The project Via San Gennaro And winner of the fourth edition of the Italian Council (2018), competition created by Directorate General for Contemporary Art and Architecture and Urban Suburbs (DGAAP) of the MiC-Ministry of Culture to promote Italian contemporary art in the world, financing new works by some of the most significant Italian artists in strategic collaboration with Italian and international museum institutions. On this occasion, MAN developed a support program for Sonia Leimer in partnership with theInternational Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) of New York – one of the most established incubators of innovative contemporary art productions globally – where the project was previewed from September 2019 to January 2020 edited by Kari Conte and Luigi Fassi.

Via San Gennaro is the outcome of an intensive residency of several months by the artist in New York. During her stay Sonia Leimer conducted research on the Italian memories of Little Italy in Manhattan, a New York neighborhood symbol of the history of Italian migration to the United States, in particular from the southern and Mediterranean regions, a crossroads of individual and collective destinies between the twentieth century and the new millennium.

Divided into sculptural works, videos and drawings, the exhibition is a reconnaissance of a set of traces, phenomena and urban sediments capable of narrating the transformations of Little Italy together with the inexorable disappearance of Italian memories. The exhibition takes its title from the celebration of the Feast of San Gennaro which has taken place every year in September in Little Italy since 1924.

The exhibition is accompanied by an extensive catalogue published with ISCP and Mousse Publishing and accompanied by critical essays by Alessandra Cianchetta, Kari Conte and Luigi Fassi.