Istituto Svizzero presents Story Line (2021), a site-specific installation by artist Latifa Echakhch that will be hosted in the garden of Villa Maraini.
The art piece was inaugurated on the occasion of September Calling, the evening of presentation of 2021/2022 Fellows.

Latifa Echakhch’s installation Story Line evokes memories, perhaps even a sort of nostalgia. Made out of conventional metal structures used in the construction of concert stages, it tells of a night of debauchery: we think back to the open-air concerts of our youth, all-night dances at festivals with few hours of sleep in a cheap tent on a damp ground. Not by chance, the inauguration of the work coincided with the autumn concert that takes place every September in the garden of Istituto Svizzero in Rome. In the fall of 2021, Latifa Echakhch’s work takes on an additional connotation: the months of the pandemic were (and are) accompanied by a thoroughly nostalgic reminiscence of those nights with music, with dancing and sweating bodies. The hope that soon this will be possible again is great.

Latifa Echakhch (b. in 1974 in El Khnansa, Morocco, lives and works in Switzerland) often introduces associations with ‘cultural mementos’ that reveal a complicated relationship, where symbolic valency is subtracted, its absence suggesting an entirely new meaning and presence. Echakhch re-imagines and re-evaluates found objects and defamiliarizes the vernacular, questioning the meaning embedded in these and, in general, our own relationship and preconceptions towards such objects. Only when supposedly known objects have been emptied of their original meaning they can be read in many ways. Referencing and appropriating the archetypes, ideologies of modernism and beyond, she reflects on the often-prejudiced perception of national and religious identities in works that are both poetic and conceptual, and questions the semantics of cultural paradigms, providing instead what the artist calls “poetic transfiguration”.
Latifa Echakhch will represent Switzerland in the upcoming Venice Biennale 2022; her work has been exhibited internationally in several solo exhibitions. She won the Zurich Art Price (2014) and the Prix Marcel Duchamp (2013).