A pillow to speak to yourself (1997-2000)
Silicone
Performance

"I sleep. I choose this parallel life to enter into reality of things, but in a different way, total, because during those hours I fluctuate between past, present and imagination, but maybe reality itself is imagination and what I dream is totally true. On the other hand I'm totally immersed. If life is in the mind, in thought, dream is the most authentic thing we live. It's the hallucination we carry inside of us during the day when we open the eyes and, for a while, sometime confused, we feel that shifty, undefined part of us."

The young Torinese artist Luisa Rabbia, born in 1970, opens the season of solo-shows at the gallery Ciocca which, after the success of the group show in collaboration with Claudia Gianferrari, continues its program traditionally dedicated to young avant-garde artists. An exhibition focused on sleep, on silence, on the sleeper's unconscious; dreams and desires are born from the energies that surround us and these relate with our inner self just passing through a thin stratum of skin. The works talk about sleep... everybody's, meant not as a rest moment, but as an exploration of desires and a comparison with fears; it's a journey which frees ourselves and which let us feel like an integrant part of the external world. On show also a pink skin mattress, which is stitched together not by buttons but by belly buttons; this work represents on the one hand a mother womb where fluctuate and are reborn through our own knowledge, on the other hand our belly, a place where we confront ourselves with the darkest and most visceral parts of being. The belly button represents for Luisa Rabbia the first physical wound we live, it symbolises the entrance on earth as men alone, and signs the tie with the body which gave birth to us. The continuos breath of a sleeper brings the visitor to the slide projection route, a girl is having a rest on a skin pillow with an ear strained to listen; the journey itself, the sleeper's one, and the communication with the pillow are shown by the progressive discovering of the body until total nakedness, which symbolises the abandonment of the rational sphere showing the deepest part of being.

Francesca Pasini