Nicolò Baraggioli

I have being working on this new body of work.
These days of self-isolation are helping me out to develop and continue this project that it was born from the necessity to healing myself from this period of uncertain, fear and panic.
It took me quite a lot of time to get there and it’s still a very hard and painful act. Something that burns you inside out. Something that leave you with a sense of discomfort and anguish.
Works of mine (on paper: one or several works for each capsule depending on the size of the piece) have been burned, kept their ashes, encapsulated and sealed into small plastic bags as if they were proper pills to be used to make me feel better, as the process – of burning them – itself.
As medicines ready to be taken. Found this practice very relieving and satisfying at the same time. A process that made me feel better.
The title of this series is: Catharsis /kəˈθɑːsɪs/ ,
the process of releasing, and thereby providing relief from, strong or repressed emotions particularly anguish and fear—through art or any extreme change in emotion that results in renewal and restoration. It is a metaphor originally used by Aristotle in the Poetics, comparing the effects of tragedy on the mind of a spectator to the effect of catharsis on the body.
Catharsis was also central to Freud’s concept of psychoanalysis, but he replaced hypnosis with free association.
The term catharsis has also been adopted by modern psychotherapy, particularly Freudian psychoanalysis, to describe the act of expressing, or more accurately, experiencing the deep emotions often associated with events in the individual’s past which had originally been repressed or ignored, and had never been adequately addressed or experienced.