Linda Rubino

• Art in the age of ecological crisis: a conversation with Filipa Ramos

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  Curator Filipa Ramos discusses how contemporary art can shift mindsets, foster interspecies empathy, and drive urgent ecological change.

  We live in an era of profound planetary crisis. The accelerating realities of climate change, mass extinction, and systemic pollution have become the defining context of our time, prompting a powerful ecological turn within contemporary art. Artists are increasingly moving beyond simply representing nature to engaging with it as collaborators, advocates, and healers. At the forefront of this movement is Filipa Ramos, an international curator, writer, and thinker whose work consistently challenges anthropocentric perspectives. As a curator of major international biennials and editor of influential publications, she has become a key voice in articulating how art can foster a more-than-human worldview. Her new book, The Artist as Ecologist: Contemporary Art and the Environment, provides the framework for this conversation, outlining the key strategies contemporary artists are employing to confront our shared environmental predicament.
  Filipa Ramos (Lisbon, 1978) has charted a curatorial and intellectual path marked by an ever-deepening ecological engagement. Her journey began with a foundational focus on animal representation, most notably as the editor of the influential book Animals in Whitechapel Gallery’s Documents of Contemporary Art series. This inquiry soon expanded into a far-reaching exploration of interspecies consciousness through The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish, a long-running, interdisciplinary research platform she co-developed for the Serpentine Galleries. As a curator of major exhibitions, she has brought this vision to an international stage: from Bodies of Water (the 13th Shanghai Biennale) and Biennale Gherdëina ∞ (Persones Persons), to Bestiari, Carlos Casas’ immersive, multisensory installation curated by Ramos for Catalonia in Venice, presented as a Collateral Event of the 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia (2024). Across these varied roles, Ramos has cultivated a practice that moves from theory to lived experience, sharpening how we navigate the relationship between art and the more-than-human world.

  INTERVIEW WITH FILIPA RAMOS

  You’ve curated landmark exhibitions like Bodies of Water, which was directly inspired by the hydrofeminism of Astrida Neimanis. How do you translate such a profound philosophical concept into a large-scale biennial experience for a broad public, and how does this relate to the emerging blue humanities anthropological studies and oceanic thinking in curatorial practice?
  Bodies of Water, the 13th Shanghai Biennale (2020-21), was a project conceived by the show’s Artistic Director Andrés Jaque and I was honoured to join his curatorial team and contribute to his thinking. Astrida Neimanis’s hydrofeminism was not a theme to illustrate but a method to explore how art may address forms of fluidity, proximity and flow, between rivers, forms of automation and intimacy.  With Andrés and the whole team, I tried to think with tides, circulations and porosities: how works touch, leak into and modify one another; how audiences drift rather than proceed through fixed interpretive channels; how the biennial itself could feel tidal, rhythmic, unstable. The challenge in a large-scale public exhibition is to translate these philosophical insights into forms that can be sensed before they are understood ‒ humidity, resonance, sound, flow, dispersion ‒ so that visitors feel invited into a relation rather than instructed about an idea.

  

  Your work consistently moves away from anthropocentrism; in projects like Bestiari you use sensory immersion to decenter the human. What are the main challenges and responsibilities of curating for a more-than-human audience, and is empathy enough to drive systemic change? How can curators stage urgency and immediacy around climate breakdown?
  That is a very interesting question and I would love to conceive an exhibition for animals or plants, but Bestiari, a project I conceived with artist Carlos Casas for the 2024 Venice Biennale, was entirely dedicated to a human audience. What it attempted, however, was to invite humans to inhabit a sensorial position that is not strictly their own ‒ to feel the instability, vulnerability and altered perceptual scales that other beings experience every day. In that sense, rather than curating *for* a more-than-human audience, the challenge becomes curating *towards* a more-than-human awareness: opening up the conditions for visitors to recognise their entanglements and responsibilities within a shared, fragile environment.

