Ghosts: palimpsests of memory presents to the public for the first time in the rooms of the Madre museum a selection of the latest works that have become part of the collection along with others never exhibited. Among the works there are acquisitions finalized with the support of the Campania Region (POC Funds - COMPLEMENTARY OPERATIONAL PROGRAM 20-21), donations by artists and prestigious victories in calls such as the Italian Council , promoted by the General Direction for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture . Ibrahim Mahama 's work was the winner of the PAC2020 public call - Plan for Contemporary Art promoted by the General Direction for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture.

The thematic approach allows us to offer insights and create new paintings to renew our gaze on the permanent collection. The works that make up the exhibition - produced by artists of very different generations and origins - are united by the attempt to open a space crossed by the ghosts that haunt the environment in which we live. The works are inhabited by erased or suppressed stories, becoming a means of making visible what is poised between presence and absence, past, contemporaneity and future. Using elementary materials - water, earth, metal, light, stone - and archetypes of experience - home, family, street, work, sacred place, music, nature - the artists on display question the relationship between traces of individual and shared experiences. The narration of an experience makes hidden stratifications visible, calls into question the revived and invokes the ghosts of the past to understand their actions in the present.

In William Shakespeare's The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Hamlet's trusted friend, Horace, begs the wandering ghost to speak, but the latter begins to recite the following words only when he is alone with Hamlet on the fortifications of the castle of Elsinore:

"I am the spirit of your father condemned for a time to wander at night, and by day relegated to fasting in the fire, until the vile crimes committed in my natural days are burned and purified. If it were not forbidden for me to tell the secrets of my prison [...] "1

In his discussion of these passages, the philosopher Jacques Derrida emphasizes that history and life as such are always already haunted by ghosts and that to look to the future it is necessary to start over in memory, this time, of that "impure impure ghost story. ". The "intellectual" of tomorrow - or here we could say the artist - "should learn à vivre by learning and teaching, not to converse with the ghost, but to spend time with him, with her, to leave him or to give him the word, even if only within oneself, in the other, in the other in oneself: the ghosts are always there, even if they do not exist, even if they are no longer, even if they are not yet ”. 2