Meeting Point @CdRF Exhibition
Artist: Erika Guadagnin
Curator: Marina Paulenka
"Home Is Not a Question" unfolds as a spatial and visual inquiry into belonging, shaped through the long-term negotiation between Italy and Romania that defines Erika Guadagnin’s practice. At its core, the project can also be understood as a personal navigation, an attempt by the artist to locate herself within and between these contexts, not by resolving the question of belonging, but by staying with its uncertainty.
Working from archival traces, vernacular images, and fragments of community histories, Guadagnin approaches the image as an unstable ground. Across the exhibition, archival materials appear layered, interrupted, and partially obscured, often by curtain-like structures that both divide and connect. These gestures introduce a quiet but persistent spatial metaphor: two worlds held in proximity yet never fully reconciled. The curtain becomes a threshold, a surface of projection, and a point of separation, suggesting how identity is continuously negotiated across visible and invisible boundaries.
Her photographic language extends beyond the image itself. Printed on metal, suspended on transparent foils, or embedded within sculptural installations, works shift in response to the viewer’s movement. Frames overlap, dissolve, or remain deliberately incomplete, allowing images to exist in a state of permeability. What emerges is not a fixed narrative, but a field of relations where meaning is contingent, constructed through duration, attention, and positioning.
At the same time, the artist’s research into Italian communities in Romania reveals a condition of dispersed presence, a community that exists without a stable or unified representation. This gap between lived reality and its visibility becomes central to the work. Guadagnin does not attempt to resolve it. Instead, she composes through fragmentation, allowing discontinuities to remain active, holding together elements that resist alignment.
Motherhood introduces an additional layer to this inquiry, sharpening the question of continuity and transmission. What is carried forward, and from where? How does one articulate “home” for another when it is not fully defined for oneself? These questions resonate throughout the exhibition, grounding its conceptual concerns in lived experience.
Presented at CDRF in Romania, the exhibition unfolds as an open trajectory rather than a fixed path. There is no single point of view. Each step produces a shift, each position a different alignment of images and meanings. It is within this movement that the work finds its form, as an ongoing attempt to situate oneself across thresholds, between histories, and within a space that remains, by necessity, unresolved.
— Marina Paulenka
About the artist:
Born in Italy and based in Romania for nearly two decades, Erika Gaudagnin develops her practice between two cultural contexts, within a continuous process of negotiation and reconfiguration. Identity is approached as a fluid condition, shaped by movement, memory, and lived experience. Her research draws on archival materials and community-based narratives, with a specific focus on the fragmented presence of Italians in Romania. These materials are rearticulated into installations, collages, paintings, and artist books, where image and document function as unstable structures of meaning. The practice investigates the relationship between the visible and the invisible in images, as well as the
ways in which meaning shifts through juxtaposition, generating an open field of interpretation. In this context, “home” is not understood as a fixed location, but as a continuously evolving process, shaped by migration and motherhood.
About the curator:
Based in Berlin and originally from Croatia, Marina Paulenka brings over 18 years of experience in artistic direction, curating, education, leadership, management, and cultural development, alongside her own artistic practice. Her work spans contemporary visual, digital, and performing arts, with a specialization in photography and new media. Across these roles and mediums, she consistently pushes boundaries, provokes critical dialogue, and engages with urgent global concerns. In 2008, she founded Organ Vita Festival (Zagreb) and managed it until 2019 when she became the artistic director of the photography fair UNSEEN in Amsterdam. In 2022, Marina became the Founding Director of Fotografiska Berlin where she defined its artistic vision, institutional strategy and the public identity of the museum.
Drawing on her post-Yugoslav and Balkan heritage, Paulenka’s curatorial approach is rooted in rich cultural histories and complex socio-political realities. She engages deeply with feminism, identity, gender, human rights, and social justice, as well as the politics of the body, digital representation, and the sociocultural impact of cyberspace. Her perspective is informed by non-Western epistemologies, and she actively centers voices from African, Asian, Latin American, Indigenous, and diasporic communities, foregrounding aesthetics and knowledge shaped by lived histories of resistance, displacement, and care. Working both locally and internationally, she builds bridges between diverse cultural contexts and imagined futures, and is interested in how knowledge is constructed at the intersection of art, science, spirituality, and technology.