26/08/2026
“𝗡𝘂𝗼𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝘀𝗲𝗻𝘇𝗮 𝗽𝗲𝗻𝘀𝗶𝗲𝗿𝗶 𝘃𝗼𝗶 𝗰𝗵𝗲 𝗮𝘃𝗲𝘁𝗲 𝗺𝗲𝗿𝗶𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗼 𝘂𝗻𝗮 𝘃𝗮𝗰𝗮𝗻𝘇𝗮”
This is the title of the final artwork co-created by artist Maria Giovanna Abbate and the young inmates at the end of her residency at the Nisida Juvenile Detention Centre, carried out as part of the European MEDSAIL project.
Supported by the curators of Collettivo Zero APS, the Department of Architecture of Naples, the Anton Dohrn Zoological Station and the Juvenile Penitentiary Institute’s educational staff, the project interwove marine biology, social sciences and artistic experimentation to explore the concepts of perception, group and boundary.
The research began with a study of the collective behaviour of schools of fish and neuromasts — the mechanoreceptors that detect changes in water movement and pressure, enabling fish to move in unison as a single organism by sensing one another. However, during the sessions at the institute, the young participants’ needs to reaffirm their own uniqueness in relation to group dynamics became particularly evident. A revealing analogy emerged from discussions with marine biologists from the Zoological Station: just like fish trapped in a tide pool when the sea recedes, the youth in custody develop individual survival strategies within a closed and isolated ecosystem, where collective trust must be continually rebuilt.
In response to this need, cyanotype paper was first divided into individual sheets. Then, using illustrations from an early 20th-century swimming manual, the participants examined and recorded the movements and trajectories of swimming on paper without the presence of the sea. This represented a cognitive and experiential paradox reflecting their own situation: practising movement and interaction within an enclosed space; learning to move and to understand the world from within a closed structure.
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