From 20 June to 14 September 2025, Momart Gallery hosts CTRL Z, a solo exhibition by Michele Giangrande curated by Giuliana Schiavone and held under the patronage of the Municipality of Matera.
The project emerges from an ethno-visual research developed within the territory of Matera, moving through traditional bakeries, artisan workshops, and oral archives. It unfolds as an exhibition device that interlaces memory, language, and sculptural gesture. At the heart of the path lies a reflection on erasure and permanence: in an era dominated by the logic of reversibility and control, CTRL Z asserts itself as both a poetic and political act. When the mark ceases to be code and becomes incision – an imprint cut into the living substance of bread, food and symbol – the device implodes. Erasure turns into testimony; the irreversible speaks.
Through an entirely carved alphabet composed of twenty-six glyphs and engraved signs, the artist expands the initials once found on ancient bread stamps into an original and contemporary semantic field. These objects, formerly domestic tools, become sculptural and communicative matrices, capable of translating communal memory into a critical language for the present. Alongside these works, the exhibition presents a series of ceramic bread-sculptures, created from high-fidelity casts of traditional Matera loaves. These pieces retain the appearance of daily nourishment but subvert its function, inscribing on their surfaces collectively sourced words and thoughts drawn from poetic, literary, and philosophical texts. The contrast between their original fragility and ceramic fixation intensifies the dialectic between consumption and survival, sustenance and memory. Bread and clay – both malleable, both subject to firing – share the necessity of transformation, of a passage toward form, where matter, traversed by gesture and fire, becomes artwork.
On the opening night, an engraved bread will become the focus of a participatory performance, inviting the public to partake of the work. The act itself triggers a reflection on the symbolic and political role of nourishment as a shared, foundational, and relational practice. The exhibition is further enriched by a series of photographic images that document the ephemeral existence of the real breads – engraved with stamps and presented in the gallery as suspended traces between action, consumption, and remembrance.
The scope of the project is further extended through a site-specific intervention conceived as a work of public art: a luminous sign traverses the urban space and is projected onto the Sassi of Matera as a visual marker – archetypal and reactivated. Visible from several points in the city, the installation inscribes itself into the rocky landscape, offering a new layer of meaning and activating a sensitive, relational connection with the territory. A perceptual interface and a visual echo, it inhabits the urban night as a trace of a memory in tension – questioning reversibility, permanence, and the threshold between gesture and disappearance. CTRL Z becomes an urban and spiritual threshold, a liminal space between what might still be recovered and what, even if lost, demands to be remembered.