Raccogliere parole (Collecting words) and I quaderni di Hannah Arendt (The notebooks of Hannah Arendt) are the two exhibitions by Sabrina Mezzaqui (Bologna, 1962) that closed in Italy at the beginning of 2025. The first, at Galleria Continua in its historic location in San Gimignano (September 14, 2024 – January 26, 2025), is part of a relationship that has lasted more than twenty years between the artist and the gallery, while the second, curated by Manuela Valentini (February 6-14, 2025), is the result of a collaboration with the Library of the Center for Documentation, Research and Women’s Initiatives in Bologna and takes place as part of Art City for Arte Fiera – a particularly successful edition for Mezzaqui, who, represented by Galleria Continua and Galleria Massimo Minini, wins the BPER Foundation prize.
The two exhibitions, which follow one another a few days apart, are not only chronologically but also conceptually contiguous, offering us an opportunity to briefly reflect on some aspects of the poetics and practice of Sabrina Mezzaqui, an artist who has been active since the 1990s on the Bolognese, Italian and international scene with a research focused on the value of time and everyday life, with a strong relational and manual operativity.
In the works on display in both exhibitions – which we will analyze shortly – we can in fact recognize themes and processes that have been a constant in the artist’s career spanning thirty years: specifically, literature and the transformation of the book-object. Since his first works in the nineties, Mezzaqui has been interested in literature as a source, empathizing with stories and characters. One need only think of the installation Le mille gru (1998), in which 999 origami cranes, patiently made by the artist, emerge from the pages of Il gran sole di Hiroscima by Karl Bruckner, as the protagonist Sadako Sasaki patiently attempts the same exercise. Literary references have since recurred not only in the form of quotations, but also as a symbol of a deep passion for reading, accompanied by experimentation on the book as a “volume” – that is, in its concrete and tactile form – which takes place through methodical and meticulous activities of cutting, folding and recomposing its very material: paper.
The main difference between the first works and those of the 2000s, as well as the very recent ones exhibited in the two shows in question, lies in the process of execution, which is no longer individual but collective. In conversation with Monica Coretti at the MADRE Museum (for the Costruire comunità cycle, 2023), Mezzaqui reveals that working in groups and with groups was born as a contingent need – when her friends offered to help her speed up delivery times – but it then became a recurring, if not constant, method and an integral part of her research horizon. Mezzaqui becomes a mediator for temporary or periodic communities, who meet at the same time and place to carry out manual and repetitive tasks together (cutting out paper, threading beads) and who share in this relational context moments of everyday life, stories, thoughts, encouraging moments of meditation, silence, affection, care.
As part of the Raccogliere parole (Collecting words) exhibition in San Gimignano, Mezzaqui has chosen to organize a series of meetings open to the public – one of which is in collaboration with the artist Claudia Losi – in a specially dedicated room. There he has set up Il tavolo della poesia (The poetry table), a series of workshop sessions of “spontaneous composition” in which participants are invited to create small collages of phrases on paper, embellished with embroidery and beads, and installed in progress on the walls. In the room there are also “modified” natural materials collected during the trek from Pistoia to San Gimignano, along the Via Francigena, which Mezzaqui does in a group a few days before the inauguration and which reveal another situational and relational sharing method dear to the artist.
This is not the first time that Mezzaqui has set up “work tables”, which are held both privately and on a regular basis – in her studio or in the “permanent table” granted to her by the Municipality of Marzabotto – and in institutional and museum settings, as part of temporary exhibitions (such as Appello ai meditanti, 2014). Among the works in Raccogliere parole (Collecting Words), positioned on the stage of the former cinema, is En – Il tavolo di Plotino (En – Plotino’s Table), the material result of the work table of the same name (2017-2024) between San Gimignano and Maccastorna: a glass table that holds thousands of folded strips of paper containing the Greek words of Plotinus’ Enneads, cut out of the Italian edition by Bompiani, arranged to form a circle inscribed in a square with a central rectangular insert.
Also I quaderni di Hannah Arendt (2017-2021) from the Bologna exhibition of the same name are the result of a work table set up to transcribe the famous German philosopher’s In the Desert of Thought – Notebooks and Diaries 1950-1973. The 29 notebooks, arranged on three glassed-in, backlit tables, are the product of long collective sessions of tracing in negative on sheets of light paper, typical of legal and administrative acts, from the BEAT edition, which in a second step Mezzaqui goes over with ink and binds by hand with Bauhaus-style gray covers, with the collaboration of artisans from Marzabotto. The only visible handwriting, of impeccable precision, without errors or oversights, thus renders a choral process, behind which many hands are hidden. This modus operandi had already been used in the transcription of I quaderni di Simone Weil (2010-2016), proof of a predilection for the thought of women writers that is also evident in the works in which Mezzaqui quotes and pays homage to, among others, Marguerite Yourcenar, bell hooks or Mariangela Gualtieri – poet and friend to whom the artist also dedicates 5 books (2024), the central installation of the exhibition in San Gimignano. In the case of Hannah Arendt, the exhibition context of the Italian Women’s Library amplifies even more the desire to preserve and enhance the intellectual work, political militancy and autobiographical dimension of female voices; a desire that is further emphasized by the public event that accompanies the finissage of the exhibition, namely a performative reading of Arendt’s passages by a group of women, friends and students who follow her work closely.
If we imagine the process of creating the works mentioned, what is striking is certainly the time factor and the meticulousness of the gesture. The communities activated by Mezzaqui seem to escape the consumption and frenzy of turbo-capitalism through slow, patient, minimal acts. The systematic repetition of the same movement ends up creating a state of perpetual attention and trance, a perfect connection between action and thought that recalls a meditative and spiritual dimension that is not only Western in nature – Mezzaqui is in fact fascinated by Buddhist rituality and the executive impermanence of the mandala, a motif that she returns to several times in her research. “Meditare con le mani” (Meditating with your hands) – the title of a workshop held in Cesena in 2016, at the invitation of her friend Mariangela Gualtieri – is the apt expression Mezzaqui finds to define this collective and continuous work, aimed at searching for new forms of r-existence; therefore meditating by breaking down and tracing with the hands the words of the Other, of great thinkers; “meditating with the hands” finding “pastimes” to “carve out time”.
The author would like to thank:
Sabrina Mezzaqui, Galleria Continua and Laura Montesanti
the artist and photographer Sonia Lenzi for the Center for Documentation, Research and Women’s Initiatives in Bologna.
Essenzial webography:
Sabrina Mezzaqui
Exhibition at Galleria Continua, San Gimignano
Exhibition at Centro di Documentazione, Ricerca e Iniziativa delle Donne di Bologna
images: (cover) Sabrina Mezzaqui, «I quaderni di Hannah Arendt», 2024, exhibition view, Archivio Biblioteca del Centro di Documentazione, Ricerca e Iniziativa delle Donne di Bologna. Courtesy: CDD (Centro Documentazione Donne). Photographer: Sonia Lenzi (2) Sabrina Mezzaqui, «Raccogliere parole», 2024, exhibition view, Galleria Continua San Gimignano. Courtesy: the artist and GALLERIA CONTINUA. Photographer: Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio (3) Sabrina Mezzaqui, «Raccogliere parole/Il tavolo della poesia», 2024, large table with twenty chairs, 2 wall shelves, 7 books, variable elements. Courtesy: the artist and GALLERIA CONTINUA. Photographer: Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio
