Utställning: Hunger for culture or hunger for food?
Evenemangets tidpunkt: –
Evenemangsplats:
Under bibliotekets öppettider
Hangö stadsbibliotek
Berggatan 3-5
Enrico Mazzone’s drawing exhibition at the Hanko Library unfolds as a quiet interrogation of hunger in its multiple guises: hunger for culture, knowledge, and meaning on one hand; hunger for sustenance and basic needs on the other. Set within the intimate aisles and reading rooms of a community library, the show frames drawing as a portable archive—sketches, fragments, and studies that accumulate into a larger map of human cravings. Concept The title poses a question rather than a verdict. Mazzone juxtaposes the hunger for cultural exchange with the hunger for nourishment, suggesting that both are essential forms of care and continuity. The drawings oscillate between intimate, granular marks and expansive, cartographic lines, inviting viewers to trace how ideas feed bodies and how bodies, in turn, demand ideas. Medium and technique The works are predominantly pencil and charcoal on paper, with selective use of ink wash and graphite to build depth and texture. Recurrent motifs include kitchen shelves, library stacks, communal tables, and architectural silhouettes of Hanko’s coastline and harbor. The technique emphasizes immediacy—smudges, cross-hatching, and quick gestural lines that preserve the sense of drawing as a momentary negotiation with the subject.
Themes and motifs
-Cultural nourishment: drawings of libraries, classrooms, concert halls, and street markets as spaces where culture is encountered, shared, and contested.
-Food and shelter: still lifes and partial landscapes that reference meals, dining rooms, and the resilience of daily bread.
-Memory and displacement: figures that appear between pages, between frames, or at the edge of a coastline, suggesting migration, aging, and the transference of stories.
-Absence and presence: blank margins and erasures that imply what is missing when hunger is unmet.
-Dialogue between public and private: scenes set in communal spaces juxtaposed with intimate, solitary acts of drawing.
Hanko Library’s architecture becomes part of the work: tall windows casting long shadows, reading desks that become stages for the artist’s mark-making, and the quiet, public atmosphere that invites contemplation. The drawings are arranged to move visitors from the public sphere (city, market, library) into more private realms (kitchens, bedrooms, memory), mirroring the arc of a day’s hunger: waking to need, seeking resources, and finding nourishment in community and art.
Artworks are on sale and 50% will be donated to Suomen Punainen Risti
Visitors are invited to move through a sequence that mirrors a day’s rhythm: morning light by the harbor, midday bustle of markets, afternoon quiet of a library, and evening at home. The drawings’ immediacy rewards slow looking, while the participatory corner offers a tangible sense of belonging, turning hunger into shared conversation rather than solitary ache.
Hunger for culture or hunger for food? asks not which hunger is more legitimate, but how both feed our humanity when they intersect. Enrico Mazzone’s drawings propose that culture and nourishment are two meetings in the same room—two ways we tell our lives to one another.