O-Platz, Interstitial Identities (2014-2019)
Installation sculpture composed of eight glass spheres and metal support.

Materials: silk-screened glass, iron, inclusions in zircar, electric engines, theatrical spotlights
Dimensions: the installation is modular and the size varies depending on the available space. Each sphere has a diameter of 23-25 cm

Claudia Virginia Vitari
O-Platz. Interstitial Identities
Text by Roberto Mastroianni


The "O-Platz. Interstitial Identity" by Claudia Virginia Vitari represents the most recent stage of her artistic and theoretical research, now ten years in process, focused on the relationship between identity, narratives of inclusion / exclusion, "total institutions", regulation of bodies and production of humanity and inhumanity. This artistic experimentation began with the cycles "Melancholie" (2002) and "Percorso Galera" (2007-2009), realized beginning with experiences in the psychiatric hospital of Halle an der Saale in Germany and Lorusso e Cutugno penitentiary in Turin, Italy. It later continued with the project "The Invisible Cities" (2009-2012), inspired by the non-institutional experience of Radio Nikosia in Barcelona. The process ​​finds a new and compelling manifestation in this new sculptural-installation cycle. 

Beginning with the Berlin experience of Oranienplatz (O-Platz), Vitari’s work arises from the participatory observation of life and protests by a group of asylum seeking persons, mainly from African countries, but also from Pakistan, Iran, and Afghanistan, who gave life to a permanent garrison that for months coordinated demonstrations, beginning with the occupation of the Berlin square. With a work of observation and graphic documentation, the artist has collected information, portraits and stories of the people, which converge in this exhibition.

"O-Platz. Interstitial identities" is a dynamic installation in metal and glass. The eight glass spheres are screen-printed and processed using the "roll-up" technique; the metal joints of the tripods metaphorically allude both to an experimental structure and to the neuronal path of social and relational synapses. The biographies of asylum-seeking people, impressed in the spheres, react with each other through the metal connections, symbolic of constrictive social relations dictated by the bureaucracy of the host country. The conditioning imposed by forced migration and arrival in the destination country forge the identities of individuals, as if they were subjected to a kind of "social experiment".

The installation thus forms a representation of the space and relationships that emerge in the existential interstitial situation typical of the condition of migrant persons, who live in a suspended dimension between their place of origin and an undefined arrival space, merging past experiences (country of origin and culture), present (Europe) and future (expectations and dreams).

There is a profound awareness of the anthropological value of institutions and social relations in Claudia Virginia Vitari’s work. The artist "The artist is conscious of how,  "shapeing human existence" always responds to dynamics of regulation, and to institutional, communicative, and symbolic practices, which Foucault would define as the "microphysics of power". These dynamics become evident in the processes of marginalization, manifested by the experiences of imprisonment, medicalization, and management of migrant people.


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