  Your collaborative practice with Lucia Pietroiusti, which you’ve described as functioning as “one entity”, is a defining feature of your work. How does this model of shared curation shape long-term, research-intensive projects like The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish at the Serpentine? Do you see this as a space for what Claire Bishop calls relational antagonism, where conflict and asymmetry can surface rather than be smoothed over?
  With Lucia we are instinctively porous to one another’s instincts, doubts, obsessions and workflows. Projects like The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish do not have a singular authorial voice; they are shaped by our readings, listenings and mutual trust. I am not familiar with that notion of Claire Bishop (I read so little art theory, as I am much more interested in fiction and science) so I don’t know how to address that. What I can say is that the long duration of the project, and its permeability across disciplines, species and formats, emerges from friendship and enthusiasm, meaning that the curatorial framework is a relationship rather than a blueprint, an ecology of thought rather than a division of labour.

  

  FILIPA RAMOS’ CRITICAL PERSPECTIVE 

  The theme of “returning” seems to critique an urban-centric art world. In the spirit of Bonnie Ora Sherk’s The Farm or Fernando García-Dory’s INLAND, what role can art institutions realistically play in supporting regenerative agriculture and rural knowledge systems?
  The idea of “returning” in the book is not nostalgic; it is a critique of the centripetal force that pulls artistic value towards the city. Projects like Bonnie Ora Sherk’s The Farm or Fernando García-Dory’s INLAND propose that cultural production can be rooted in regenerative agriculture, in rural expertise, in forms of knowledge that have sustained life for centuries. Institutions can play a role, but only if they are willing to shift power and resources away from the metropolitan centre. See what Grizedale is doing for instance, or Salmon Creek Farm. This means long-term commitments: land-based residencies, collaborations with farming communities, funding that follows seasonal rhythms rather than fiscal calendars, and an acceptance that knowledge circulates differently outside the city. It requires humility ‒ institutions must learn to listen to territories rather than extract from them.

  The “performing” chapter highlights works like Sun & Sea. What is it about liveness and embodied performance that you feel is uniquely capable of communicating the emotional complexity of the climate crisis, perhaps in ways static objects cannot?
  Performance moves at the pace of bodies ‒ sweating, breathing, tiring, persisting. Works like Sun & Sea make us feel climate crisis not as an abstraction but as a physiological condition and ask you to choose the way in which you participate in them, physically but also emotionally and mentally, by recognising yourself (or not) in the kinds of narratives that the performers are singing. Liveness allows for a more complete relationship to simultaneity and contradiction, which are inevitable in the times we are living: beauty and dread, leisure and exhaustion, pleasure and ecological grief.
  This is difficult to convey through static objects, which often risk becoming illustrative, allegorical or didactic: about something. I’m interested in the way time-based media, including perfromance, can metabolise climate emotions ‒ not by representing catastrophe, but by revealing the fragile, rhythmic, low-frequency registers that traverse bodies and shape the living through ecological instability.

  The concept of “entanglement”, central to thinkers like Donna Haraway, appears throughout your work. How does this idea challenge traditional exhibition-making, which tends to separate objects, disciplines and viewers, and what might an entangled exhibition look or feel like in terms of display, mediation or institutional structure?
  Donna Haraway’s notion of entanglement challenges the historical role of exhibitions as separating devices: this object, that discipline, those audiences. To curate entangled exhibitions is to challenge and ultimately refuse those separations, that membrane (which often is physical: a vitrine, a frame, a cage). It means acknowledging co-dependence: that artworks, visitors, materials, climates, species and infrastructures are constantly intra-acting and that the classical divisions of subject-object, nature-culture, are artificial dualisms imposed by Westernised modernity.
  I never thought about the concept of entangled exhibition before so I don’t really know what it would look like. Maybe it tries to understand how to create zones instead of rooms; generate overlapping soundscapes; bring together displays that require care rather than control. Mediation becomes less about explanation and more about facilitating relations ‒ a guide rather than a script. Institutionally, this might mean cross-departmental teams, porous budgets, co-authorship with environmental scientists, farmers, activists or animal ethicists. Entanglement became a very trendy word lately, particularly since Merlin Sheldrake’s bestseller book. Yet it remains useful as a curatorial ethic and a spatial strategy.

