Years by Open Group at Dello Scompiglio: Time, Memory, and the Echoes of War
- Redazione
- 7 days ago
- 2 min read
The Cultural Association Dello Scompiglio presents Years, an exhibition by the Ukrainian collective Open Group, curated by Angel Moya Garcia. After the success at the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024, where they represented Poland with Repeat after me II, artists Yuriy Biley, Pavlo Kovach, and Anton Varga return to Italy with a new site-specific project conceived for the spaces of the Tenuta Dello Scompiglio near Lucca.
The work emerges from the background of a decade of war. Since 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea and fueled the conflict in Donbass, Ukraine has lived through years of occupation, resistance, and devastation. The full-scale invasion launched in February 2022 has since turned into a prolonged conflict, marked by static fronts, immense losses, and fragile hopes of mediation. As of 2025, the war continues without a clear end in sight. According to UN reports, the true number of victims remains incalculable — a tragic measure of lives lost and stories erased.
Within this reality, Years transforms remembrance into presence. The installation unfolds through a constellation of video works in which projections of engraved years on tombstones expand into space, their slow rhythm of light becoming a metaphor for time, loss, and persistence. The passage of light across stone marks the flow of years, but also the fracture of human connections torn apart by war — the fragility of memory, and its stubborn refusal to fade.
The exhibition translates the devastation of conflict into a tangible, sensory experience. Numbers and statistics dissolve into a field of light and sound, where memory becomes almost corporeal. Behind each image vibrates the presence of countless lives — suspended between absence and survival, between silence and testimony.
For Open Group, Years is not only an artistic installation but an act of witnessing. Preserving what war tries to erase, the work opens a space of awareness, mourning, and resistance. It gives form to what remains unspeakable — the persistence of humanity within the ruins of history.
The Dello Scompiglio Project, created and directed by Cecilia Bertoni, combines contemporary art, landscape, and environmental sustainability in a multidisciplinary space dedicated to the dialogue between artistic practice and nature. The Tenuta hosts exhibitions, performances, residencies, and educational programs that merge art and ecology.
Founded in 2012 in Lviv, Open Group works across visual art and curatorial practice. Their work explores collective authorship, social dynamics, and the intersections between personal experience and global crises. Their projects have been shown at major institutions including the Venice Biennale, Bozar Brussels, Zachęta National Gallery, High Line New York, and Belvedere 21 Vienna, among others.
Years at Dello Scompiglio stands as a luminous meditation on time and remembrance — a space where the traces of war, rather than fading, continue to resonate.
Associazione Culturale Dello Scompiglio
Via di Vorno, 67, Vorno - Capannori
Date
15 novembre - 1 marzo 2026
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