Sara Zunino
/  Italy

Sara Zunino was born in Isernia in 1987. She grew up in
Liguria, and now lives and works in Florence. She graduated
in Sculpture from the Academy of Fine arts in Carrara in
2012. In 2013 she collaborated with the First Museum in
Florence. In 2014 she won a scholarship at the Museo Galileo
in Florence. Since 2016 she has been teaching Plastic and
sculptural disciplines in high schools and teaching Italian
to foreigners and migrants. She has participated in several
workshops, residencies and competitions, and won second
prize at Yicca 2020.
The work Hand luggage tells of the freedom of movement of
human beings as an inalienable right that people are often
forced to exercise at the risk of their lives to escape conflict
and poverty. In the aftermath of the Lampedusa shipwreck
in October 2013, doctors, lawyers and anthropologists
working to identify the bodies of migrants who drowned
at sea recurrently came across small “luggage”: plastic bags
containing a handful of their native soil. In the work on
display, Zunino evokes the symbolic power of that object and
that gesture with a brass plate on which she displays identical
bags of soil accompanied by their coordinates of origin.