Letizia Romanini walked around a country, not to achieve a sports feat or an artistic performance, but out of a desire to inscribe landscapes into her body, to see them with her eyes, but above all to feel them through the strength of her legs. Because walking around a country is about experiencing the border, inhabiting it, crossing a peripheral third space that is neither home nor foreign land, a nameless space infiltrated by unruly vegetation. It is about rediscovering a form of lost nomadism, replaced by the recommended 10,000 steps per day in our ultra-sedentary society. Walking around a country on foot is, above all, an experience of slowness, finding beauty in the detour, feeling distances, and submitting to nature's
In 2021, Letizia Romanini undertook this 24-day walk, covering the 356 kilometers of Luxembourg’s borders. During this journey, she captured hundreds of images but also gathered plants, stones, and small “left-behind” objects, as she calls them. Since this walk, Letizia Romanini has developed an interest in buffer zones, these marginal spaces that she crosses on her way to her studio from home. During these daily trips and on other travels, she continues to pick, bend down, collect, and gather what pricks, tangles, and entwines. Thus, thistles and acacia branches—plants whose thorns act like barbed wire—are isolated from their environment to better highlight their sculptural aspect. The plants she collected have inspired her brooches and jewelry; the images she gathered have left the screen, shedding their two-dimensionality, changing scale to exist in space, printed on fabrics. The compositional lines of her photographs have nourished the design of her straw marquetry.
Through bronze casting, textile or aluminum printing, and the artisanal practice of straw marquetry, the artist transforms what she has gathered in a perpetual process of shifting scales and perspectives. This diversity of techniques reflects Letizia Romanini's varied practice: installation, sculpture, and drawing are all ways for the artist to show what once existed—there, on the ground, or in front of our eyes—but which sometimes escapes our notice.
Juliette Hage
Velvet and muslin prints, bronze casts,
variable dimensions
Reuter Bausch Art Gallery, 2024
© MIKE ZENARI