Adrian Paci: Il vostro cielo fu mare, il vostro mare fu cielo

This site-specific installation for MUDEC’s Agora in 2024, serves as a preview of the exhibition “Travelogue: Stories of Travel, Migration and Diaspora”.

The installation transforms the Agora with a mosaic of blue-green hues, evoking the colours of the sea. Each fragment of this seemingly abstract composition is, in fact, a detail taken from photographs published in newspaper articles about migrant shipwrecks in the Mediterranean.

Drawing on his own personal experience, and spanning from the end of the Soviet bloc to the present day, Adrian Paci searches through Italian and international newspapers to assemble a necessarily partial archive of the tragedies that befall those who seek emancipation through exile, only to encounter death instead.

The artist does not depict the disaster, the drowned, or the survivors. Instead, he selects the one element that unites all these stories—sometimes the subject of the photograph, sometimes relegated to the background: the sea.