Now is the Time of Monsters: the exhibition that never was, Amina Berdin and Vittoria Martinotti

It’s 2020, Amina Berdin and Vittoria Martinotti are queuing at the Goldsmiths’ library cafe, discussing the next steps for their upcoming exhibition Now is the Time of Monsters at EnclaveLab, the first solo show by artist Stella Cade in London. There's still much to be done once the space is secured: applying for funding, gaining access to university facilities, developing a small public program, and finalizing the exhibition design.

With coffees in hand, they begin to tackle delicate aspects of the project. The artist’s proposed topic is deeply personal: how the human body records physical and emotional traumas. As curators, the two need to determine how to effectively engage with local communities beyond their university circle while also  considering how to include a diverse audience in the deeply personal and often isolating process of healing. Inspired by psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk's work, they recognize that a supportive community is essential for healthy recovery.

Flash forward to 2024: the show never materialized due to the pandemic.  The following conversation between Amina and Vittoria addresses how the two dealt with the exhibition’s cancellation and how this experience shaped their young curatorial aspirations.

Vittoria Martinotti: … And so here we are. Four years later, after 2020, after Covid foiled our attempt at materializing Now is the Time of Monsters, or “the exhibition that was supposed to happen, but that never was.”

Amina Berdin: That led to very different projects and also to a different kind of life, in a sense.

Yes! So much has changed – us, our interests, and how we perceive our work. That exhibition was my first personal solo project, not bound to bigger groups or collectives, something organic that came out from special chats with friends: you and Stella. It wasn’t tied to any specific direction, just free-flowing creativity, freed from constrictions. It’s unlike some of my recent, more structured shows, I’m not sure I could recreate that magic now.

After four years I became more pragmatic, and I would realize that bringing real turf into an exhibition space – with no money basically – is impractical, and I would probably think of different solutions.

My approach to research and exhibitions has evolved too. The themes of healing and care, which were central to our "non-exhibition," have deeply influenced my personal life. I now work with tools like tarot and personal growth research, which have become a second vocation and changed how I engage in dialogues with artists. Over time, I've also sought to ensure my projects have a lasting impact, focusing on areas where my work is truly needed rather than seeking out traditional gallery spaces like Enclave. This shift has led me to reassess my curatorial priorities and practices.

Indeed, our curatorial urgency has shifted, and so have our workspaces. Four years ago feels like a lifetime. I was so insecure and self-conscious about my work, about what I wanted to pursue with my research and I couldn't properly picture my practice evolving. I was still stuck in a school/institutional bubble. The pandemic's curveballs made me reflect a lot, especially in this past few weeks that we've been talking about this piece, and when I think about where I was envisioning my practice taking me, compared to now, I see that, for me, rather than being guided by pure research and time-specific contexts, the space where I'm practicing is important too. Not just in a physical sense but the meta aspect of it too. I crave spaces that breathe, that leave room for possible implementations and growth. I was really into that exhibition. I loved working with you and Stella, but my approach has totally shifted. I need to see the bigger picture before diving into a project.

I've thought about this a lot, considering how different the national context was. Today in Italy, it's challenging to realize independent projects and be an independent curator due to the lack of infrastructure and funding. One needs to be highly motivated to find spaces, people, and reasons to pursue independent projects with minimal support. The same struggle applies to artists. The major funds that support the independent scene are institutionalized, relying on museums, foundations, and established galleries. This means that to develop something independently, I now prioritize working with artists and spaces rooted in the local community.

In Italy, contemporary artistic language hasn't caught on like it has in London. Experimenting in white cubes is more viable in London because of these conditions. It's harder to find neutral spaces and people willing to engage with such projects in Italy. What has changed for me is the need to understand the underlying reasons behind my curatorial projects. The environment’s urgency becomes more important than expressing my own voice, ideas, and research,, which was something that I felt Goldsmiths was pushing a lot. When I moved back to Italy, the local context began to suggest the right topics to me, reversing the process completely… This return also required me to engage with contemporary art differently, facing the impact of our cultural heritage on current artistic practices. This has made me feel somewhat alien in my own city, a feeling I still experience in Milan.

