CURA.

For her first solo exhibition in Milan, SAGG Napoli turns to the subject of addiction, following several years of working with archery as both a physical discipline and a conceptual practice. Since 2020, the artist has explored archery not only as a sport but also as a framework for thinking about focus, endurance, and the confrontation between body and mind. In this new body of work, SAGG Napoli extends that inquiry into the terrain of memory, pain, and relapse — mapping how personal struggle can be transformed into a language of resilience and attention.

I’ve been struggling with memory, so I write everything down. I take pictures of almost everything. It’s become a discipline: the discipline of contradiction, or maybe the discipline of working on oneself through contradiction. I had to work on addiction. I had to learn which addictions I could live with, and which I had to cut out. It’s an ongoing process. Sometimes I just sit and watch myself being a version I’m not proud of. But eventually I tackle it. Because the truth is: we do have the strength to work on ourselves. Sometimes it’s about gathering energy. Sometimes it’s about gathering knowledge. Sometimes it’s about leaning on a supportive system. Sometimes it’s about accepting relapse. And sometimes it’s about admitting that we don’t yet have the right tools.

It’s very human — once you’ve reached a stage where you feel good — to want to believe you’ve “arrived,” that the work is finished. But I don’t even wish it were like that. There’s nothing more humbling than knowing you’ll never fully get there, that maintenance itself is a kind of work, ongoing and active.

The good news: it does get easier. Humans are incredibly adaptable — if we want to be. One thing I still can’t get used to, though, is pain. For me, pain has always been a catalyst. Part of it is my personality: I refuse to believe things won’t change if you put in the work. And sport made that truth visible — not just for me, but for others too.

How long should things last, really?
Where I’m from, there’s a way of putting things together. It’s not building — it’s assembling. An assembling that respects time. I used to complain about how long everything took. But now I see it differently. People are losing patience, and this comes from someone who only learned patience recently, through sport. But this is not about sport. It’s about an innate patience I believe my people have. A way of adjusting, of finding in-between spaces. Things shift from provisional to lasting. I see it especially in the countryside: nothing feels generic. Everything feels personal — someone’s choice, someone’s solution, a thought made material. And it moves me. It’s a kind of provisional architecture — not just buildings, but everything: how you arrange the space around a house, sometimes the house itself.
It’s not about replacing.
Not about consuming.
It’s about finding permanent solutions, assembled carefully, patiently, until they last.