[Translation from the Press Kit in the German]

In collaboration with the Antiquities Collection at the Kunsthalle in Kiel, students from the Free Art and Ceramics department of the Muthesius Art School in Kiel are showcasing their artistic works. The artists in this exhibition are all participants of a research trip to Rome, which has inspired them in unique ways. The abundance of history, buildings, and artworks in this ancient city has fascinated and influenced each of them in their own way. In their individual works, they engage with the impressions and experiences of this trip and bring their personal perspectives into their artistic creations. The works show a strong connection to the aesthetics and materiality of Rome. Some artists reflect on their own experiences and encounters in the city, while others engage with historical places and structures, questioning and reinterpreting them. Themes such as space, transience, eternity, instability, and impermanence can be found in the different works.

[Santiago Insignares’s Project Statement]

My interest in the ruins of old civilizations goes back to my teenage years in Colombia when I attended an Italian school and learned about the classical aesthetic cannon while being too far away from Italy to experience Greek or Roman architecture firsthand. This feeling of longing for the inaccessible eventually pushed me to move to Rome. Living, loving, fucking, creating, growing, eating, partying, tripping, raving, mourning, playing, dancing, sleeping, crying, all while stepping on very old stones. And with every experience, yet another ruin would leave its mark on my memory, becoming another building block to add to the construction of my identity. As if in a way, by living a portion of my life among old rocks and old bricks I made them my old rocks, my old bricks, my ruins.

Nostalgic memories of my time in the eternal city and my first psychedelic macro dose experience within archeological sites led to the production of a series of sculptures, photographs, and video performances titled “Ego Dissolution” and my most recent work “Ruin Complex #1”. In between these two projects came an art commission, requesting me to make a precise ceramic architectural model of a temple made of old rocks I had never stepped on- the “Vesta Temple in Tivoli”. Making a replica of a ruin using only internet-sourced images such as Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s drawings and Antonio Chichi’s crock model’s photographs was somehow contradictory to the process of recreating ruins while trying to remember altered states of consciousness.

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These three projects were shown together with works by Regine Bruhn, Annette Herbers, Nadine Kles, and Yigyeom Sun in the temporary group exhibition ALTE FELSEN NICHTS NEUES at the Antikensammlung of the Kunsthalle in Kiel, Germany. The five artists installed the work in response to the museum's collection of plaster and bronze replicas of Greek and Roman sculptures.