CURA.

how we always survived is the first solo exhibition by Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz in Italy.

Boudry / Lorenz’s multidisciplinary practice encompasses sculpture, performance, choreography, music, and film installation, often combined into immersive installations that challenge the conventions of both the white cube and the black box. Conceived specifically for the spaces of Villa Maraini, how we always survived includes new commissions alongside existing works, harmonised within a timed installation that unfolds across the villa’s various rooms.

how we always survived explores the doings of sound as a language capable of shaping hope, mourning, and desire in repressive contexts. The title is taken from a sentence by activist Chelsea Manning, one of the exhibition’s protagonists, referring to the role music had for her during her time in prison. The exhibition plays on the boundary between the choice to speak out and the possibility of transforming speech into sound, blurring the lines between aesthetic and political acts.

In the works on display, voice becomes the means to let forgotten pasts resonate, echoing through the villa’s rooms and evoking other places through song. Dance functions as a programmatic tool to guide a collective movement of bodies. The architecture of the villa itself seems to move, participating in the composition with a sequence of gestures that exploit the opposition between light and darkness, sound and silence, pause and motion. The resulting grand choreography appears to pose a question: can moving side by side, in concert, simultaneously connect political disillusion and utopian aspiration?