This catalogue is published on the occasion of the show of the Italian artist Luisa Rabbia at the Fondazione Merz from 19 June to 20 September 2009. The exhibition evolves around three central works, consisting of a video and two installations, with traveling as the main theme, through an intimate, imaginary and surreal journey. Luisa Rabbia combines her own world of loneliness, fear, anxiety and personal memories with images taken from other people’s lives. The result is a sort of diary, a narrative that develops through a net of drawings: endless roots, fragments of the artist’s work and clips from her previous videos that are all like blood vessels of a life journey. The video Travels with Isabella. Travel Scrapbooks 1883-2008 was conceived during the artist’s residency at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Luisa Rabbia was inspired by the photographs collected by Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840-1924), during her journey through China in 1883, to create an entrancing animated trail: a scenario of images from ancient China on which she composes her personal diary made of drawings, video footage from her previous works and works from the museum collection. In the installation The Following Day, No One Died, placed on one of the large walls of the Fondazione, the porcelain marks interact with her father’s ECG as if extending the past into the present, to let that distant moment in time live on. Finally, among the main works is Under the Same Sky, based on the encounter between the different cultures emerging nowadays in Turin: Italian, Moroccan, and Rumanian. It is a photographic work that blends the images of these three different countries to create an imaginary landscape on which the artist draws, according to her interpretation of the word “immigration” and to her personal experience as “immigrant” in the USA. All photographs are downloaded from the Web, which has actually become the ultimate source of information for all travelers.

From January 23 to February 27 2010, the exhibition will be hosted by the Fundación Proa in Buenos Aires (Argentina).