Exhumation 1 st November 2011
Paintmarker installation on unfolded cardboard, 540 × 185 cm
Palazzo Marigliano, Naples

Architectural studies in Laurent Ajina’s youth gave rise to an obsession and curiosity for urban development; an inexhaustible source of inspiration for his art installations today. This obsession leads him to endlessly scour the city, unveiling new contours and engraving their silhouettes on his mind, meticulously searching the horizon for unassuming architectural wonders as an archaeologist searching for a lost city. He inscribes his findings with the help of a paintmarker, his artistic tool of choice.

The Institut Français Grenoble in Naples called on Ajina in 2010 for the O'CURT video festival Redvesuvio projection. The artist described his paintmarker drawings as "a psycho- geographical tale of cities." The exhibition on the terrace of Palazzo Marigliano has nothing to do with your average concept of a home, but is rather a reflection on the excavation of a makeshift shelter. Void of walls or a roof, this shelter evokes the idea of a quarry; its living space defined by the juxtaposition of simple cardboard boxes. The artist's traces of paintmarker represent the physical limitations of a living space; a cartography of all cities. Form and subject coincide in the installation. Laurent Ajina sees the cardboard as archaeological fragments in the making as they are torn and trampled. Unfolded, arranged, placed end to end, they litter the asphalt, becoming one with the ground, forming makeshift shelters, they are ingrained in reality. The scores of paintmarker evoke strata, geological crucibles, hollows, cavities, caverns. The artist utilizes the exhibition space of the terrace as an archaeological site where the roofs of adjacent buildings become a desert landscape, dead space riddled with fissures, an arid abstract environment.

Laurent Ajina juxtaposes two ineluctable and paradoxical situations of the reality of Naples. The archaeological ruins of the city emerge from their roots in earth and rise to stand next to the waste and cardboard boxes that have been fed into the bowels of the city and overtake the streets of Naples as the lava of Vesuvious once did.

KAPLAN’S PROJECT N°3 / Palazzo Marigliano / Via san biagio dei librai, 39 / 80138 Napoli Tel. +39 081 29 95 79 / kaplansproject@aol.com / NHSP@aol.com