Mario Rizzi

b. 1962, Italy

nextdoor is a project on nostalgia. Individuals living in Limerick, in the city or inside the local prison, were invited to engage in the process by sharing stories, rhymes, dreams and regrets, which form a portrait of the everyday. nextdoor is a hymn to the importance of being different in an increasingly homologous, intolerant and prejudiced reality. Memories, metaphorically crossing each other, become a bridge between people from different paths and experiences of life. By juxtaposing and re-enacting private stories, the process preserves their intimacy, while at the same time transforming them into universal paradigmatic events. The project gives voice to silent zones of unperceived humanity, and acts as a switchboard for feelings in a continuous process of dislocation between dream and reality, the city and the prison, the performers and the artist. This network of interactions will eventually involve the viewer, provoking empathy and identification or distance and negation. Nostalgia inevitably grows in a time of accelerated rhythms of life and deep historical changes, such as it is the case in Ireland today. But nostalgia is also a feeling connected with the re-appropriation of one’s individual personal history in moments of life reassessment, in moments of ‘homesickness’. In its etymology, in fact, nostalgia refers to the concept of home.

(Text: give(a)way catalogue, 2006)