Unfolding Desire
A project by AiR Trieste in partnership with La Collina Social Cooperative, Trieste Contemporanea, and Griffin Art Projects
Curators: Francesca Lazzarini and Elham Puriya Mehr
Artists: Ofri Cnaani and Evann Siebens
In collaboration with: Escuchame and Collettivo Marte
Exhibition at Trieste Contemporanea
May 30 – June 20, 2025
Opening: Friday, May 30, at 18:30
Followed by Performing the Unpredictable, a performance by Evann Siebens with Samuel Codarin and Pavel Berdon, at 19:00
Curatorial tour and artist talk by Ofri Cnaani:
Thursday, June 5, at 18:30 Via del Monte 2/1, Trieste
Trieste, May 2025 – Unfolding Desire is a research project that stems from the encounter between artistic practices, archive theory, memory, and shared experiences to imagine possible futures in a time marked by the re-emergence of authoritarian impulses and normalising logics. Curated by Francesca Lazzarini and Elham Puriya Mehr, the project is promoted by AiR Trieste in partnership with La Collina Cooperativa Sociale, Trieste Contemporanea, and Griffin Art Projects, and focuses on San Giovanni Park, a symbolic place of the psychiatric revolution initiated by Franco Basaglia.
Through the works of Ofri Cnaani and Evann Siebens, realized thanks to a collaboration with workers and users, members of Radio Fragola’s programme Escuchame and the Marte Collective, Unfolding Desire explores San Giovanni Park not only as a custodian of memory, but as a living, affective and sensorial place where dormant desires can be reactivated and transformed into collective practices of care, knowledge production, and resistance. Starting from the precious material kept in Oltre il Giardino, the Documentation Centre (CDD) of the former Psychiatric Hospital, the project questions the possibility of imagining ‘other futures’ starting from a past marked by the struggle for deinstitutionalisation and emancipation.
Cnaani’s research focuses on the process of digitising the CDD materials as a political and relational gesture, challenging traditional archival extractive and classificatory logics to propose a mode of care informed by proximity and the ethics of closeness. Based on a workshop held with Escuchame and Marte Collective, her works question the neutrality of archival technologies, proposing instead a situated and participatory practice.
Through photographic collages and performances, Evann Siebens evokes the uncanny, transforming its monstrous connotations from a site of stigma into a liminal presence that disrupts order and reawakens forbidden desires. Her layered images, charged with movement and compressed temporalities, invite emotional and embodied readings of the archive, resisting any normative fixation on the past. Here, too, the works emerge from a close engagement with the materials of Oltre il Giardino and the people who animate it on a daily basis.
The works of the two artists are on view in an exhibition co-produced and hosted by Trieste Contemporanea, open from May 30 to June 20, 2025. On the occasion of the opening, Performing the Unpredictable by Evann Siebens took place, a performance conceived by the Canadian artist during the residency and in collaboration with Escuchame, featuring the sonic participation of Samuel Codarin and Pavel Berdon, members of the historic Radio Fragola program. On June 5, curators Francesca Lazzarini and Elham Puriya Mehr will lead a guided tour of the exhibition, featuring an online talk with artist Ofri Cnaani.
Through workshops, artist residencies, performances, convivial and exhibition-based events, Unfolding Desire proposes a model for activating the site’s archival material as a generative and unpredictable space, one where memory is never concluded but continuously renegotiated through bodies, affects, and relationships. In a present where desire risks being captured and neutralized, the project invites us to reopen the margins of possibility, nurturing new forms of life in common.
The project’s team will participate in The Trieste Model event organized by the Mental Health Social Justice Network, taking place at Birkbeck University in London on June 14. Unfolding Desire will also be presented at Griffin Art Projects in Vancouver in fall 2025.
