What’s Past is Prologue | Courthouse Projects

Thursday 16 – Thursday 30 January 2025

Private View: Thursday 16 January, 6-9pm

Opening Times: Tuesday & Thursday 5-7pm | Saturday & Sunday 4-6pm

Lambeth County Court, 28 Cleaver St, London SE11 4DR, UK

FEDERICA BERETTA – What’s Past is Prologue

What’s Past is Prologue is my most intimate body of work.

Almost like in a self portrait, I used my own apartment in London as a main and recurring subject. The work it’s about the emptiness, physical as well as emotional, experienced after a loss, and an attempt to deal with the void as a survival mechanism. The negative space of anyone’s home is what allows one to actively in-habit and to shape the emptiness of the house, as well as of their own existence.

Drawing on tracing paper recalls the architecture practice, but here the focus is on filling the voids, rather than marking the structure. Working on the negative space of my apartment’s floor plant acts as an X Ray, a way to reduce the physicality of the space to the nothingness, keeping only the invisible space and discarding all the rest.

Houses allow the active action of inhabiting, providing rooms and boundaries; and in turn their dwellers see their movements, actions, thinkings and emotions shaped from them, from the available space, from the geometry of every corner.

What’s Past is Prologue is an attempt to analyze this reciprocal relation between the domestic space and the inner space, but also to come to terms with the endings. Houses are places of experiences, witnesses of events, custody of memories, safe shelters, suffocating cages. This personal reflection of the inside/outside, is a way to complete a painful process of self-discovery and healing, in strong connection with the apartment which was the set and the witness of changes and of a deep personal transformation. On an emotional as well on an artistic level, the strong use of the white acts as a purification process, a way to conclude a cycle of previous works and prepare for something new to evolve. The use of white painting is an instrument to erase and hide, rather than create and add. A patient process of overlapping allows the negative space to gently emerge on the canvas’ surface.

Forms disappear, evolve and fade covered by layers of white color, or emerge from the transparency of the paper, but only to suggest possible shapes, constantly playing with the ephemeral as a new way to interpret the world.

Federica Beretta 2024