Liberami, voglio tornare a casa
Liberami, voglio tornare a casa unfolds as a meditation on what remains when the place of origin can no longer be reached except through memory.
In Veronica Botticelli’s work, the home is never merely a domestic space. It is an inner construction, made of traces, survivals and displaced presences. The objects, images and fragments that move through her practice do not reconstruct the past; they reveal its persistence, its instability and, at times, its impossible consolation.
The title — Free me, I want to go home — holds together the desire to return and the awareness of loss. To return does not mean recovering what once was intact, but measuring what time has transformed. Childhood, family, ordinary gestures and beloved places become the materials of a mental space in which the intimate acquires a universal resonance.
In this exhibition, the image is not simply looked at: it haunts, settles, resurfaces. It brings forth a memory that never fully gives itself, yet continues to inhabit forms. Between appearance and disappearance, Veronica Botticelli questions the ways in which memories survive the people, houses and objects that once carried them.
The presence of Rachida Brakni, invited to read excerpts from Kaddour, extends the exhibition’s resonance around filiation, absence and return. Liberami, voglio tornare a casa thus becomes an interior home: not a place recovered, but a place memory continues to seek.
© Text : Yasmine Azzi Kohlhepp I AYN
Veronica Botticelli develops a pictorial and installation-based practice centred on matter, memory and temporality. Her work proceeds through layers, superimpositions and resurgences, allowing images to emerge as palimpsests in which presence and absence remain inseparable. Presented on several international art scenes, notably in Paris and New York, she has also been distinguished by a number of prizes and selections, including the Premio Giovani of the Accademia Nazionale di San Luca.
