Marta Roberti | Così, distanti, ci veniamo incontro. Geografie di prossimità | Athens

z2o Sara Zanin is pleased to announce the participation of Marta Roberti in Così, distanti, ci veniamo incontro. Geografie di prossimità, curated by Leonardo Regano.

 

On the occasion of the 22nd edition of the Giornata del Contemporaneo, promoted by AMACI – Association of Italian Contemporary Art Museums, the Italian Cultural Institute in Athens presents Così, distanti, ci veniamo incontro. Geografie di prossimità, an exhibition curated by Leonardo Regano that brings together Italian and Greek artists in a project devoted to the cultural relations between the two countries through the practices of contemporary art.

The title takes up the closing line of The Girl from Athens by Vittorio Sereni. The poem stems from the poet’s recollection of a young Greek woman he once met and entrusts memory with the task of keeping that encounter alive beyond time and distance. In Sereni’s work, Greece does not appear as an idealised place of myth or antiquity, but as the concrete setting of a human relationship that continues to exist through memory. This image provides the starting point for the exhibition’s perspective, in which the two countries are not viewed as separate realities or as reflections of a shared past, but as cultures that continue to recognise one another through the exchanges, experiences and practices of the present.

The exhibition, hosted in the spaces of the Italian Cultural Institute in Athens, brings together Italian and Greek artists from different generations, many of whom have lived, studied or worked in both cultural contexts. Their works convey the complexity of this ongoing dialogue, rooted in direct experience and observed from different perspectives, in which memory, landscape, material culture, travel and mobility become tools for rereading a shared history.

 

Marta Roberti’s practice develops at the intersection of myth, nature and the human figure. Her works do not recover antiquity as an iconographic repertoire, but reactivate its original function, turning myth into a tool still capable of questioning the present. Human figures, animals and hybrid creatures belong to the same symbolic universe, in which the boundaries between the human, the animal and the divine remain deliberately permeable.

The works on paper presented in the exhibition establish a dialogue with the tradition of Attic red-figure pottery. The figures emerge from the dark surface with the force of apparitions, evoking the visual construction of ancient vases without turning it into a direct quotation. The reference to the classical world is not archaeological in nature, but instead restores to myth its character as a living language, capable of traversing time and continually renewing its meaning.

Within this continuity between past and present, Greece does not appear as an origin to be celebrated, but as an imaginary that remains active, continuing to generate images and new possibilities for storytelling.

 

2 October 2026