Ars Memoriae

Ars Memoriae was a group exhibition of site-specific installations in the former Monte dei Pegni di Santa Rosalia, the old pawnshop inside Palazzo Branciforte in Palermo, a building restored by Gae Aulenti. Curated by Zerial Art Project, it was part of the tenth edition of the Settimana delle Culture and was promoted with Fondazione Sicilia and Sicily Art & Culture. Its title comes from Giordano Bruno's Latin treatise on the art of memory, and the show set out to give memory a form that visitors could walk through. Six artists took part: Desideria Burgio, Camilla Marinoni, Chiara Tubia, Federico Clapis, Leonardo Meoni and Andrea Guastavino.

Clapis presented Everlasting Memory, a video work conceived for the space and released as an NFT. The curators describe it as a reflection on memory as an existential knot, a point where past and future meet through a shared sense of absence, with virtual projection serving as a contemporary metaphor for timeless emotional states. The documentation shows the piece projected in the dim rooms of the pawnshop, among the tall wooden shelves that rise to the ceiling: a draped female figure, rendered like a sculpture, appears in black and white against the grain of the old structure.

The exhibition placed an NFT work by Clapis inside a historic Sicilian setting, in dialogue with archival architecture rather than with a screen-based or crypto context, and it shows how he carried the language of his sculpture into digital and projected form.

Sources

• Ars Memoriae — Zerial Art Project
• Ars Memoriae / Edoardo Dionea Cicconi ~ XYZT — Arte.it
• Zerial Art Project approda a Palermo con "Ars Memorie" — Gorizia News