Caterina Guadagno

Nothing gentle will remain is a publication inviting artists and audiences to speculate on how we gather together, now and in the future. The publication condenses a year-long exchange with Open School East and contributing artists Josefin Arnell, Pauline Curnier Jardin, Paul Maheke, Dipesh Pandya, Naïmé Perrette with Sara Giannini and Sam Keogh. 

The project was initially conceived as a series of artist commissions to be presented across Margate in May 2020. These performances, workshops and screenings were to engage with the different timescales, paces and rhythms of the seaside town. With a crowded beach and abandoned arcades, a turbulent sea and a century-old amusement park, Margate is a town that fluctuates between carnivalesque abundance and eerie absence. The region’s geological history as an island severed from the mainland, its ancient myths and daily tides form an environment where past, present and future overlap. Departing from these peculiar sensations of space and time, Nothing gentle will remain intended to invite artists and audiences to come together and take up space; to explore what might happen if we spill over and ooze out. 

In a radically shifting moment, when collective gathering has been called into question and all we have are our speculations on the future, Nothing gentle will remain reimagines this proposition. With contributions ranging from drawing and collage to poems, an incantation and a script of a performance that never happened, the publication serves both as a transient space to stage the artists’ work and as a manual for our future collective gatherings. 

Nothing gentle will remain is a collaboration between Lydia Antoniou, Caterina Guadagno, Nora Kovacs, Titus Nouwens and William Rees, in partnership with Open School East as part of the Curating Contemporary Art Programme Graduate Projects 2020, Royal College of Art, London. The publication is designed by Lotte Lara Schröder and developed online by An Endless Supply. The title is borrowed from CAConrad’s poem of the same name, published in ECODEVIANCE: (Soma)tics for the Future Wilderness (2014), with kind permission from CAConrad.

Caterina Guadagno’s practice focuses on cultural racism, policies of inclusion and the positions set up by the curatorial for accessing contemporary art. Her dissertation, On Refugee Crisis: Curating Opacity, reflects on cultural racism as a result of necropolitical systems of thought and their influence on the curatorial experiences addressing refugee crisis and narratives of displacement. Thinking through the notion of Relation as meant by Édouard Glissant and the theory of the Minor elaborated by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, her research investigates the ways in which rhizomatic structures of curating can allow Opaque identities.

For her graduate project, Caterina collaborated in the curation of the publication Nothing gentle will remain, originated from the partnership with Open School East. The publication reflects on the converging temporalities of a seaside town and invites artists to speculate on how we gather together, now and in the future.

Prior to her experience at the RCA, Caterina studied Economics and Management of Arts, Culture and Entertainment at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milano, graduating with honours. She also took part, with the support of a scholarship, to the Summer Program at the University of California, Los Angeles, attending the Film Studies Department’s classes of Art and Technique of Filmmaking.