Cadèna de la us / [Chains of voices]

Arielle Christina Tarzia's work Cadèna de la us / [Chains of voices], which comprises sculptures, videos, and textiles, materializes within the domestic sphere and characteristically results from collective experiences. Central to her practice are themes such as family memories and their transmission across generations. In her installation whose title originates from the Bergamasque dialect, she asks herself how the family, as an institution, serves as a model for the roles we embody, the legacies we inherit from our parents and the elements that shape our identities. Her work explores home as an intimate space where the encounter, engagement, and collaboration with her parents play a crucial role. Family members gather to work with their hands (resulting in growing ceramic chains) and engage in conversations centered on forgetting and remembering unspoken aspects of leaving one home in pursuit of finding a new one. In her quest to uncover the worldviews and self-images of the previous generations in her family, she gathers oral histories, sounds, and moods, weaving them into memory archives consisting of various media. This process renders tangible not only the visual environment of the family but also the invisible realm of recollection and imagination. In doing so, she transforms post-migrant spaces of amnesia and silence into places of storytelling. The chestnut becomes a living emblem of the interconnectedness between past and future generations but also between nature, community, and tradition. Chestnut-dyed textiles in collaboration with AUF&AB, Cordula Ammann-Zuber, 2024. Multi-media installation, dimensions variable, 2024.