Elisa Giardina Papa
“U Scantu”: A Disorderly Tale
03.10.–30.11.25
Elisa Giardina Papa, “U Scantu”: A Disorderly Tale, 2022, still frame from video. Courtesy of the Artist and Galerie Tanja Wagner. (c) Elisa Giardina Papa
Opening: October 2, 7 pm
With “U Scantu”: A Disorderly Tale, Künstler:innenhaus Bremen presents the first institutional solo exhibition in Germany by Italian artist Elisa Giardina Papa (1979, lives and works in New York and Sant’Ignazio, Sicily). The artist works with film, drawing, and ceramics to explore how hegemonic demands for order and legibility strain radical forms of knowledge, desire, and embodiment.
Her works – including large-scale video installations, sculptural objects, and AI-based projects – create spaces for reflecting on the shaping and regimentation of collective memory and histories. The starting point of “U Scantu”: A Disorderly Tale is the Sicilian myth of the donne di fora: ambivalent, supernatural female figures who carry ancestral forms of healing, as well as histories of persecution, magic, and resistance.
Giardina Papa stages these mythological figures as queer allegories for a fluid identity rich with transformative potential beyond rigid categories. The exhibition weaves together personal memories, speculative history, and archival research to form a poetic-political space where the magical and the disorderly emerge as creative forces. Amid braided ceramic hair, moldy lemons, and subversive bike-tuners in a utopian abandoned Sicilian town, the exhibition conjures memories of resistance and new perspectives on history, belonging, and potential futures.
Curator: Marie Oucherif
