N.A.S.A.L. is delighted to present Born to Blossom, Bloom to Perish, Emma Pidré's first solo exhbition.
Emmanuel Pidré Starosta (Buenos Aires) is an artist based in Basel. He holds a Diploma in Visual Arts from Weißensee Kunsthochschule Berlin and an MA from the Institute Art Gender Nature / FHNW Basel. His work examines the relationships between bodies, objects, and space, tracing how desire, conditioning, and cultural structures shape perception. Moving between digital and material forms, his installations use hyper-aestheticized bodies to activate or destabilize their environments, reflecting on how “low” cultural codes and elite aesthetics continuously appropriate one another.
His work has been shown at CPU – Entorno para operaciones de arte contemporáneo (Buenos Aires), the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art (Riga), Sesc (São Paulo), Palacio de Glace (Buenos Aires), Kunst Raum Riehen (Basel), Kunsthalle Palazzo (Liestal), Kunsthaus Baselland, and other institutions in Europe and Latin America.
" (...) Emma Pidré’s work alludes to the fact that this medieval reality—and its systems of grilles and punishments—remains alive. Hence its reappearance in popular culture. In Till death do us part, the work focuses on love locks in a very particular location: the Käppelijoch. Käppelijoch is a small chapel located on the Mittlere Brücke bridge in Basel, Switzerland, once used as an execution site, particularly for women accused of witchcraft, who were thrown from the bridge into the Rhine River. It is paradoxical that this is now the place where lovers fasten their locks. Its vertical sculptural form is strangely transformed into a kind of execution cage, creating a counterpoint between the kitsch, globalized romanticism of the love lock phenomenon and the institutionalized violence still present in that place. Today, the chapel is a popular tourist spot where people recreate a ritual—placing "love locks" inscribed with lovers’ names or initials, followed by the symbolic gesture of throwing the key into the river, underscoring the idea of “no return.” The trend of love locks became global after the publication of Ho voglia di te (2006) by Federico Moccia, where the protagonists place a lock on Rome’s Ponte Milvio and throw the key into the Tiber. Since then, the practice has gone viral in cities like Paris, Cologne, Seoul, New York, and more. A collective ritual repeated ad nauseam, yet devoid of any understanding of what it means to be imprisoned by the very system that creates it. (...) "
Exhbition text by Chus Martínez