Biographies:
Ofri Cnaani is an artist and researcher working across performance and media. She creates artworks and writes about data and coloniality in cultural institutions, somatic knowledge in the age of networked spatiality, and performance as a model for developing critical technology. Cnaani is a visiting scholar at the Institute of Visual Culture, TU Wien, Austria, and a research fellow at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) at the University of Amsterdam. Her work has been presented at Tate Britain, UK; the Venice Architecture Biennale; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC; PS1/MoMA, NYC; Inhotim Institute, Brazil; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (MAC), Chile; the Israel Museum; Tel Aviv Museum of Art; Amos Rex Museum, Helsinki; Kiasma Museum, Helsinki; BMW Guggenheim Lab, NYC; the Fisher Museum of Art, L.A.; Twister, Network of Lombardy Contemporary Art Museums, Italy; the Moscow Biennial; The Kitchen, NYC; Bronx Museum of the Arts, NYC; Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, among others. Since 2021, Cnaani has co-organised Choreographic Devices, a three-day choreographic symposium at ICA, London.
Escuchame is a radio program produced by Inglobante Universale (a leading company in the production of symbolic matrices), on air since the summer of 2000 every Friday at 5:35 PM on Radio Fragola, thanks to the support of La Collina. Conceived and hosted by the Unknown Proprietor (formerly Anuro Gauna – Guillermo Giampietro) and Margherita Antivulgaris (Lara Baracetti), it is the result of an encounter between knowledge, madness, and voices in the boundless ether. Dreams, poetry, science, and politics weave together in the discursive flows of a wayward group of free thinkers: the artist of the imaginary Diego Porporati, the philosopher and self-made entrepreneur Raffaello Ciprio (Giovanni Paronuzzi), the actor and performer Pavel Berdon, the opinionists Emidio Castagna and Robert Parovel, the dancer and opinionist Renato Porporati, the mathematician Ferdinando, the commentator Emperor Massimo (alias Mad Max), the expert in cosmos, matter, and electricity Mr. Frank (Franco Tonut), the music expert Intercamalemelont (Samuel Codarin), the meteorologist Alessandro Parentin, the actress Edda Gaber (Monica Perozzi) and many others over the years. In Escuchame, voices intertwine in smoldering clusters of sonic matter, where meanings detach from objects in the mad certainty of eloquence, without ever quite reaching their destination.
Francesca Lazzarini is a visual art curator and researcher. She is currently a PhD candidate in Curatorial Knowledge/Advanced Practices at the Department of Visual Cultures of Goldsmiths, London. Her research looks at post-photography as an open and dynamic space in which to articulate new ways of relating with and through images. She worked for Fondazione Fotografia Modena and the Scuola di Alta Formazione from their inception until 2013. She then embarked on a freelance career, curating exhibitions and projects in collaboration with private, public and independent organisations including: SixtyEight Art Institute, Copenhagen; FMAV, Modena; Kunsthaus, Graz; Škuc Gallery, Ljubljana; IC-CD, Rome; Galleria Kortil, Rijeka; NABA, Milan; Fondazione Francesco Fabbri, Treviso; SpazioGamma, Milan; BACO, Bergamo. Her curatorial practice favours long-term projects, based on research, collaboration and experimentation. Among them: POIUYT (2017 – ), Neuro-Revolution (2019-2020), Talking (about ) Images (2018-2019), Stories from the Edges (2015-2016). She directs the artist residency program AiR Trieste, which she founded in 2016.
Marte Collective is a creative group composed of workers, artists and frequenters of the Parco di San Giovanni that carries on the work started in the previous decades by the Laboratorio P. Born in 1983, at the time of the dismantling of the psychiatric hospital of Trieste, from the desire and collaboration between artists, health personnel and users around the Pavilion P, the homonymous Laboratory has been a point of encounter between art and culture and the struggles for mental health and rights. In the wake of this experience, the Collective Marte offers itself as a community place of production, growth, hospitality, and entertainment open to the city, developing projects, exhibitions and creative practices to overcome stigmas and prejudices and activate new cultural, educational and productive horizons.
