This change involved all the arts, from literature to music, theatre, cinema and, of course, the visual arts, which have seen such significant movements coexist such as minimalism, arte povera, land and conceptual art, simultaneously contrasting the then emerging American art with the European scene. It has generated a climate rich in extraordinary sensitivity, a new existential model based on a constant commitment to the concept, presentation and distribution of the art of one’s own time: breaking through the object, a constant and direct control at all times, a shift of art into life, a passionate, multi-faceted and supporting art.

The exhibition becomes a story, therefore, suspended between the historical, the political and the poetic, a narration that starts from the words of Mario Merz himself and presents some of the most important works of those years that have become icons of his artistic career.

The second booklet in the RADICETERNA series is dedicated to Katinka Bock. For the programme of research and the promotion of contemporary art that sees its first realisation in the Botanical Garden of Palermo, the German artist proposes a series of new works, especially conceived for the space of the Calidarium. Popolazione (lines and straight lines), is a composite sculpture inspired by and derived from residual natural elements of the Botanical Garden, collected and used as a base for forms designed by nature itself. The Calidarium in Palermo’s Botanical Garden, originally a heated greenhouse to allow certain plant species to survive the rigours of winter, takes on a new value as a place of care and an incubator of ideas thanks to the artists involved in the project, suitable for sheltering thoughts, experiences and narratives.