On Thursday 27 January 2022 , the Pastificio Cerere Foundation presents La prima madre , a solo show by artist Sara Basta curated by Cecilia Canziani and Costanza Meli.

The exhibition, which extends along the spaces of the silos and the basement of the mill, both obtained from the recovery of the ancient Pastificio Cerere, will remain open to the public from Friday 28 January to Saturday 26 March 2022.

The first mother was conceived as a path in her most recent research. A corpus of works created in the last two years that returns an emotional map drawn by the artist's time: starting from the present one, lived and broken down in its repetitiveness, up to the time of memory, of research in family memory, and the cyclical relationship between birth and death. From this original relationship, the path unfolds by exploring the thematic nuclei that characterize various series of Sara Basta's works: the mother, the house, the care, the artist's body as the seat and manifestation of physicality and emotion.

The exhibition itinerary begins with a series of watercolor self-portraits made with eyes closed in the moments torn from the altered daily life of the lockdown, a time-circuit that envelops the artist's days in the insistence of a gesture that attempts to affirm the physical reality of 'image. This intimate dialectic between presence and absence is articulated in the exhibition through the figures of the mask and the ghost that transform memory into something contingent, through play or documentation.

In a fabric work, the central embroidery outlines the shape of the artist's mother's hair, while a sound installation spreads her feeble voice: “I wanted to record the crumbling of his language while at the same time my son's language was being built”. The relationship between mother and language is central in the exhibition, as is that with the home, a space in which the bonds take shape and reveal themselves in their complexity.