In the spaces of the former hospital of San Rocco in Matera, from 10 September to 8 January 2023, the exhibition project Damir Očko – Driant Zeneli. Exploratives, conceived and curated by Giacomo Zaza, combines two important contemporary artistic experiences from the Balkan area – Croatia and Albania – which elaborate visual universes rich in poetic, reflective and performative components.

As Giacomo Zaza points out: “the two artists nurture an exploratory imagination that deals with ethical and political issues, social codes, encroachments on the sensible and new space-time hypotheses. Očko's works involve various themes related to man (fragility and resistance) and to his systems of control and oppression, as well as to the marginal conditions of the body. They also combine signs and images on the edge of truth and communication. While Zeneli's work insists on travel as an exploration and crossing of borders: an innate human aptitude for movement and change. Zeneli dwells on the utopia/dystopia dualism, on the poetic nature of the sun and the moon, on freedom and dreams. Both artists transform the human being and his mind into vectors of an imaginative and unstoppable exploration”.

And again, Zaza specifies: “The exhibition is based on a continuous exchange between reality and imagination, a complex mechanism of symbolic production that reactivates, in new forms, the processes of the psyche and the perceptions of the world, beyond the known parameters. Following the theoretical positions of Edgar Morin, it can be said that Očko and Zeneli insist on the capacity of the image in the field of knowledge, as the image refers to a reality to be known”.