Daria Koltsova — Postcards from Home in Piazza San Carlo, Turin

Daria Koltsova
Postcards from Home

Oct 30-Nov 6
10–22h
Turin, Piazza San Carlo

While taking a kiosk on the piazza San Carlo in Turino over with stained glass installation Daria Koltsova offers a reminiscing voyage in memories of a world that vanishes under our eyes.

Daria replaced the windows of the old kiosk with abstract stained glass landscapes. Produced in the size of old postcards the glass landscapes highlight Ukrainian ecosystem that has been on the edge of extinction because of the war. The process articulates a symbolic gesture of protection and archiving.

The war cripples the land, forcing people to flee. But we don’t flee alone. We bring to new places our memories, our stories, our “postcards”. The kiosk is a refugee story of moving with memories, of being a living archive of culture, meant to be destroyed. Enabling memory to survive is in itself an act of resilience.

In the world we live we feel the need to store records in our own personal random access memories. Dramatic events multiply and bring our reality to slowly collapse and drift away at faster pace, our souvenirs and imagination remain the unique recollection of such idealized « beauty ».

Every landscape is simplified to a symbol, to a composition of colours without details. The landscape is an essential image for Ukraine. Ukrainian flag represents the wheat field and the blue sky above.

The old stained-glass technique, often used in churches, emphasises the sacred essence of nature and its vulnerability in facing the war, equally echoing its regenerative capacity. Bringing light into something is a spiritual gesture, and the stained-glass becomes a sacral element of a symbolic home that we all bring with us when we are moving to new places.

Curated by @valeria.radke

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