Exodus by Lea Gramsdorff does not correspond to a single exhibition or to a completed cycle of works. Over the course of almost ten years, the project moved through different places, materials and configurations, changing with each new presentation. The traces preserved in the archive allow us to follow its evolution: from the early works on canvas and paper to the multitudes crossing nautical charts, their emergence into physical space with Exodus.4, and the subsequent material transformation of Exodus.5.
The numbering of the project is not entirely consistent across contemporary documents. Reconstructing Exodus therefore means avoiding the retrospective imposition of a fixed sequence and instead observing how the work was presented, transformed and reconfigured over time.
2012-2013 - The Origins
The development of the project dates back to 2012, while its first documented exhibition took place in Cagliari in 2013. Exodus, a solo exhibition by Lea Gramsdorff curated by Inés Richter, opened on 7 March at in/visibile and remained on view until 30 March.
Elements that would remain and evolve over the following years were already present at this early stage: figures, objects, individual and collective memory, travel and displacement. Yet Exodus did not remain bound to a definitive form. Its subsequent presentations would gradually reveal the open-ended nature of the project.
2014-2017 - The Project Across Different Places
In December 2014, Exodus travelled to Berlin, together with Simone Dulcis’s Di Tempo Immemore, as part of the two-person exhibition Temporaneo e Permanente. The exhibition was held from 11 to 20 December at Kirsten Müller-von der Heyden’s Schillerstrasse 106 space.
In November 2016, the project was presented at the Machon Ha'mayim Gallery in Giv'atayim, Tel Aviv, curated by Doron Polak. In a later reconstruction of the project’s development, this presentation would be identified as Exodus.3.
A 2017 document from Berlin, Exodus. Notizen 2012-3, instead returns to the origins of the work and records some of the materials that entered into its construction: canvases, pages from a nineteenth-century Protestant Bible that had belonged to one of Lea Gramsdorff’s uncles, silver leaf, numbers and codes. At its centre is a question: Was nimmst du mit? - “What do you take with you?”
The documents reveal a project moving through different places while continuing to accumulate materials, images and new layers.
2019 - The Figures Leave the Charts
With Exodus.4, presented in March 2019 at the Museo dell’Emigrazione in Asuni as part of the Terre di Confine Filmfestival, a decisive transformation takes place.
Nautical charts have by now become part of the project’s vocabulary, crossed by multitudes of small figures. In Asuni, however, these presences no longer remain confined to the surface.
Describing this new phase, Lea Gramsdorff identifies the transition precisely: the figures “leave the charts and invade the space.”
Exodus.4 also includes Somewhere a way, an installation created in collaboration with Simone Dulcis: five hundred figures made of cellular concrete physically extend the two-dimensional space of the charts into the exhibition environment.
The transition is now clear: what had represented multitudes in motion on the charts becomes a three-dimensional presence in space.
2019-2020 - Reconfiguring Exodus
A few months later, Exodus changes configuration once again.
In Nel Tempo, an exhibition by Simone Dulcis and Lea Gramsdorff curated by Efisio Carbone at the Museo Diocesano Arborense in Oristano, Exodus is placed in relation to Elegia and Preghiere del Mattino. The exhibition, which opened in October 2019 and continued until January 2020, revisited earlier works to construct a new site-specific installation.
Contemporary documentation describes a new configuration of Exodus, created jointly with Simone Dulcis, in which the figures are sculptures and the skies are painted canvases. The project is not presented as Exodus.5: it retains its name and is reconfigured within a new environment.
A later phase, therefore, does not necessarily erase the one that came before it. Materials and images can be revisited, transferred and placed in new relationships, assuming a different function through their installation.
2021 - Exodus.5
In September 2021, a new number explicitly appears.
During the eighth Festa della Ceramica, held at the Giardini Pubblici and the Galleria Comunale in Cagliari, Exodus.5 was presented, consisting of three hundred figures made of raw earth.
Compared with the five hundred figures of Exodus.4, the project retains the three-dimensional dimension reached in 2019 while changing its material and configuration.
The transition makes the material transformation that took place over the years particularly clear: from figures on surfaces and nautical charts, to the five hundred three-dimensional presences in cellular concrete of 2019, and finally to the three hundred raw-earth figures of 2021.
Almost ten years after its earliest developments, Exodus thus retains its core while continuing to transform its form.
The documents preserved in the archive do not provide a consistently named sequence of Exodus.1, Exodus.2, Exodus.3, Exodus.4 and Exodus.5.
The 2013 exhibition in Cagliari is documented as Exodus; the 2014 Berlin presentation took place within Temporaneo e Permanente; the contemporary document for Tel Aviv in 2016 again uses the simple title Exodus, while later sources identify this presentation as the third stage of the project. Exodus.4 in 2019 and Exodus.5 in 2021, by contrast, are titles attested in contemporary documents.
For this reason, the archive preserves the title documented by the relevant historical source for each stage, rather than retrospectively applying a uniform numbering system.