Istituto Svizzero presents Atlas Studios, the first monographic exhibition in Italy by artist Latefa Wiersch (1982, Dortmund, based in Zürich). Specifically designed for the spaces of Villa Maraini in Rome, the exhibition evokes the studios of the same name located at the edge of the Moroccan desert and often used by international film productions to recreate imperial antiquity sets.

Wiersch’s practice engages with popular culture, cinema, television and historical imagery, filtered through her perspective as a Germany-born artist of Amazigh and Arab descent. Moving between autobiography and fiction, her work raises questions of national and cultural belonging from a post-migrant standpoint, staging history as an unstable field of projection, rehearsal and role-play. Her main body of work consists of sewn puppet figures that she iteratively re-engages and re-fashions in a plethora of figures drawn from pop culture, history or her own life.

Atlas Studios builds on Wiersch’s research on Hannibal, the Carthaginian general who notoriously attempted and failed to conquer Rome, and on the ways in which cinema has portrayed him and the history of the Roman Empire. Hannibal also refers to the 1970s housing estate in Dortmund-Dorstfeld where the artist grew up. The convergence of these stories forms the point of departure for ideally retracing Hannibal’s route across the Alps and through the enduring mythologies of ancient imperialism – allowing him, in a sense, to finally reach his destination.

The exhibition turns Villa Maraini into film backstages inspired by the Atlas Studios in Ouarzazate, Morocco, where from the 1980s onwards countless international film productions have staged their visions of antiquity, empires, and exoticism. It unfolds as a sequence of environments that evoke the apparatus of filmmaking – sets, costumes, lighting, and rehearsal spaces – while exposing the mechanisms through which history is constructed, staged and perpetuated over time.

Central to the exhibition are Wiersch’s protagonists, doll-like figures who embody hybrid, unstable identities. Neither fully animate nor inanimate, these characters bear the marks of migration, trauma and conflict. Placed within constructed sets, they oscillate between historical figures, hired actors, and exhibition visitors: as you walk through the villa’s rooms you may come across Kahina, the legendary Amazigh queen, or a worker repainting the villa’s frescoes, or Gertrude Bell with her camel loosely resembling Nicole Kidman in Queen of the Desert. Confronting the viewer’s gaze, the characters reflect back inherited narratives of power and otherness, revealing how identities are continuously produced through repetition, performance, and institutional frameworks.