I get that. Coming back after a while and saying, “Hey, I’m back! What do we do now?” can be awkward. Reflecting on the urgency you mentioned and your voice, I’ve noticed a big shift in my perspective on individuality and having to pursue your projects on your own, which was something that I felt as a heavy weight on my shoulder while in London and in institutionalized British contexts.

Maybe it’s because there in London, the art scene is more developed, with more funding and a better understanding of contemporary art. Milan, supposedly the hub of Italian contemporary art, feels way behind. I don’t know any independent curators our age here.  It’s too tough to sustain yourself. Sure, it’s hard everywhere, even in London, but they have more infrastructure, I believe. There are different ways of doing things: white cubes and exhibition spaces and project spaces, they exist and they're thriving. A while ago, I was chatting with a great artist/curator who's running a project-space in London, and he was telling me, “I want to have a space that can accommodate things and practices that London clearly doesn't want to accommodate, like, big sculpture, performances, things that don't really fit.” That conversation left me baffled, realizing how far behind Milan is. We lack such spaces and even big commercial spaces are having a tough time. In London it seems like there is more room for experimentation, where you can find your own voice and develop your research, build on ideas, pinpoint something peculiar that’s happening within the system, and either expand on it or completely defy it.

When I moved to Milan, it was not about finding my own voice, but really about building a community with which, together, we tried – and still are trying – to understand what we can do here. It worked somehow, as I see that it works also for other people. I see that a lot of independent work and things exist not inside commercial or institutional spaces, and rely heavily on the concept of community, whatever sort of community you can think of. That’s something vibrant here, a growing movement, and I feel it made me thrive, to rely on safe spaces and trusted people with whom I can navigate this hectic city, embark on new adventures despite the hardships. It's this weird in-between where everything must fit in strange ways, like a fucked-up Tetris. That changed my practice and how I approach new projects and I was able to fully embrace it only after I moved back to Italy. That’s of course my take on the matter, and you could say that it's absolutely not true, though I feel you're also part of this community I'm talking about.

I would say it's a niche community. After a while, you know everyone, and everyone knows you. This brings many positive aspects, like personal support, meeting artists with shared interests, and forming lasting relationships that go beyond exhibitions. In terms of independent projects, the communities are often the one suggesting venues or opportunities. They might say: "I know someone who has this abandoned house," or "I have this land in the middle of nowhere in the center of Italy. Let's do something together.” In Italy, smaller provinces are becoming culturally empty as people flock to major cities like Milan, Turin, and Rome for opportunities. But now there's a trend of relocation, similar to what I witnessed in London after Brexit when my international community began to disperse. We are still in touch, but long-term projects became difficult as everyone returned to their home countries, feeling the urgency to work locally. Many of my European classmates struggled to envision a future in London, and I see a similar urgency in Italy now, with people focusing on their home territories.  London surely opened my eyes to aspects of my own culture I hadn't considered before. Discovering incredible Italian female writers like Silvia Federici, Rosi Braidotti, and Carla Lonzi while in London was a revelation, as it was shocking realizing that I didn't know a lot about my own country. I had to become a nomadic subject, as Rosi Braidotti suggests, to understand the blind spots in my country.

Yeah, she really did have our fate mapped out if you think about it [laughs]!  Same as you, one of the things that I took back with me from London, considering that my research has always relied heavily on feminist studies and theory, is this immense tradition of sensational Italian women that I discovered in England as they were more appreciated abroad than at home. Although I wasn’t even fully aware at the time, I started building on something that was leading me back to my roots and to my culture. A lot of my reasoning and my research too has changed so much because I encountered these figures that were linked to our land and our cities. Like Carla Lonzi in Milan, or Natalia Ginsburg – who was more famous in London than in Italy back then. It's something that really made me question how my upbringing and my roots were part of a process of fundamental rediscovery of the more practical and actual idea of care and wellbeing. I thought about how I had to incorporate these elements in my persona and in my private life as well, to have them translated properly into my practice and my personal research. The community I was seeking, and that I have found here, would make me feel more at ease, more safe, would enable me to trust my instinct and support my voice.

