Info

CENSURA launches its curatorial programme with Matete Martini, an artist from Pordenone, presenting the project Eis Café Martini.

Opening to the public on 30 May at 11:00 am, the exhibition introduces the theme of self-censorship through an intimate exploration of family history, weaving together memory, migration, belonging, and the transmission of identity.

With Eis Café Martini, Matete Martini begins with the story of her own family, who left Italy in the aftermath of the Second World War to build a new life in Germany through the restaurant business. The project unfolds across the Ruhr region and several generations, drawing on her father’s stories, domestic memory, and the perspective of a child raised within a large, hardworking, and deeply united family.

Through photography, painting, and archival materials, the artist does not seek to reconstruct an ordered genealogy or a linear account of events. Instead, she focuses on the traces, gestures, and forms of continuity that endure over time: the rhythm of everyday work, the symbolic weight of a family name, the sense of belonging, and everything that is passed on without necessarily being expressed in words.

As the artist writes:

“What is this almost blood-bound resistance to doing and being, and where does it come from? This need to carry forward a surname, a name, a tradition, a place?

I have always been fascinated by this strength: not being afraid, not even in the face of danger. Never feeling inferior, not even in a country where one is a guest—together with other guests.”

The result is a narrative in which identity is not asserted explicitly but emerges through recognition: in one’s origins, in the body, in family memory, and in everything we inherit long before we are able to understand it.