Rome, Flora Deborah's gothic-contemporary fairy tale in her first Italian solo exhibition

Through Oct. 31, 2022, Gaggenau DesignElementi in Rome is hosting the exhibition Semi, the first solo show in Italy by French-Israeli artist Flora Deborah. Curated by Sabino Maria Frassà, it is the tale of Flora Deborah’s gothic-contemporary fable and her long journey in search of the deepest meaning of existing; a long and troubled journey, but always accompanied by the optimism to move forward. The Gaggenau DesignElementi in Rome thus becomes the setting for aperformative as well as an installationexperience. “Viewers are asked to bring and donate a stone, so they can participate in what could be defined as a choral journey of initiation, conceived by the artist for the construction of a new Tower of Babel, a place of dialogue and confrontation,” the curator explains.

The exhibition is built around images hovering between dream and reality, born from a creative process that never includes corrections, but which sees precisely in the inaccuracies or rethinks of the artistic gesture a metaphor for the ups and downs of human events: one never goes back, but goes forward bringing new matter within one’s path. Thus are born the ceramic, earth and gold works of Flora Deborah, which sublimate and synthesize the extraordinary long journey that is human existence.

From a video installation in which she excavates and assembles the earth of the kibbutz where her parents met, through casts of her own language and those of her family members, to more recent plates and tiles in which dreamlike characters pass around cups. “Flora Deborah reflects on how it is not (only) places that determine who we are, but rather the language we employ to speak and think. Can the lexicon of each of us penetrate and be the seed and fruit of the languages of those who live around us, and what are the boundaries of this familiar lexicon?” adds Frassà.

The artist describes a humanity that nurtures a new universal idiom, an Esperanto made of art, understood as a union of matter and beauty, and also involves viewers in this process through a true performative and installation experience. Indeed, anyone who visits the exhibition can be part of the artwork, leaving a stone with which to build a new Tower of Babel; a gesture that was also part of a dedicated performance at the showroom, in which participants finally savored the cast of the artist’s language, made of chocolate. “None of us know how these stones we left behind will be employed by the artist,” Sabino Maria Frassà concludes. “As in Jewish culture these stones are a symbol of respect and pietas in the face of another person’s past and existence. After visiting the exhibition we will therefore not know the ending of the story: intrigued, amazed and perhaps a little melancholy all of us spectator-actors will have the awareness of being part of something big, of another person’s life.”

Seeds is part of the Materabilia cycle, in which Gaggenau and CRAMUM tell the story of matter becoming wonder through human genius.

The exhibition is sponsored by Gaggenau, Cramum, DesignElementi.

Hours: Monday through Friday from 10:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. and 3:30 p.m. to 7 p.m.

Visits open to the public by appointment only by e-mail or telephone contact. To book a visit write to gaggenau.roma@designelementi.it or call +39 06 39743229, +39 371 1733120.

Image: ©Francesca Piovesan, Courtesy of Flora Deborah, Cramum, Gaggenau.

Rome, Flora Deborah's gothic-contemporary fairy tale in her first Italian solo exhibition

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