Zweigstelle, 2007

Oberfinanzdirektion
Kuratiert von Giselher Hartung
Frankfurt am Main

(...) Christiana Protto, however, would hardly be the artist she is if she left it at that. On the contrary, in alternating media she takes as her own theme perception, translation and transfer under alternating conditions that also change with experience, both artistic and non-artistic contexts. Essentially this already applied to her "Home Abroad" intitiative, a platform which brought together different artists from all over Europe, each clearly influenced by more than one culture. it applies even more to the "mobile studios" she created many years ago as her own personal artistic form.

These works that Protto staged during her own journeys, in the context of scholarships and exhibitions all over Europe sometimes at galleries and museums, and others in greehouses, office buildings or even as an open-air tree house, are called "studiolo", "demeurante" or "Zweigstelle" (branch).
As site specific installations and potentially mobile studios, they strive to reflect the respective context and integrate the latter into the work. At the same time they inevitably prize it open and charge it.

They seem to be closed self-sufficient entities with vegetable and flower gardens, houshold items and knick knacks, furniture and books, red wine and cookies, sometimes objéts trouvés, sometimes compressed into an image in an abstract form. And always full of references to both the vile world of everyday life and that of art. (...)

Christoph Schütte,
Dong You Ji or The Art of Learning Chinese,
Christiana Protto – Dong You Ji,
Ed. C. Protto
Frankfurt am Main, 2010