Nostalgism

Nostalgism
Multi-channel audio-video installation
Overall dimensions variable
2026

Ancestors Syndrome
Coated aluminum
Overall dimensions variable
2025

Nostalgism explores nostalgia as both a condition of contemporary anxiety and a tool instrumentalised by neoliberal socio-economic systems. Emerging alongside Western modernisation and the Industrial Revolution, nostalgia became linked not only to homesickness, but also to longing across physical and temporal distances shaped by migration, labour, and military displacement. The project examines how this emotion is mobilised to support nationalist and ideological narratives through idealised visions of the past, while proposing alternative understandings of nostalgia as a way to challenge dominant ideas of progress and imagine counter-hegemonic futures.

Rooted in the artist’s generational ties to Naples, the work takes a situated perspective shaped by personal, familial, and geographic connections to the city. It considers how nostalgia is shaped across generations by social and political contexts through migration, class division, and the historical tensions between northern and southern Italy.

The project includes:
A multi-channel video work (Nostalgism, 2026) filmed across Naples and its surroundings, including Mount Vesuvius, the city’s historic alleys, abandoned seafront factories, and a former NATO base. Its fragmented, non-linear structure reflects histories of displacement and instability shaped by geological, militaristic, and economic forces. The work is co-authored with Moccia’s family members, who gave formal and informal contributions to the research, taking roles in planning the shoot, selecting locations, filming scenes and recreating gestures from archival photographs and films. The video is displayed on screens varying in scale and format both analogue and digital, showing footage filmed on a range of devices emphasising lens and image distortion.

A large-scale sculpture (Ancestors Syndrome, 2025) is composed of fragmented aluminium casts derived from geological maps of Vesuvius, including formations created by the 1944 eruption during the US occupation of Naples in World War II. Referencing the displacement of the artist’s grandmother from the mountainside to the city, the sculpture exists between collapse and reconstruction, embodying unresolved forms of emotional, social, and cultural inheritance.

Installation views at Temple Bar Gallery + Studio Dublin. Ph. Ros Kavanagh

Nostalgism is produced by Careof, in collaboration with Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, Collezione Agovino, WhiteSpaceProjects Napoli, IIC Dublin.

Film Credits
With Annamaria Moccia, Brigida Moccia, Claudio Fontanarosa, Cristina Nasti, Edoardo Moccia, Gennaro Cera, Giuseppe Moccia, Lorenzo Moccia, Nicoletta Moccia, Sara Moccia.