I’m Half Sick of Shadows
With I’m Half Sick of Shadows, a solo exhibition by Davide La Montagna, we inaugurate 10 documents, a platform for artistic, curatorial, and theoretical research structured through public research programs, each devoted to a different object of study. Through exhibitions, publications, encounters, conversations, sonic and performative acts, the platform builds each time a living archive — a collective lexicon developed through presence, reiteration, and listening.
The first research program unfolds around the theme of affection, understood as a relational force — what moves bodies, shapes communities, and redefines critical thought. Within this framework, La Montagna’s exhibition explores how the affective dimension — in its most intimate and contradictory forms — inhabits the spaces of domestic life, generating shadows, silences, and apparitions.
The title of the show cites the closing verses of Alfred Tennyson’s poem The Lady of Shalott (1832), inspired by a 13th-century Italian novella. The ballad recounts the story of Elaine of Astolat, a young noblewoman confined in a tower near Camelot. Isolated from the world, Elaine spends her days watching life unfold through the reflection of a mirror and weaving a tapestry of shadows. One day, she glimpses Lancelot passing by and falls in love; she decides to leave the tower, breaking the spell and condemning herself to death. Her “nameless sickness” — a fever of desire and distance — becomes in Tennyson a symbol of impossible, mediated love, incapable of incarnating itself in reality.
In the exhibition, La Montagna translates this tension between desire and dissolution into a constellation of works that evoke a domestic landscape of light and shadow, love and violence.
In Fever Dream (2025), a series of floor lamps connected to a timer cyclically interrupt the power flow, creating an intermittent pulse of light. When illuminated, the lamps project the shadows of blunt household objects — ordinary yet potentially threatening presences — that vanish into darkness like fleeting manifestations of a domestic unconscious.
On the walls, a new series of collages in which cut-out images completely overlap photographs from the artist’s family archive, rendering them invisible to the viewer. The works’ titles — such as Mom holding the bouquet & wearing her wedding dress, sitting on a staircase with a sad gaze (2025) — describe the hidden scene, turning language itself into a vehicle of memory and loss. Over time, the direct contact between collage and glass will cause the material to deteriorate, eventually revealing the photograph underneath: a slow process of unveiling and decay that questions the very nature of remembrance.
The video What Sounds a Rose Makes (2025) is part of an ongoing series composed through the montage of film frames featuring cut flowers — including The Addams Family (1991), Vertigo (1958), and 3-Iron (2003). Conceived as loops to be projected in dialogue with one another, these sequences reflect on the regulation of romantic love and on the rituals that mark its representation — from courtship to marriage — within the context of affective capitalism. Drawing from the writings of Eva Illouz, the work examines how love, within the contemporary economy of emotions, becomes both a form of emotional labor and a consumption device.
Through these minimal and precise gestures, La Montagna constructs a reflection on the representation of love in contemporary culture — a feeling continually mediated, performed, and consumed — and on the power of images to resist, deteriorate, or disappear.
The exhibition is accompanied by the presentation of the poetry book What Sound a Rose Makes, published by 10 documents and performed by the artist with a sound composition by Flavio Michele.
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Davide La Montagna (Rivoli, 1992) is an artist based in Turin. His research explores love as an ambivalent and transformative force, tracing the tensions between opposites that inhabit the space of relation and desire. Through the use of everyday objects and poetic language, his work unfolds as a process of inquiry and evocation, bringing to light submerged or forgotten narratives often linked to dynamics of violence and power.
A graduate of the Dutch Art Institute in Arnhem (2025), he has held solo exhibitions at Archivio Gribaudo and Almanac (Turin). Recent group exhibitions include Efemeridi. 2013–2025 (Almanac, Turin), The Good Company (IUNO, Rome), and Thinking Songs of Things (Mario Mauroner Contemporary, Vienna). In 2023, together with Deborah Martino, he co-founded the Ethereal Society of Poetry (ESP), a platform dedicated to sharing and promoting poetry through readings, conversations, and participatory gatherings.