Elisa Strinna at OnCurating Project Space

As part of the exhibition stories of water as part of Zürich Art Weekend

11 November, 2022 until March, 2023

stories of water explore a selection of video works that dive into the aqueous depth of various scenarios and narratives. Understanding water as a fundamental source of life, and a space carrying countless myths and mysteries, the artists dissect the terms, challenging our relation to it. The presented works navigate unsettling realities – them being political, social, environmental and technological in scope. They are, in one way or another, reflections of current paradigm shifts and all center around a common idea: water – in particular oceans, ice, lakes, rivers – no longer follows its natural streams but has become both the means and the vessel of human needs. How have the widest and deepest ecosystems on Earth become so monitored, controlled, and appropriated? And, paradoxically, how are they still so underestimated and under-studied? Why is water as a common good so crucial for all living things, as well as their primary habitat – so endangered?

Elisa Strinna | The Upwelling, 2018 | Still shot

The Sicilian Channel is one of the most traffic-intensive areas in the world. In addition to being an ecological corridor for birds migration, it is the crossroads of merchant ships distributing materials for the industry. It is a human migration corridor and the place where fiber-optic cables are laid from Europe to the North African coast, to then continue towards the Middle East and Asia, in an attempt to connect virtually the entire globe. The Upwelling follows some of the fiber optic cables going from Mazara del Vallo, Sicily, to Tunisia. The invisible flow of information goes together with the story of a young migrant telling his journey from Nigeria to Italy.

Elisa Strinna is an Italian artist currently based in the Netherlands. Her work investigates the nature/culture bisection, addressing, in particular, the interdependence between individuals and technologies and the byproducts of such affiliations. By growing on top of the natural world, the technological world is establishing itself as the future of an ever-expanding species. When mediated nature seems to replace nature itself, Strinna looks back on the material and spiritual effects of this transformation by closely studying its consequences and limits.

OnCurating Project Space is interested in art as a practice and social criticism, less in a traditional understanding of art objects. As a kind of meta-practice, a curatorial attitude plays with various disciplines and brings them into the presentation space of art, questioning society, politics, public life and the private sphere. The OnCurating Space members understand the curatorial as a multi-authored approach to the production of meaning which is intrinsically linked to transformations of contemporary societies, the reorganization of labour, cultural policies, politics of inclusion/exclusion and issues poised by points of intersection.

OnCurating Project Space
Ausstellungsstrasse 16
8005 Zürich

11 November, 2022: 11 am—8 pm
12 November, 2022: 11 am—6 pm

go to OnCurating Project Space’s website