Restrizione Emotiva (Emotional Restriction) is a widespread installation dedicated to the community of Malamocco, made up of twelve sculptures placed within its territory.

Each unit is the custodian of a sentence pronounced by the inhabitants of the village, recorded and transcribed by the artist during her stays. Among all, one in particular was the source of inspiration for the title of the work: “That’s Malamocco, there is emotional restriction”.

Beyond any possible negative interpretation, the phrase seems to express a condition immanent to the community of Malamocco, found in many of the exchanges had by the artist, but always tied to double thread with the love for their territory. Although it could be an obstacle for any research related to emotion, Lucia was able to read the restriction as a simple type of spatial definition, thus identifying an emotional perimeter within which to move and conduct their work.

For this reason, the artist started from the desire not to impose her presence in the village but looking rather to develop a relationship with the people who live it every day, through a research on their words. Whether these words are part of reflections written about life or chosen from spontaneous conversations or stimulated by workshops with a class of elementary school, all have helped the artist to generate portraits of how life flows in the village.

Their physical restitution is a work made up of fragile presences, generated by harmless contrasts between different surfaces and materials, in which the guarded phrases emerge from a dark depth, contained in yellow, red and green bodies. Ceramic shapes that possess the ability to accommodate feelings that, without a defined shape, could not be relived.

The concept of emotional restriction thus becomes a different way of relating to the village for anyone willing to read and listen.

Lucia Cantò (Pescara, 1995) graduated in Sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice in 2018 and went on to continue her studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in L’Aquila. She lives and works in Pescara. Her research is fuelled by the investigation of structural fragility, the dash that separates the word WUNDE from the letter R. An attention to the details that some may consider of little importance, extracted from the complexity of human apparatus, leads her to appropriate everyday symbols and relational actions. The practice of writing is necessary to lay the foundations for the construction of her works, in fact she believes that language is the means that moves sculpture. In her sculptural practice, the use of concrete materials is a response to a sentimental reality that tends to remain immaterial and evanescent. Occupying physical space is equivalent to trying to make an emotion solidly structured, which often corresponds to fragility. “Am I Fragile if you look at me and if you let yourself be looked at?” It is a question that she recognises as the trait d’union of her research. Lucia Cantò is co-founder – together with Simone Camerlengo, Gioele Pomante, Francesco Alberico, Eliano Serafini, Gianluca Ragni, Matteo Fato and Lorenzo Kamerlengo, Giovanni Paolo Fedele – of the Cultural Association SenzaBagno, based in Pescara.
She has taken part in several group exhibitions: Sabbia d’oro at Museo Laboratorio di Città Sant’Angelo (2019), Biennale Giovani Monza (2019); straperetana and Io sono verticale, Pereto (2020); C.U.O.R.E. – Cryogenic Underground Observatory for Rare Events designed by Margherita Morgantin at Palazzo Lucarini, Trevi (2021). In 2021, she exhibited for the first time in a solo exhibition at the Monitor gallery in Rome, she curated the group exhibition and the publishing project The Blind Leading the Blind at Monitor gallery in Pereto and won the 14th edition of the Talent Prize.