LUCA TREVISANI – KOTIKEYE | CASA MUSEO JORN, ALBISSOLA MARINA, 30.05.26 – 25.08.26
LUCA TREVISANI – KOTIKEYE | CASA MUSEO JORN, ALBISSOLA MARINA, 30.05.26 – 25.08.26
Casa Museo Jorn presents Kotykeye, an exhibition by Luca Trevisani marking the culmination of a complex project curated and produced by associazione BLU– Breeding and Learning Unit (Genoa). The project is supported by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture through the Italian Council program (13th edition), dedicated to the international promotion of Italian contemporary art
After traveling internationally through a series of performances—from FRAC Corsica to the Académie Internationale de la Céramique in Geneva, and from the National Museum of Modern Art in Zagreb to the Palazzo Ducale in Genoa—and prior to entering the collection of the Museo Madre (Fondazione Donnaregina per le arti contemporanee) in Naples, this series of stoneware sculptures is being exhibited to the public for the first time at Casa Museo Jorn.
The works, created in collaboration with Danilo Trogu of the La Casa dell’Arte pottery—part of the renowned ceramic manufactures of Albissola—engage in a dialogue with the evocative site where artist Asger Jorn theorized and lived the fusion of architecture, nature, and art, now part of the Fondazione Museo della Ceramica di Savona.
This new series of sculptures stems from a deep investigation of the Toirano Caves (Savona), ancestral sites where geological stratification preserves traces of a millennia-old coexistence between nature and culture, human gesture and animal track, memory and matter. Here, alongside footprints left by humans thousands of years ago, signs of some dogs believed to have lived in close proximity to—and perhaps domesticated by—humans are visible. Trevisani explored these Ligurian karst cavities in search of these prints, reading them as thresholds of contact between species, shared histories, and points of mutual friction and transformation— signs suspended between the biological and the symbolic.
The stoneware sculptures, inspired by the morphology of the caves, have assumed porous and tactile forms incorporating organic traces and food, evoking processes of sedimentation and ritual.
The title Kotikeye refers to an expression used by christian missionaries in Antarctica; unable to reference the “Lamb of God” in a place where lambs did not exist, they pointed to the gaze of a seal pup as the ultimate expression of innocence. It is an animal and sacred gaze, capable of crossing barriers between species and cultures. The works thus present themselves as vessels for relationships and tools of proximity—sensitive surfaces where the human and the animal touch, recognize, and modify one another. The sculptures were activated through a series of performative banquets, convivial presentations conceived as rituals of relationship. In these events, every gesture becomes language: food is shaped through the sculptures, becoming a layer, a print, and a trace, involving bodies in a dance of proximity and discovery.
Kotikeye transforms the prehistoric footprints kept in the Toirano Caves into porous sculptures, thresholds of contact between human and animal, memory and matter, states Trevisani. The ceramic casts of the steps of a prehistoric family—and perhaps their dog—magical and restless, celebrate an interspecies alliance and a thought that traverses bodies, gestures, and touch. The food, served on the sculptures, invites guests to eat with their hands in a sensory choreography that restores touch to its role as an original language.
In their activation, the sculptures reveal their dual status: objects and subjects, tools and presences, symbols and bodies. The project as a whole questions the very idea of sculpture and tool, food, form, and function, proposing a radical reflection on domestication as a profound cultural device where control, affection, violence, and reciprocity intertwine.