Riccardo Giacconi’s new work looks at a hopeless alternative: the one between fascism and fascism. In the 1940s the people of South Tyrol were given the option of either emigrating to the Third Reich or remaining in fascist Italy. Giacconi explores the resonances between the era of this so-called Option Agreement and the contemporary political climate in Europe today through an installation in the galleries of the Grazer Kunstverein and a performance in the streets of Graz during the opening days of the festival. Giacconi’s installation draws upon folk culture, political propaganda, and eyewitness accounts, using shadow plays, posters, film, and audio to question ideas of citizenship, nativism, and migration. His performance in public space vaguely resembles the work of young street vendors of newspapers without a fixed newsstand who cried out daily headlines in the old days. Playing with fiction, abstraction, and the historical present, he creates a constellation between two points in time, examining the contemporary situation through the lens of a past event.

Riccardo Giacconi (1985, San Severino Marche, Italy) is an artist whose practice is often based on historical research and explores complex narratives. In films, performances, and installations, he investigates the dislocations and shifting borders of 20th-century history. Giacconi lives in Milan.