The exhibition brings together the artists who have participated in the Instagram initiative “Welcome Home”, by featuring a selection of the artworks they produced within their domestic confinement, during the lockdown. Ranging from painting to photography, video, drawing, and sculpture, the works result from the drive of their authors to overcome the challenges of the quarantine through imaginative and ingenuous ways of doing and thinking, within and beyond art-making practices. Hence turning their domestic space and time of confinement into an inspiration enabler.

Recalling the 1968 epic science fiction movie 2001 A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubric, DOMESTIC ODYSSEYS addresses the exploration of an unknown domestic life – as opposed to the unknown extraterrestrial life of the futuristic movie. Echoing the voyage to Jupiter imagined by Kubric, the exhibition theme offers a pretext to re-think our relationship with our domestic environment – an intimate space that, during the confinement, has suddenly and paradoxically turned into an unfamiliar and, sometimes, unsettling place of dwelling, into otherness.

 And yet, having transformed their homes into temporary studios (or vice versa), and hence, making a virtue of necessity, the artists of the DOMESTIC ODYSSEYS exhibition have been able to find the most authentic inspiration in their new domestic space. In some way, the artworks featured in the exhibition are the repository of untold intimate domestic tales, joys, and struggles – what we would call «domestic odysseys» – as well as of the desire to re-domesticate our unknown dwelling spaces.

Although they saw their exhibitions and plans for 2020 canceled or postponed, by reinventing themselves within precarious and temporary contingencies, once again they have shown to the world that art, as a form of knowledge production, can acquire multiple shapes, but it never ceases to be and manifest itself. Like in other moments in history, artists have been able to challenge the most critical times, turning art into an inspiring and resilient way of thinking, being, and doing differently.