From September 12 to October 12, 2025, the Mattatoio in Rome hosts the exhibition Spaces of resistance, curated by Benedetta Carpi De Resmini and promoted by the Department of Culture of Roma Capitale and Azienda Speciale Palaexpo in collaboration with Latitudo Art Project. Part of the commemorations of the thirtieth anniversary of the end of the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the siege of Sarajevo, and the Srebrenica genocide, the exhibition is not a historical reconstruction but a poetic and political traversal of the post-war present, an attempt to make visible what lingers after conflicts end, what survives in bodies and in territories.

The six artists involved—Simona Barzaghi, Gea Casolaro, Romina De Novellis, Šejla Kameri, Smirna Kulenovi, and Mila Pani—compose a geography that is dissonant yet coherent, where memory is not fixed in the past but continues to generate questions, tensions, and possibilities for transformation. Barzaghi’s practice, centered on walking along the Drina River, initiates a radical act of listening: the moving body becomes a narrative device, the landscape no longer a backdrop but an interlocutor. The slowness of her steps and the rhythm of her breath produce an invisible writing that weaves intimacy and history, the individual and the collective. In contrast yet in dialogue, Romina De Novellis grounds her action in a repetitive gesture, the obsessive act of cleaning a portion of space without ever being able to erase: a performance that highlights the weight of memory as an enduring wound, as a scar that resists erasure.

Šejla Kameri, a direct witness of the war, brings the urgency of a political discourse on the body as both battlefield and site of resistance: her works refuse consolation, expressing a critical tension that restores to the female body a subversive force, an act of defiance against the invisibility imposed by power. Smirna Kulenovi? introduces another dimension, that of nature as an active agent, custodian and mediator of processes of collective healing: fragile, organic elements become ritual matter, instruments through which history may be metabolized and transformed. Within this landscape of resistances, Gea Casolaro works with the image of grass as a double symbol: of life that stubbornly grows back, but also of menace, for it is in the grass that minefields lie hidden, it is among its fragile blades that fertility and death intertwine.

Her work constructs an emotional geography in which Sarajevo becomes emblematic of every city marked by war, suspended between the desire for rebirth and the awareness of fragility. Finally, Mila Pani, through the archaic gesture of burning a field tied to her family heritage, reflects on destruction as a necessary condition for transformation, on the ambivalence of fire that devours yet prepares for renewal. Together, the six voices form a fragmented chorus that restores the complexity of post-war memory: the exhibition does not seek reassuring harmonies but instead keeps open the contradiction between pain and healing, loss and possibility, roots and transformations. In this sense Spaces of resistance is not commemorative celebration but critical exercise, interrogating our present, a time marked by new wars, shifting borders, and memories that risk dissolving into the surfaces of communication.

On October 3, a symbolic day of remembrance and hospitality, the dialogue between cinema and performance through Ado Hasanovi’s documentary and Barzaghi’s performance adds another layer of density, reiterating that resistance is never merely individual but always collective, that memory is never concluded but constantly rewritten. To choose the Mattatoio as the site for this passage means situating the works within a space already laden with layers of pain and transformation, of sacrifice and regeneration. It is not a neutral container but a living organism, able to hold and refract the exhibition’s tensions.

If Spaces of resistance has a particular merit, it lies in its refusal to turn trauma into spectacle, choosing instead to present it as matter to be traversed, as an experience to be shared through aesthetic forms that do not close but open. It is a project that demonstrates how art can serve as both critical and therapeutic tool, inscribing itself into collective memory without falling into the illusion of pacification. At a time when war is not a distant recollection but a wound reopening in other places, the exhibition at the Mattatoio becomes an invitation to think of resistance as a daily practice, to imagine possible futures within and beyond the rubble.