Nicola Lorini Tunes And Habits
Tunes and Habits is a solo intervention by Nicola Lorini in the Zuzeum Greenhouse. Invited to respond to a part of the Zuzāns Collection, Lorini chose to work with the decorative arts department, focusing on small porcelain figures portraying animals, creatures, and somehow childish yet dramatic characters.
The selected items, made between the late nineteenth century and the 1990s, are both cultural artefacts and witnesses to the periods in which they were made, forming a group of comrades time-travelling from the end of the so-called Little Ice Age to today, across the complexities, traumas and accelerations of the twentieth century.
Removed from their usual archived condition and brought into a new setting, the objects are displayed within proto-architectural models built on site from cardboard, wood, and glass, resembling modernist buildings as well as medieval religious constructions. The environment is inhabited not only by the collection’s pieces and architectural elements, but also by a single wood-carved sculpture made by the artist using linden wood, inspired by a detail from a painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder.
Oscillating between the idea of sculpture as display and display as sculpture, Tunes and Habits engages with recurrent themes in Lorini’s practice: the notion of non-linear history and the tension between narrative frameworks and material presence. These elements are rearranged to unsettle the divide between nature and culture, past and future, promoting ideas of world-making in times of crisis.
About the artist
Nicola Lorini (b. 1990) is an artist and educator based in Milan and the founder of the spatial practice The Present Tense. His work spans sculpture, installation, architectural interventions, and radical agriculture. He studied Industrial Design at Politecnico di Milano and Fine Art at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, and HKU Utrecht School of the Arts. He is a professor of Ecology of Perception at IED Milano and a guest lecturer on the POST program at the Art Academy of Latvia in Riga. In recent years, he has exhibited and collaborated with institutions such as the Warburg Institute, London; Pera Museum, Istanbul; the Noguchi Museum, New York; Sonnenstube, Lugano; Traffic Festival, Italy; Magma Maria, Frankfurt; Spazio Maiocchi, Milan; In-Ruins, Italy; Tokyo University of the Arts, Tokyo; and Central Saint Martins, London.