Lorenzo Vitturi: Catacaos

Imagine encountering an object, a form, that utterly fascinates you. A hat, a vase, a picture, a body. Something you instinctively desire without quite knowing why. Then, one day, you find yourself in a town filled with this very thing. Shops and market stalls display it everywhere. Where might it lead you if you followed it?

For Lorenzo Vitturi, this place was Catacaos, a small town in northern Peru, where he encountered an extraordinary abundance of poto, or calabash, a dried gourd whose sinuous form had long captivated him. Integral to local craftsmanship, it is traditionally used to serve and share chicha de jora, an ancient fermented corn drink. Vitturi had already studied and sought out this object across different geographies. Yet here, it acquired an unexpected personal significance: Catacaos was also the birthplace of his great-grandfather. In Peru, one of the two countries to which his roots are tied, alongside Italy, an object he had followed across the world led him to uncover an unknown part of his ancestry.

Drawing on this encounter, Vitturi presents existing and newly produced works tracing the intersection of personal, cultural and material histories across Italy and Latin America, particularly Peru. Spanning photography, sculpture, and tapestry, each work foregrounds material as a carrier of place, tradition, and individual and collective memory.

In Catacaos, the exhibition named after the Peruvian town, the calabash becomes a recurring motif, its form continually reconfigured, stitched, assembled, and transformed.

In the first room, the undulating contours of the poto resurface in large-scale tapestries, evoking the chromatic palette of Peruvian landscapes. Knotted in wool and plant-based silk by the weavers of the Jaipur Rugs Foundation and completed in Murano, these suspended textiles incorporate clear and pastel-coloured glass, bringing together distinct material traditions and places. Through this convergence, the works articulate a layered cartography of cultural exchange and movement, at once deeply physical and emotionally resonant.

In the second room, the relationship between materials is reversed, shifting from suspended textile surfaces to enclosed volumes of totemic, calabash-shaped glass sculptures. Titled Combinado, these works bring together cotisso glass and Peruvian yarns, evoking Andean apachetas: stones accumulated by travellers at mountain passes and crossroads as ritual offerings to Pachamama and mountain spirits, seeking protection along their journeys. While the tapestries hold and incorporate glass, here glass encloses the yarns. This inversion of container and contained foreground tensions between softness and solidity, fragility and weight, transforming the sculptures into sites where material, cultural memory, and movement converge.

In the final room, photographs reassemble materials encountered throughout the exhibition into solemn, almost ceremonial figures. Draped in Peruvian textiles, their faces concealed behind sculptural masks drawing on Andean and Venetian traditions, these hybrid bodies emerge against luminous landscapes and backdrops of red adobe, a traditional earthen wall finish from Peru’s Sacred Valley. Its rough, warm texture recalls local architecture, connecting bodies and places. 

Conceived as generative experiments, these compositions bring together glass, textiles, terracotta, stones, beads, and other materials selected by Vitturi not only for their physical properties but for the histories they carry. Together, they form a quiet yet palpable language that traverses geographies and traditions, opening up new possibilities for meaning and transformation.

Movement lies at the heart of this process, as suggested by Caminante (walker), the title of the textile works. What begins as a search for an object becomes a journey guided by the object itself, tracing unforeseen connections across continents and generations. The object becomes both a point of departure and a means of return, leading towards places never known, yet somehow already inscribed in one's own history.