Elham Puriya Mehr is an artist, curator and scholar based in Vancouver, BC. She holds a BA and MA from Tehran University of Art, a PhD in Art Research from Alzahra University, and completed her Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Advanced Practice at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research explores the potentialities of social spaces in alternative forms of learning and knowledge-making that generate through the possibilities offered by events. Over the past eighteen years, Puriya Mehr has worked internationally as an educator, curator, and writer, delivering lectures at conferences, symposiums, and public talks across a wide range of global contexts. Among her curatorial activities, she delivered a lecture at the National Museum of Iran (Tehran, 2025), served as the Artistic Director of the international symposium Contact Zone (Tehran, 2024), led the curatorial team for Live Assembly: Repair and Care (Live Biennale, Vancouver, 2021), co-curated the exhibition Beyond History at Framer Framed, Amsterdam (2015), curated the project Club 29 at Ag Experiment (Tehran, 2018), and curated The Fourth Annual Sanandaj (Kurdistan, Iran, 2013). Her ongoing research project, The Third Space: The Affective Atmosphere of Coffeehouses, has been presented internationally in London, Tehran, Vancouver, Trieste, Amsterdam, Istanbul, and Derry. Puriya Mehr is also the co-director of Empty Space Studio, a nomadic, non-profit platform based in Tehran, London, and Vancouver.
Evann Siebens makes media, performance and photos with movement. Her lens-based practice negotiates the human body as an archival site and the politics of the female gaze. She danced with the National Ballet of Canada, the Bonn Ballett, Kunst-Stoff and Danzaisa before studying film production at New York University. She worked as a dance cinematographer in New York City for many years and shot dancers such as Mikhail Baryshnikov, Bill T. Jones and Lucinda Childs. Recent exhibitions include: Cloud Seven, (Brussels, 2024), PET Projects (Athens, 2022), Vancouver Art Gallery Offsite (Vancouver, 2021), MACBA (Barcelona, 2021), Kunstinstituut Melly (Rotterdam, 2020), Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts (Moscow, 2020) and Belkin Gallery (Vancouver, 2019). Siebens’s documentary work previously screened at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC and was broadcast on PBS. Her work from A Performance Affair in Brussels, Belgium was featured on the front page of the International New York Times in 2019. She will be releasing the book project Pedestrian Protest published by the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2025. Represented by Wil Aballe, she is now based in Vancouver, Canada on the ancestral and unceded territories of the Coast Salish people – xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh).
Performers biographies:
Samuel Codarin, alias Intercamalemelont, is a sound artist, multi-instrumentalist musician, and independent sound researcher, active between experimental practices, spirituality, and multimedia production. His trajectory begins within various musical groups and collectives and then evolves into an autonomous path with the Intercamalemelont project, a constantly changing one-man-band in which electronic music and acoustic instrumentation meet to generate hybrid, stratified, and sensorial sound environments. His interest in sound matter as a vehicle for transformation leads him to study Nada Yoga, music therapy, and harmonic singing with Riccardo Misto (a student of the master Vemu Mukunda), and to deepen his knowledge of harmonic singing with the pioneer David Hykes with whom he is still continuing a training path. Sound thus becomes for him a meditative practice, a ritual space, and a tool for deep listening. He was the author of the program Mek Des Kom on Radio Fragola and collaborates with the format Escuchame by Inglobante Universale, both in its radio version and in its cinematic declinations curated by Guillermo Giampietro, in which his sound research meets narration, territory, and audiovisual imagery. He is a member of the M.A.V. (Movement for Vaporized Art). His work moves in an open field between art, sound and meditation, in a constant tension towards the invisible and the vibrant.
Pavel Berdon is an artist based in Trieste (Trst), Italy. As a member of the Slovenian minority, he has been active for many years in the fields of theatre and cinema. His video works, such as Iliad Ghosts, Prince of Persia Classic, and Magnifier TV, have been shown in the context of the Venice Biennale. Berdon is a member of the Collettivo Marte and co-host of Escuchame, a radio program on Radio Fragola with Guillermo Giampietro and Lara Baracetti. Recently, through Escuchame, he co-produced a film that was screened at the Kino Otok Festival, as well as in Buenos Aires and Rosario, in the context of Argentina’s deinstitutionalization movement. In 2023, Berdon realized Communism Robotic, a vision by Guillermo Giampietro, which was performed at the Academy of Arts in Zagreb and in Hungary during the period of the Orban regime. The performance was dedicated to Ilaria Salis.
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