Prima che l’anima
riconosca la via di casa.

Silenzio.

Site-specific installation for Rocca Albornoz
cattail seeds, raw clay, steel from abandoned buildings

Curator: Antonio Rocca
Production assistant: Manousos Manousakis
2025

Sui sentieri sconosciuti

is a site-specific installation that explores transition, metamorphosis, and the fragile duality of threshold moments—when the familiar collapses and the future has yet to take shape.

Created specifically for the Rocca Albornoz, the work reinterprets the space itself—a fortress once built as a symbol of power and control, later left in a semi-abandoned state, and now reactivated as a meeting point between history and contemporary art. The installation becomes a dialogue with the architecture and memory of the site, questioning how past, present, and future coexist and transform one another.

At its core is the archetypal figure of the Izbushka na kurikh nozhkakh, the Slavic hut on chicken legs. Far from being merely the home of the witch Baba Yaga, the Izbushka is a liminal being—a guardian of thresholds, a portal between life and death, known and unknown.

As Mircea Eliade writes about initiation rituals, the threshold is not just a passage but a transformation: a rupture from the human order to enter the sacred. These Izbushki embody that space in between. Like Charon’s boat crossing the river Styx, they do not belong to one place or time but float between worlds—escorting what was toward what might be.

The installation reimagines these figures as wandering spirits of space and time, nomadic dwellings that carry the memory of what they’ve passed through.