  Looking at the theme “exhibiting” projects like Pierre Huyghe’s Untilled or Anicka Yi’s In Love with the World create living, evolving system inside institutions. What new demands do such works place on curators and museums that have historically been geared towards preservation and stasis?
  Works like Huyghe’s Untilled or Anicka Yi’s In Love with the World are not stable; they breathe, decay, adapt, sometimes die and to a certain extent exist beyond our control. For curators, this means relinquishing control and accepting that the artwork’s behaviour may contradict institutional expectations ‒ including the expectation of preservation.
  Museums need new protocols: biological expertise, adaptive lighting and ventilation, live-species welfare guidelines, maintenance teams that understand ecosystems rather than vitrines. These works demand that the institution itself becomes a living system. The question is not only how to care for the artwork, but how to care with it.

  EXHIBITIONS AND CURATORSHIP ACCORDING TO FILIPA RAMOS 

  Exhibition requires a certain amount of CO2 both to be produced and visited by people all over the world. From your perspective, what are the most concrete strategies curators and institutions should adopt at the earliest planning stages, not only to build compelling narratives about the climate crisis, but also to actually reduce and, where possible, offset the emissions their exhibitions generate? Where do you see genuine structural change, and where do you see greenwashing?
  Exhibitions, like most things we do, produce emissions ‒ through materials, shipping, travel, construction, energy. The question is how early in the process we confront that fact. For me, the planning stage is where the most meaningful reductions occur: local production rather than global shipping; reusing and adapting existing structures; slow travel; telepresence when possible; reducing scale; collaborating with nearby institutions to consolidate transports; prioritising works that do not require excessive technological infrastructure. 
  Offsets are not enough; they risk becoming moral alibis. Structural change happens when curators, artists and institutions accept constraints as generative. Greenwashing arises when sustainability becomes a communication strategy rather than an operational one ‒ when the only “green” thing in a project is its press release. 

  Finally, drawing on the “Reverberating” chapter, where you discuss Documenta 13 and its afterlife across art, science and ecology initiatives, how do exhibitions reverberate in the midst of the current climate and ecological crisis? Which curatorial frameworks or cross-disciplinary collaborations do you find most effective in turning that echo beyond the gallery into concrete ecological and climate action, rather than remaining at the level of discourse?
  In the Reverberating chapter, I reflect on Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev’s Documenta 13 (2012) because it showed, in a pioneering way, how an exhibition can behave like a seed dispersal mechanism ‒ initiating relationships, research clusters, scientific projects, activist alliances. In the context of the climate crisis, this reverberation becomes even more critical and I feel that her role needs to be better acknwoledged, as she really introduced discourses on ecology and science within mainstream art. 
  Some of most interesting frameworks that treat an exhibition as one moment in a longer trajectory: projects that have life before and after the gallery, and that build infrastructures for collaboration across art, science, ecology and local governance. What matters is not the intensity of the opening week but the durability of the relationships that follow. When exhibitions invest in situated knowledge, long-term accountability and transdisciplinary companionship, their echoes become forms of action ‒ not representations or metaphors.

  Linda Rubino

  Filipa Ramos

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  by

  Linda Rubino

  December 31 · 25

• Between time and matter: a conversation with Giorgio Andreotta Calò

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  Central figure of the Italian Pavilion at the Venice Art Biennale in 2017, Giorgio Andreotta Calò talks about his creative process, his relationship with matter, and the often-complex dialogue between the artist’s intuition and the mediation of the curator.

  The encounter with the work of Giorgio Andreotta Calò (Venice, 1979) was, for me, rare. With an educational background in the field of materials engineering, my gaze is used to deciphering the world through stress graphs and physical laws. And yet, in front of his works, that technical language was transfigured into visual poetry. His bronze Clessidre, born from Venetian briccole corroded by the tide, evoke in me the image of tensile test specimens brought to breaking point in the laboratory. But whereas I see a fracture point, a mechanical limit, Giorgio Andreotta Calò sees an imprint of time, a form that preserves the memory of the lagoon. This double reading, this bridge between scientific rigour and artistic imagination, is the engine of our conversation.
  Giorgio Andreotta Calò is one of the central figures on the Italian contemporary art scene, whose research moves between sculpture, performance and installation. His artistic practice is deeply rooted in the places he has crossed and inhabited, from Venice, his native city and inexhaustible source of inspiration, to Berlin and Amsterdam, where he completed his professional education.
  The recurring themes in his poetics are the passage of time, seen as a dynamic process of transformation, and stratification, expressed through an almost archaeological investigation of places and materials. Through works such as the Clessidre, the Carotaggi or performative actions such as Il Ritorno, Giorgio Andreotta Calò establishes a deep dialogue with matter, architecture and memory, inviting the viewer to reconsider their own relationship with space and time.

