Theo Drebbel

Theo Drebbel was born under a false name in 1990 in Naples. For years her interests have revolved around one single purpose: the development of an art of oblivion. To do this, she has created a material language which allows her to re-territorialise the memory and the past by reshuffling its outcrops.

In the last two decades she has marked the lines of the same ellipse with several foci, through the succession of homogeneous series. The extreme phases of her production are the “Dioramas” and the “Processions”, opposite points of the same arch.

If by 'Diorama' one would mean the representation in scale of an existing landscape, in those that Drebbel builds, the referent is present but abstract. Dioramas as landscapes of memory, therefore, made up of mother scenes, unsustainable memories for joy or pain, this doesn’t matter. What counts is to leave the memory free of burdens, to be reconjuncted with the fluidity of the present time in its flow. Everything is translated into a position, hieroglyphs whose legend resides in the color, in the materials.

With the series "Processions", what looks like the beginning of a military march, a strategical advancement, reveals itself also and especially as a liturgical rite, with the faithfuls lined up, at a measured pace, in what would recall a street or the entrance of a temple. The “Processions” do also evoke the act of proceeding, of originating from a place: a metaphysical development from the One to the Multiple; any form of unitary collective movement of a Whole towards a Point.

In the “Processions”, a complex story resounds, the line of an itinerary which leaves its start and end out of the picture to concentrate on the pure development of the plot, on the “proceeding” itself.

If with the “Dioramas” the born of a vocabulary arose to fix the images of memory in a scene, with the Processions semantics, the desire is to nominate the nameless, to give shape to the breathless stirring of life, waiting for the unthinkable, the end…A taut string and ultimate mystery, which Drebbel pays homage to with gifts, with questions as if the work could be an oracle, with her own language, made up of concrete signs, of object enigmas.