I met some really incredible people in London, and I do believe that it, as you said, gives a lot of opportunities. Staying there for a while definitely opened up my mind. Though, to think that I went back home because of a global pandemic, as a mistake in a way, an unforeseen event that wasn’t supposed to happen, and it turned into a revelation, is pretty wild to me. I realized that I do work way better here. I feel better, I feel like my research has definitely benefited from this environment change.

It's fascinating that the idea behind Now is the Time of Monsters was connected in a way to the lack of community. It addressed how traumatic experiences are often something communities struggle to confront, leaving individuals alone in their healing process. Even now, I think the idea we were proposing – creating a safe healing space for small, temporary communities – highlights the necessity of community for a strong curatorial practice. It underscores a sense of urgency and a clearer vision of where to situate our work. In Italy, the lack of infrastructure forces people to rely more on each other, though experiences may vary, obviously. I must say though, that sharing the knowledge was something I learned from the artistic scene in London, while here in Italy these pools of thoughts still need to be expanded more. Sometimes I find myself in this sort of no man’s land, where I don’t belong completely to Milan, don’t belong to the UK culture anymore, and I can’t even rely on it in terms of jobs and creative networks. I believe from these clashes of perspective and cultures, I started to split my practice in two, one became more magical and focused on helping people to heal and understand their unprocessed emotions, while the other focused on developing communities through territory, through the physical space.

I feel that in a way, this exhibition, and the year that followed, our year of Magical Thinking, to quote Joan Didion, during which we mourned a project we believed in with our whole hearts and had to reflect on what we wanted to pursue when life would hit play and resume, was such an intense and revealing process. It made me at least, fully translate these ideas we were exploring within Now is the Time of Monsters and pivot them towards a more tailor-made approach that suited me personally. It still makes me very sad to think that this exhibition never happened because I can see, as you said, that these were, unconsciously, our baby steps into the core and further developments of our practices… And now that I think about it, it would be so much fun to hear what Stella has to say as well, as she’s the one that has probably changed her life around the most out of the three of us.

She has a fantastic family now!

Yes, she does indeed! It would be so interesting to hear what she has to say about this as well. As at the time, we were developing this project we had in mind, but I feel like we were almost a bit clueless, our first step into curation, as students. Now I would work in a completely different way. I wouldn’t manage that workload the way we did, even though it was a lot of fun. As I said, in the beginning it was really freeing for me to work in such a careless way, and I think that these failed experiences, as it was also my overall experience in London in a way, started from this exhibition. Looking back, it was kind of a blessing in disguise, it made me put things into perspective. I allowed myself to believe a bit more in what I was doing and to take the time to reroute myself here, and I feel the roots I’ve planted slowly started blossoming and led to so many things that I'm very proud of and happy about.

Yes, but personally I'm also happy to look back at our project, “foiled” project if you want, and see that the seeds underneath were already in the right place. I can see a sort of consistency behind our research. Though coming back to Italy gave a different light to those aspects and they materialized in a completely different outcome, that is the right outcome for me, but I couldn't see it back there in London.

If you look back you can tell that a little path was already forming for the both of us, as you said, that project wasn’t that distant from our practice, it just developed through the years. There was definitely something that is still there, it simply took a different direction. I guess it happens: you grow, you learn, you meet new people, you move on and experience new environments, that’s the terrific experience of living.

Amina Berdin (b. 1996) is an Italian independent curator and researcher. She holds an MFA in Curating from Goldsmiths, University of London. In 2022, she attended CAMPO, a course on curatorial practices organized by Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, and later worked as a curatorial assistant at the Pirelli HangarBicocca foundation. Her projects explore the potential of Italian provinces and strategies to culturally reactivate these territories. Her work also delves into the generative and ritualistic aspects of magic in the creation of new mythologies, examining the relationship between magical activities and speculative outcomes. She is the co-founder of Mares, a residency that supports emerging practices and aims to regenerate a former convent in Alessandria. Alongside her art projects, she studies and applies evolutionary tarology, using tarot cards as a tool for inner investigation. Her article on the representation of the Sun in the history of tarot was recently published by TBD Ultramagazine.

Vittoria Martinotti (b. 1998) is a curator and writer based in Milan. With her work she focuses on the re-semantification of the English and Italian non-inclusive dialectics by aiming to foster a femme-serving language, shaped and pushed forward by her icons and all the vere baddies out there.