Reassemblage: Roudhah Al Mazrouei, Alessandra Risi Castoldi and Natalya Marconini Falconer
‘We hold things in our bodies. The earth holds things in its body. In clay. In ice. The real. The unreal. Time. Each other. All the chances we had.’
Anne de Marcken
General Assembly and Teaspoon Projects are thrilled to present Reassemblage, curated by Gigi Surel. Bringing together the work of Roudhah Al Mazrouei, Alessandra Risi Castoldi and Natalya Marconini Falconer, Reassemblage begins from a shared intuition: that landscapes and materials remember. Rocks, pastes, copper sheets, stamps, industrial remnants and plant matter are treated not as passive supports but as things that have lived; things that quietly store the pressures of migration, ritual, extraction and care. The artists are unified by their concern with how such materials hold cultural memory, especially where personal, colonial and industrial histories are fractured or incomplete.
Drawing on Jane Bennett’s notion of vibrant matter, the artists approach stone, snaah, resin, copper, botanical fragments and industrial debris not as passive supports but as living materials – agents that hold, transmit and at times resist the histories impressed upon them. Each practice listens to the particular energies of its materials – how scent lingers or fades, how metal tarnishes, how paper burns or buckles, how a stone carries time. Memory is not simply something the artists depict; it is something that moves through pigments, metals, resins and scars in the land.
The title Reassemblage takes its name from the work of filmmaker and writer Trinh T. Minh-ha, for whom storytelling is less a matter of delivering fixed truths than of composing with life – of speaking from within the flow of inherited stories, repetitions and interruptions. For Trinh, a story is never simply one person’s property: it is a fragment and a whole at once, a weave of past, present and future that keeps accumulating in and through the body. Here, ‘reassemblage’ names the way each artist works with fragments – of ritual, archive, debris – recomposing them without pretending to restore a single, authoritative history.
Seen together, the works suggest, echoing thinkers like Stuart Hall, that identity is not an accomplished fact waiting to be represented, but a production: constantly in process, continually renegotiated through representation, place and material. Yet this is not a general, abstract identity; it is always situated – Emirati, Peruvian, Italian-British – shaped by specific ecologies, lineages and political histories.
Alessandra Risi Castoldi works explicitly with archives: stamps collected across generations, Italian botanical books from the twentieth century, images from scientific research trips. Through painting and installation, she reorders, cuts and re-situates these materials alongside copper, ceramics, matchboxes and light boxes. Botanical specimens become proxies for colonial trade routes; colour and gesture transform bureaucratic stamps into tiny theatres of desire and loss. Her installations often leave canvases unframed, floating in space, emphasising the provisional, unsettled nature of the histories they carry. In Risi Castoldi’s work, archives are not neutral repositories but volatile fields where questions of nature-as-power, capital and belonging are constantly being rewritten.
Roudhah Al Mazrouei’s practice turns toward what might be called embodied archives: rituals such as the preparation of snaah, objects like the murtaasha necklace, and materials drawn from the environment of Al Ain and the Hajar Mountains. In her film set in Qatara Oasis, the preparation and application of snaah become a living archive of girlhood, intergenerational care and the textures of Emirati domestic life. Sculptural works such as Murtaasha cast traditional forms in resin infused with snaah, preserving the colour and gesture of ritual even as its fragrance begins to recede. Bedouin resilience, desert ecologies and women’s knowledge are held in materials that endure and transform at different speeds, asking how cultural memory can be carried forward without being embalmed.
Natalya Marconini Falconer works with the aftermath of histories in southern Italy – Calabria and Sicily in particular. Her installations and sculptural structures emerge from gaps in familial and regional memory, gathering the material fallout of former cycles of industry, labour, migration and geophysical events. Altered found objects, casts and metalwork become provisional holding structures where personal recollections and broader historical narratives coexist without neatly aligning. Falconer’s practice centres on what she describes as material’s ‘timekeeping potential’: its ability to hold sensation and history when the body, or official record, falters. Rust, erosion and sedimentation are not just visual effects but temporal registers, marking the slow accumulation of lived experience.
Each artist, then, activates a different kind of archive – botanical and institutional, ritual and ecological, industrial and geophysical – testing how far material can sustain memory when narrative coherence is no longer possible. Though grounded in distinct geographies – Al Ain, Lima, Calabria and Sicily – they share an in-between perspective shaped by diaspora, migration and transnational upbringing. London, as the site of the exhibition, becomes another node in this network: a cosmopolitan terrain where these disparate materials and histories encounter one another and are reassembled anew.
Reassemblage proposes that history and identity are not fixed stories to be recovered intact, but processes that unfold in and through matter. By working with archives and residues – stamps and herbariums, desert rocks and scented paste, industrial debris and casts – the artists show how memory persists, mutates and sometimes resists at the level of things themselves. In doing so, they propose an invitation to attend to the quiet agencies of materials and to the unfinished stories that continue to gather within them.
