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STUDIO STEFANIA MISCETTI is delighted to present a solo exhibition by Silvia Giambrone, dillo con i fiori (say it with flowers). The exhibition comprises the video installation august 6th, mon amour (2015), taken from the never before seen piece dillo con i fiori (say it with flowers, 2016) and an original performance to be presented at the exhibition’s closing night. Winner of the 2016 Optima SmartUp Prize, the video installation, august 6th, mon amour is borne out of the artist’s experience of interviewing a man and woman who survived the nuclear bomb blast in Hiroshima, and whom she met while travelling in Japan in 2013.

For the Hibakushas who survived the nuclear holocaust, the ordeal has never stopped bursting in on their lives; although they survived, their existence has remained caught in the moment of the blast. As witnesses they were forced to conceal the fact that they were in Hiroshima prior to and after the bombardment, for fear of being rejected by a society which marginalised those who were potentially radioactive, and because of the constant risk of falling ill or bringing sick children into the world as a result of the radiation to which they had been exposed.

Therein why Silvia Giambrone chose to work on the image of the clock found after the explosion and currently on show at the Hiroshima Peace Museum, which displays the exact time at which the blast struck; her creative intervention moves time forward by one minute, and adds a second hand which endlessly flicks backwards and forwards, caught between past and future.

The artist tells the story of a time and a place – both irrevocably at a standstill – in which the Hibakushas’ lives have remained trapped: she underlines how the hardest moment of their lives was not so much the bomb’s explosion, but everything that came afterwards, with the awareness of having survived.

The exhibition takes its from the never-before-seen piece dillo con i fiori (say it with flowers)), in which the daisies reveal the effects which the radioactivity produced by the Fukushima disaster has had. Here these flowers, which usually symbolise a gift or an explosion of life, tell a story of the shape nature had taken to survive.

The flowers and the clock are objects which bear testimony to the tragic events they have passed through and, by showing their inevitable mutation, emphasise the nature of the survival to which man and nature have been driven as a result of history breaking into their lives.

The exhibition’s closing night will be accompanied by an original performance by Silvia Giambrone, alongside the presentation of a new publication edited by Cristiana Perrella, in conversation with the artist.

Read and download the exhibition’s press release.