Oltremare by Bruna Esposito

The image of an upside-down white flag, submerged in water. Deprived of its conventional semantic charge, the flag no longer signals surrender or allegiance; instead, it gestures toward a utopian condition without borders—or, more precisely, toward the dissolution of identity into a state of integral neutrality. Against systems founded on rigid territorial affiliations, the principle of freedom that governs international waters proposes a tangible alternative. The high seas, understood as res communis omnium, constitute a common good belonging to everyone, a space beyond ownership, nationhood, and exclusion.

Bruna Esposito (Rome, 1960), one of the most established Italian artists on the international scene, has distinguished herself for an heterogeneous approach to artistic production since her early years. Installation, performance, video and photography merge into a personal vocabulary nourished by disciplines such as music, literature and dance. After studying architecture in Rome, she moved to New York, where she lived from 1980 to 1986, and where she became acquainted with the language of contemporary dance. In 1987, she moved to West Berlin; here, drawing on her youthful training, she devoted herself to the design of eco-sustainable public toilets. This was the first evidence of a forerunner environmental sensitivity that would characterize her later production.