SAGG Napoli

*IF WE STAY, WE STAY AWAKE* is SAGG Napoli’s first solo exhibition, specially conceived for the Contemporary Gallery.

SAGG Napoli (b. 1991, Naples, Italy) is a multidisciplinary artist who lives and works between Milan and Naples, and whose practice intersects performance, video, sculpture, photography, writing and digital culture. From a critical relationship with Neapolitan identity, her work addresses questions of social class, gender, regionalism and mental health, which she articulates within an aesthetic and political investigation the artist calls *South Aesthetics*. The architectural forms, spatial hierarchies and visual and performative codes of southern Italy are central elements of her work, which challenges, from different perspectives, dominant narratives about beauty, power and cultural value and in which the body simultaneously assumes the condition of subject and medium. Since 2020, SAGG Napoli has integrated competitive archery into her practice as a process of recovery through repetition and discipline, making physical training a method for exploring resilience, restraint and the reconstruction of the self.

For this exhibition, the spatial and sound installation, with the special contribution of composer and sound designer Matteo Pit, brings together materials, objects and alterations found in social housing contexts and in self-built homes. Starting from research carried out in Porto and references from southern Italy, particularly the Salento region, the project investigates the ways residents repair, adapt and expand their homes, who has the authority to carry out these interventions, and why some are recognized as forms of design or care, while others are dismissed as disorder.

The exhibition, produced by Fundação de Serralves — Museu de Arte Contemporânea, is curated by Inês Grosso, chief curator of Serralves Museum.

Assistant curator: Mattia Tosti

Coordination: Marina Rei and Mattia Tosti

With the support of Amorim Cork.