What's left is a full house that will soon be empty. Built brick by brick, decorated with thousands of knick-knacks that have been moved a hundred times throughout the house, the walls re-painted too. It was while exploring the house of her grandparents, Italian immigrants who arrived in France in the 1950s, that Léa Cammarata wondered how all the precious things they had brought back from their homeland and acquired in their adopted country were going to disappear, to be sorted, kept, thrown away and framed.

In the film industry, you set up a set that lives for a few months, weeks or days and then disappears. It's ephemeral, and we create what we call ‘patinas’ to age things and make them look as if they've lived and gone through layers of life. A bit like archaeologists who dig up objects to preserve them. 

For this exhibition, Léa Cammarata has invited video artist Louise Talarico, with whom she has been working for a number of years on the fantasised and speculated life of objects. Both work in the fields of film industry and contemporary art. 

They came together for this project based on the idea of a ‘third territory’ in which worlds have been displaced and then diluted. People marked by their land, who find themselves having to build elsewhere. An already inhabited elsewhere. It is here that fantasies, whether cultural or personal, become relics, like the objects left behind to bear witness to a living space.

Set design is a playground for bringing places and objects back to life. Using sheets of scenery as a starting point, they have created a transitional space between ruin and home. They propose both a fiction and the setting for that fiction, with Italy as the backdrop. The Cornicello, a symbol of good luck, is represented in the exhibition in several replicated forms. This obsessive variation, both in the gesture of making the object and in its display, is a way of experiencing its existence. It's a way of not forgetting, of remembering. Just like collectors. The plaster walls are followed by a dark room inhabited by ghostly voices whose tales straddle dream and reality. They propose a place that never existed, even though it attempts to represent their memories. 

As part of the Perspective programme at ENSAD in Nancy, the art centre has helped Léa Cammarata to become a professional artist, with the support of the Emergence scheme run by the Région Grand Est. The Cornicello exhibition is the culmination of this period of professional support. The Octave Cowbel gallery has kindly agreed to host this exhibition in Metz as part of its programme.

PRATICAL INFORMATIONS

OCTAVE COWBELL
4 rue du Change 57000 Metz

Exhibition open to the public from 24 January to 5 April 2025
Wednesday to Saturday, 2pm to 6pm and by appointment. 
Free admission.