Artist statement
My practice is drawing-led and shaped by narrative. I begin with writing—short tales, scripts, notes—then compose mixed-media works on paper from defining moments in the story, alongside larger paintings that stand alone and carry the project’s atmosphere. Projects also extend into animated video loops and limited-edition artist books.
Recurring themes include memory, unfinished history, and diaspora/return, with Jewish identity as a central thread. In exhibitions, the works on paper unfold in sequence alongside paintings and looping videos, while selected writing and source material sit on reading tables—bringing viewers into direct contact with historical documents and the cycle between story, image, and process.
Giacomo Sanzani (Jacoov) | Bologna, Italy | www.jacoov.com
Sassi- Stones
Sassi is a practice-based research project that investigates the aesthetic and conceptual possibilities that emerge when Jewish memory is explored through a fictional narrative, grounded in historical research and articulated across multiple media and modes of artistic practice.
Artistic outcomes include drawings, video works and an artist’s book, alongside a feature-length screenplay draft that provides the primary organising framework for the narrative world: the story of the ghost of a sixteenth-century Jew who haunts the Italian beach where he died while fleeing persecution, en route to Tiberias—then Ottoman Syria, now Israel. The project was presented as a studio exhibition in Bologna, Italy, inaugurated by a public event on 1 December 2025. Dissemination continues through the circulation of the video works on social-media platforms and, in 2026, through the intended distribution of the artist’s book at art-book fairs.
An iterative, practice-based methodology underpins the project. Studio work cycles between screenwriting, drawing, animation of original drawings, video editing and installation tests, while historical, archival and theoretical research continually feeds back into and reshapes these processes.
Contextual Statement
Sassi engages with artists’ projects that integrate fiction and historical inquiry, such as Walid Raad’s Atlas Group (Raad, 2006). Raad’s fictional archives blur the boundary between fact and fiction and unsettle historical narratives and archival authority. By contrast, Sassi develops a legible narrative anchored in historiographical research. This approach positions the project at some distance from postmodern and conceptual practices that privilege deconstruction and ambiguity, instead foregrounding clarity and narrative cohesion as an aesthetic and ethical position in relation to memory.
The project also sits in critical dialogue with Yael Bartana, whose staged scenarios use invented political movements to unsettle Zionist and national mythologies (Bartana, 2011). Sassi instead builds a narrative on the documented history of sixteenth-century escape routes and support networks organised by the merchant-banker Gracia Nasi (1510–1569), who aided persecuted Jews and sponsored a Jewish resettlement project in Tiberias (Brooks, 2002; David, 2017). Grounded in a pre-Zionist project of Jewish return to the land of Israel, Sassi complicates any attempt to reduce Jewish attachment to the land to a matter of modern nation-building.
On the subject of memory, Holocaust studies provide a key framework. Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory describes how traumatic events are inherited through stories and images by generations that did not experience them directly (Hirsch, 2012). Sassi adapts this notion beyond the Holocaust, treating inherited, belated memory as a recurring pattern in Jewish identity.
The project’s narrative-centred structure draws on Henry Jenkins’s account of transmedia storytelling (Jenkins, 2006), in which a storyworld is dispersed across platforms and each element makes a distinct contribution, both as a self-contained artwork and as a fragment of an unseen world.
Project Documentation
