On Tuesday 13 September 2022 the Pastificio Cerere Foundation presents Buffer Zone , the first solo exhibition in Rome by Meletios Meletiou (Lemesos, Cyprus, 1989) curated by Gaia Bobò, open to the public from Wednesday 14 September to Friday 21 October 2022.

The project - conceived for Spazio Molini as a site-specific intervention - investigates the apparent familiarity of the motifs and patterns of the public space, activating a critical investigation on the theme of hostile architecture, understood as an expression of a "paranoid and anxious" design (Robert Park) conflicting with the bodily experience of individuals in urban space, to the point of compromising their personal and political freedoms.

Meletiou takes as its starting point the ambiguity of the concept of decoration, understood on the one hand as decoration and on the other as decency, drawing on everyday objects to convert them into high-voltage systems. The recourse to the imagery linked to play is significant in his production, as can be seen from the reference to children's rides or abacus. The process of gradual dramatization of the material alters the primitive vocation of these objects, revealing a new inhospitable and insidious nature, which is realized precisely in the parallelism and ambiguity with the structures of hostile architecture.

The artist's works are in turn architectures that create physically impacting paths: obstacles, forced directions, openings to unexplored points of view, directing the viewer's attention thanks to the direct intervention on his possibilities of displacement. In this sense, the reference to the Cypriot socio-political context, present in the symbolic echo of the concept of wall or barrier, is inevitable.

On the occasion of the exhibition, the artist's book Epidermis, published by Viaindustriae, will be created and presented. The publication will bring together a series of theoretical contributions on the main themes of the exhibition and a selection of the artist's limited edition prints.