AHA X WD: Nicola Guastamacchia and Baratto & Mouravas

Join us for the third event of collaborative programme between the Archaeology–Heritage–Art Research Network and West Dean College. This series of online talks brings together artists, academics, and writers whose work engages with, and at times subverts, the practices, politics, and theories of archaeology, critical heritage studies, contemporary art, and craft.

The speakers

Baratto & Mouravas 

Baratto & Mouravas are Nicola Baratto (IT, 1989) and Yiannis Mouravas (GR, 1986), an artist duo working with Archaeodreaming, a research-based method of artistic practice developed through their collaboration. 

This experimental archaeology explores histories and mythologies along the overlaps between archaeology and dreaming. Seeking to craft non-linear and poetic ways of storytelling, while entangling daily work with subconscious nighttime experiences. The resulting outcomes are told through mixed-media installations, including films, artist books, and sculptures. They are alumni of the Dirty Art Department and former Sandberg Instituut Amsterdam research fellows.

Nicola Guastamacchia 

Nicola Guastamacchia works at the intersection of art, law and politics, combining conceptual strategies with juridical inquiry to examine how symbols, traditions and collective habits are codified and reproduced within institutional frameworks across Europe, the Mediterranean and Italy. His projects engage with the shifting ideological foundations of national identities and the hegemonic forces that sustain them. Political imaginaries are approached both through their public symbols and forms of self-identification, and through intimate engagements with personal history, domestic memory and archival material. Moving between structural analysis and lived experience, his work considers how systems of representation consolidate authority and how inherited narratives continue to shape contemporary forms of belonging.  

Nicola holds a full degree in Law, the MLitt in Modern and Contemporary Art from the University of Glasgow, and the MFA in Fine Art from Kingston School of Art, where he studied at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP). He is currently pursuing the PhD in Fine Art at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Catania. From 2017 to 2020 he served as Exhibitions Manager at Richard Saltoun Gallery, London. In 2020 he received the Italian Ministry of Culture’s “Cantica 21” Award, followed by solo exhibitions at Fondazione Pino Pascali and the Italian Cultural Institute in Tunis in 2021. His work has been shortlisted for the Exibart Prize, the Nocivelli Prize and the “Un’opera per Castel Sant’Elmo” Award at Museo del ’900, Naples. In 2022 he was awarded the Fondazione Ducci Prize (Rome) after partaking to the “Mare Nostrum – SeaCrossArt” residency in Fez, Morocco. His projects have been presented at the Italian Cultural Institute in London, the Italian Embassy in Ankara, among other venues. Nicola is co-founder of VOGA Art Project and director of In-ruins.