The cycle consists of three archives that meticulously reconstruct Gao Yue’s life through company records, correspondence and photographic and video footage. The narrative begins in the China of the 90s, when the protagonist, a figure as verisimilar as the artist’s alter ego and with a deliberately fragmented and complex personality, is hired by the Green Diamond company to test new technologies
through her own body.

 

The exhibited works, a series of photographs of various formats, depict the workplaces of Gao Yue and his colleagues: interiors, offices, waiting rooms, closed and underground spaces that become places of the oneiric. Environments without human presence, in which the only space-time coordinates are given by the presence of objects such as desks, floors with computer cables and everyday technological tools. The photographs, all shot in analogue and dominated by flashlight, offer a cross-section of the artist’s practice, characterised by the use of colourful, disorienting silhouettes. Maistrello’s two-dimensional cut-outs are often unimportant images taken from the web, which, once printed on cardboard and physically inserted into space, activate visual and semantic short circuits. Fantastic traces that, in their materiality and through the grain of the film, transform anonymous and ordinary spaces into sites of dreams.

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On the ground floor, unpublished works from Black Diamond (2024-2025) line the central hall of the gallery, in which Maistrello investigates the geological dimension of the depths as a dimension of the unconscious. The body of work is part of a broader research on trauma and how it affects not only on a behavioural and familial level, but also on a biological one, creating a deep wound. In the back room, the video Darklines (2024) is presented for the first time: the voice of Fen Lin, a colleague of Gao Yue, recounts her own involvement in the secret Black Diamond protocol, which involved a study on intergenerational trauma.

 

The upper floor displays works from the first chapter of the saga, Green Diamond (2018-2021, produced thanks to the Inside Out Museum in Beijing, winner of the Graziadei Prize and presented in China, Switzerland, France and Germany): the artist’s book Gao Yue 高跃 collects all the autographed texts, while a selection of photographic pieces reveal Gao Yue’s face in the company and details of the factory and its workplaces. A line of photographic images leads to Blue Diamond, recently exhibited at PAC in Milan and MAXXI in Rome, the second chapter of the saga, aimed at investigating the need for transcendence through totalising and synaesthetic experiences. Key to the cycle is the video The Hidden Shapes (2021), winner of the Essenziale/Nctm call, the Lydia award and the Art4future/Unicredit award. “The work investigates the water dimension and questions what exists in the void, what happens in the total absence of sensoriality. The question is: what would the world be like if we had completely new senses to experience it?” In addition to the video, the exhibition features photographic works in large format.

 

In a close dialogue with the structural and architectural elements of Artopia, the exhibition Ordinary Wounds 平凡的伤痕 gathers the main lines of Rachele Maistrello’s research. In the hybridisation of practices such as video, installation and photography, the artist probes the relationship between truth and fiction, the effects of misinterpretation, the potential hidden in the unfinished, the relationship between photographic evidence and subliminal space.