Self-topography examines the internal landscape. It understands identity as terrain — shaped by memory, displacement, language, experience, geography, and time. Like physical topography, it studies elevation and erosion, pressure and sediment, exposure and concealment. The focus shifts from external landforms to the internal structures that condition perception and presence.

This exhibition proposes paper as both medium and conceptual field through which such mapping can occur.

Paper may appear fragile, neutral, or secondary in the hierarchy of materials, yet it carries a powerful duality. It is surface and structure, skin and support, archive and erasure. It receives marks, absorbs pressure, folds, tears, preserves, and deteriorates. It is industrial and intimate at once. In the context of self-topography, paper becomes a site of investigation — not only something to work on, but something to think through.

Participants are invited to approach paper in the way they understand it. It may remain material — pulp, sheet, fiber, object. It may become conceptual — an idea of layering, recording, covering, imprinting. It may operate as document, as performance substrate, as installation surface, as projection field, as architectural intervention, or as spatial membrane. What matters is not a formal definition of paper, but the way each artist defines its role within their own mapping process.

The exhibition is anchored in the Morosini-Grimani Castle in Svetvinčenat, Istria — a site shaped by centuries of political, cultural, and architectural layers. Rather than treating the castle as a neutral exhibition hall, the project approaches it as an active spatial partner. Stone walls, vaulted interiors, thresholds, corridors, and courtyards become part of the dialogue between inner terrain and outer structure.

At the same time, the exhibition is not conceived as a contained event. Self-topography, as a concept, extends outward. Works may inhabit streets, the square, transitional spaces, and ephemeral zones of the village. Performative gestures, temporary installations, video screenings onto paper objects, and spatial interventions are welcomed within this expanded approach. The village itself becomes a layered map — not as historical illustration, but as living context.

The ambition is to create a field in which individual mappings from different parts of the world can coexist. Artists bring with them distinct climates, languages, memories, political realities, and material histories. Within this shared environment, these internal geographies are placed into conversation. The exhibition becomes a temporary cartography of difference and resonance — a spatial composition of multiple self-defined terrains.