Angie Venturini

They Told Me It Was Important: Parable of a Name is a project born from an unlikely archive: people, objects, and symbols connected only by the name Garibaldi.

The figure of Giuseppe Garibaldi, hero of Italian unification, reappears here in everyday, banal, sometimes grotesque forms. In the coexistence of the sacred and the ordinary, between important and insignificant figures, between symbol and surface, between grand History and minute stories, the identity of a fragmented and dissonant group emerges. Today, that name survives in bodies and contexts that share nothing but the word itself. Banality and historical weight coexist, shaping a symbolic space where identity and memory overlap and merge.

In this unusual archive, the name Giuseppe Garibaldi becomes a pretext to question the meaning of belonging and how it relates to identity: what does it mean to be part of something? What truly holds us together? Here, the only bond is a shared name, and perhaps it is precisely this that reveals the arbitrariness of what draws the boundary between those inside and those outside.

The project reflects on the performativity of history and the fragility of boundaries—geographical, linguistic, semantic. It moves between a past that drew clear lines and defined territories, and a present in which the stubborn defense of those boundaries increasingly seems anachronistic, disproportionate, inadequate to the complexity of reality.

The constellation of “Garibaldis” thus becomes a metaphor for today’s contradictions: at a time when national identity is often used as a tool of exclusion, They Told Me It Was Important proposes a dissonant counter-archive that challenges the illusion of coherence in official narratives—those that claim to explain who we are, where we come from, and what unites us. Through absurdity and multiplicity, the project questions the symbolic strength of names, borders, and narratives that still shape our sense of “us.”

video installation, book, engraved plexiglass, wallpaper