PROJECTS

My name is Marah, I’m 18 years old.

For the past two years, I’ve lived in a tent in the Gaza City refugee camp with my family. The tent is all we have, besides being all alive. I have two sisters, two brothers and both of my parents. We all lived in a house in Beit Hanoun on the Israeli border, but it was destroyed and we fled.

This tent today holds my dream to be an artist and expresses my deepest emotions. My experiences of war, hunger, and fear are embodied in my drawings. The tent is my studio, my gallery, my museum, our refuge. My soul is plastered on the walls up to the ceiling. My desire is to live freely and go out into the world to share all this.

My practice has become indispensable to me. Through drawings, I can communicate my feelings even when I have to resort to use the coal we use to light the pot on the stove. At other times, I’m luckier and can use the ink from ballpoint pens or pencils. Here, the noise is deafening, and I have to work at night.

I draw what I have seen what I witnessed: friends, teachers, journalists, fighters – all killed. I draw people’s suffering, empty plates, children with amputated limbs. I draw friends and relatives who are far away so I can remember them.

I also draw hope, freedom, others’ art. When I use colors and can fly with my imagination out of here and dream of an exhibition of my drawings and being able to study art abroad like any other student.

ART IS RESISTANCE, ART IS VOICE, IT’S A CRY!

My drawings are my voice, and my greatest wish is that it be heard around the world because it’s not just mine, but that of so many men, women, and children who experience this same suffering and carry the same message: we have ambitions, we have goals, we have dreams.

My name is Marah, and I am an artist.

Marah Al-Zaanin

Rebecca Moccia's Nostalgism is a material, filmic, and spatial investigation of nostalgia, rooted in the artist's personal and familial history and in the twentieth-century story of Naples, her birthplace. Presented at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios in Dublin, Ireland, the exhibition brings together a new multi-channel video work, fragmented sculptural elements, archival footage, family memories, and a dispersed soundscape to examine nostalgia not simply as sentiment, but as a social and political force shaped by displacement, industrialization, migration, war, class division, and neoliberal systems.

Naples becomes the central protagonist of the exhibition: a city marked by volcanic eruption, wartime destruction, poverty, emigration, tourism, and cultural transformation. Moccia returns to this generational home to collect oral histories, recover family images, walk through meaningful urban and rural sites, and collaborate with relatives in the making of the work.

WHITESPACE Projects Napoli plays an important role in this process by giving Moccia a space to work during her residency in Naples, allowing the artist to develop the research in direct contact with the city, its histories, and its emotional landscape. As both a partner and a site of production, WHITESPACE supports the conditions for Moccia's project to unfold from lived experience, local memory, and artistic experimentation.

Internationally recognized for her conceptually rigorous and materially sensitive practice, Moccia works across video, installation, sculpture, and performance. Her research-driven approach investigates the subtle mechanics of power and the embodied experience of time, space, affect, and subjectivity. Drawing on feminist theory, social history, and sensorial perception, she examines how emotional and perceptive states are shaped by structural forces and intimate geographies.

Her work has been presented at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo (Turin), ICA (Milano), Museo del Novecento (Florence), OGR Torino, IIC Bruxelles, and Magazzino Italian Art (New York). In 2024, she represented Italy at the 15th Gwangju Biennale with Ministries of Loneliness, a multimedia installation exploring how contemporary neoliberal societies perceive, measure, and govern loneliness as both a political and emotional condition.

The WHITESPACE Projects / Napoli residency will be base camp for Moccia during the development and filming of the Positionality Statement project, a non-fiction film rooted in a personal and historical reconnection with Naples — her city of origin. Co-produced by Careof with the support of WHITESPACE Projects / Napoli and Collezione Agovino, it will be presented at her upcoming solo exhibition at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, Dublin.

From the moment she discovered the severity of the censorship enacted on Antonia Pozzi's poetry, Loan's translation project morphed into one of legacy reconstruction — an investigation of violence in the creation process, violence against the female body, and the ethical questions at the center of creation in physical or written form. Her work began to take the form of what she calls "sculptural poetics," poetry that aims to replicate in writing the physical act of sculpture — removal as a creative process, and what is lost in extraction.

Speaking with scholars at the archives, Loan discovered that after Pozzi's tragic suicide at the age of 26, her father had severely edited and censored her work before publishing it. Thick black marker made entire entries illegible, pages were ripped out — his interventions stripped the work of its core sensuality while obscuring her struggles with mental health and her anguished pull between maternal desires and the ambitions of a female artist in the 1930s.

Director's Guest: Nick Flynn — writer, playwright, poet — nominated Leisa Loan for the first poet in residence.

Agnes Questionmark holds a leading position in the international art scene due to the significance of the themes she addresses and the expressive originality that defines her work. Her interdisciplinary practice — spanning performance, sculpture, video, and installation — investigates the limits of identity and embodiment through long-durational works that challenge conventional notions of gender, humanity, and species.

Her work explores human boundaries through genetic experiments, surgical interventions, and artificial reproductive processes, unsettling fixed definitions of the self. By queering power structures between doctor and patient, human and machine, she critiques the systems that pathologize and discipline non-normative bodies, turning her own body into a living experiment that defies classification.

She has exhibited internationally at the 60th Venice Biennale, Centre d'Art Contemporain Geneva, MAXXI Museum Rome, the 14th Gwangju Biennale, Malta Biennale in Valletta, Mimosa House in London, Casa Flash Art in Milan, and König Galerie in Berlin.

During this residency, AQ will work simultaneously on her project for the 18th edition of the Rome Quadriennale of Art, titled Fantastica, invited by curator Alessandra Troncone, and on her first site-specific solo exhibition in Naples at the WPN space.

Curated by: Alessandra Troncone, Guest Curator & Concetta Luise, Associate Curator