Boxes for storing domestic jewels and wooden suitcases for painters, freed from their original function, have become containers for human stories, dramas, told through the juxtaposition of things, souvenir-objects, small fetishes and photographs, in which war devices often peep out, a passport pierced by a bullet, to testify to the historical context, the Balkan war.
These are visual stories conceived between 1992 and 1996 by Edin (Edo) Numankadić, one of the artists from Sarajevo with whom Piero Del Giudice entered into a dialogue during the long period dedicated to the documentation of that conflict.
They are disturbing revivals, pieces of life dangerously lived in the war, objects escaped from destruction and stories rescued from oblivion, "fragments of a dissolved time, of a lost age of innocence", in the words of Del Giudice, from whose collection all the boxes and suitcases exhibited here come, as well as the large panel Traces (Tragovi, 1992), no less emblematic than Numankadić's work as a painter.
The panel is exhibited in the Museum's Didactic Room: it could be confused with the results of the neo-informalism from which Numnkadić's career started, but it should rather be understood as an expression of a "new realism", as a simple display of a stretch of bituminous and material road in which different paths and lives irreparably broken and lost cross.
Legacy of Piero Del Giudice, 2019
