When they come alive

The exhibition presents the outcomes of the research carried out by Ilare and Qeu Meparishvili, artists of the third edition of Atelier Elpis, Fondazione Elpis’s residency programme. During the residency, the two artists started from the history of the place that hosted them, asking how a form of knowledge or a presence can survive once the structures that sustained it have disappeared.

Via Orti takes its name from the vegetable gardens and fields of medicinal herbs that once surrounded the retirement home of the Piccole Suore dei Poveri Vecchi, the historic complex that now houses the Foundation’s two venues. Gardens, medicinal plants and the retirement home were part of a single system, in which nature, knowledge and care were closely intertwined. Of that landscape, and of the knowledge that ran through it, only the name of the street remains today. From these traces, two different yet complementary research paths have emerged.

Ilare reinterprets the site’s botanical past through alchemy, a discipline poised between working with matter and spiritual inquiry, which pursued the dream of the elixir of life. This longing resonates with the history of the building, devoted to caring for people in the final stage of their lives. Her works form a dismantled alchemical laboratory spread across the space, made of alembics and artificially aged glass vials, like relics of a lost knowledge.

Qeu Meparishvili, on the other hand, explores alternative ways of finding one’s way through urban space, inspired by desire paths, the spontaneous trails formed by the repeated passage of people and animals. In a four-act narrative, the artist imagines a city emptied of human presence and inhabited by stray dogs, which move by following smells, habits and perceptions. Drawing on the tradition of Orthodox icons, rooted in her Georgian origins, she engraves them on silver-plated brass plates, turning them into guardians of another order of space.

Together, the two research paths give rise to an exhibition about what disappears from maps yet lives on beneath the surface, in gestures, images and the memory of places.