THE PROJECT

Iconoclasm of the Present is a research and art project investigating how societies redefine collective identity through the transformation, displacement, or destruction of images — from Byzantine iconoclasm to the fall of Constantinople and the contemporary removal of monuments. Each of these moments reveals a shared impulse: the urge to rewrite visual memory in order to assert a new order.

Images, whether sacred, political, or symbolic, are not relics but living, mutable entities, carriers of meaning that evolve through acts of resistance, erasure, or reinterpretation. Through historical research and artistic intervention, the project seeks to construct a visual narrative that examines how memory and oblivion are inscribed in urban spaces and embodied in artistic gestures.

The residency at Secant Space culminated in the very first exhibition of the new gallery — IN TRANSFORMATION a duo show with Ferhat Tunç, featuring an in situ work created by Emanuele in Istanbul. This exploration will continue and expand in Berlin, where the next chapter of the project will unfold.

©Marina Vysotskaia

Photographs © Bariş Özçetin

the workshops - tavolo vuoto

Tavolo Vuoto was a participatory workshop developed during Emanuele Resce’s residency, where conversation became a collective critical practice. Conceived as a space to inhabit the “void,” it invited participants to question the present and think together through traces, frictions, and shifting perspectives.

Organized in partnership with Saye and Urban, the workshop unfolded across both venues, adapting its format to each context. At Urban, it took the form of round-table discussions that encouraged shared reflection and open dialogue. At Saye, actress Gülçe Oral led a session focused on the body and movement, offering participants an embodied way of exploring attention, presence, and relationality.

Free and open to all, Tavolo Vuoto created a temporary commons where inquiry, experimentation, and collective thinking could unfold.

EMANUELE RESCE

Emanuele Resce (*1987 Benevento, lives and works in Milan) investigates the relationship between matter, the posthuman, and the dialectic between anthropogenic and geological time through sculptural practices integrating natural and industrial recycled materials. Employing archaic techniques and aleatory processes, the artist deconstructs the anthropocentric ideology of formal mastery over matter.

The suspension of control becomes a means of discovery, letting latent and discordant forms surface. His works adopt the method of reusing post-industrial materials common in Southern Italy’s suburban contexts, configuring temporal stratifications devoid of teleology, acting as cultural fossils where deep past and contemporaneity hybridize.