  

  THE INTERVIEW WITH GIORGIO ANDREOTTA CALÒ
  Your artistic practice often starts from materials, such as the wood of the briccole, which undergo a process of transformation over time. With the work Clessidra, however, you choose to translate this process into bronze. What does it mean for you to stop a natural process in such a definitive sculptural form?
  My intervention, in reality, fits into a much longer process of transformation that is already underway. The starting material is a tree, which is cut, worked and finally planted in the water of the lagoon. There, it undergoes a further transformation: the movement of the tides corrodes it, imprinting on it a visible trace of the ecosystem. I arrive at the moment when these poles, thinned out, break and drift away. I began to collect these fragments, fascinated by their forms. The sculpture is born from the mirror-like combination of two of these elements, generating the shape of an hourglass. This recalls the idea of reflection, but also the etymological meaning of the word: from the Greek kléptein (to steal) and hýdōr (water), “to steal the water”. The decision to translate all this into bronze is a precise intention: to give a fixed, crystallised and resistant form to an element that would otherwise be destined to wear away. It is a way of defining a precise moment, of freezing in a form a process that would otherwise vanish.

  You are experimenting with new technologies such as 3D scanning. How do you see this process evolving and the relationship between the natural and the mechanical element in your future work?
  We are now using 3D scanning and printing, which allows us a further passage. We scan the original piece of wood and then 3D-print it by inverting the algorithm, thus creating a “opposable” form, mirroring the starting one, like our hands. This fully realises the idea of reflection. It is a process we would like to carry forward, because it marks a meeting point between the natural element and the mechanical one, a hybridisation that is occurring more and more today. From here, we could think of using different materials, perhaps with reflective properties, which would open the work to a new dimension, transforming it into a threshold towards space and the surrounding environment.

  The exhibition at Litografia Bulla in Rome is an example of “four-hands” collaboration. How did it come about and why did it work?
  There the format of the gallery, “windows on the landscape”, already provided a very strong curatorial framework. They identified the street-facing window as a display, a diaphragm between the internal space and the public one. I was asked to work within this framework. My interest was to modify that transparent diaphragm, shifting the colouring of the glass towards aqua green to create an immersive, almost underwater environment. This colour reinforced the narrative of the work, linked to the part of the wood corroded by the water. The dialogue was very close-knit: they knew the space well and made proposals, but they also allowed themselves to be surprised. We had worked together on the prints, so we all knew the material very well.

  THE WORK OF ARTISTS AND CURATORS ACCORDING TO GIORGIO ANDREOTTA CALÒ

  
  Works such as Pinna Nobilis can be transformed or rethought in each exhibition. What are the main challenges for the artist and the curator in the face of works in mutation, and how is the poetry of these processes preserved in the exhibition set-up?
  Works have a margin of modification when they are placed in a space. At Ca’ Pesaro, the Pinne Nobilis were rethought in relation to the exhibition room. It was decided to insert them into the door jambs, attached to vertical pipes that recalled the set-up of the 2017 Biennale. On that occasion they were also turned upside down. This is possible because they are small-sized sculptures, more manageable. Works such as the Clessidre, instead, have their own fixity and less margin of modification. The real rethinking of the work takes place during the realisation phase, when one works on the wax. Once it is cast, the margin of change shifts to how the object is set up in the space, which requires a dialogue with the curator.

  In an exhibition such as CITTÀDIMILANO, you transformed Pirelli HangarBicocca using the device of the camera obscura. How can such a complex concept, which requires time and adaptation of the gaze, be made accessible to a non-specialist audience?
  I try to work on a stratification of meanings. A work must be able to open up to different readings, from the most immediate and formal to the deepest one, depending on the sensitivity and predisposition of the viewer. As far as accessibility is concerned, it must be understood in various ways. At times, a certain difficulty can push the viewer towards a more active investigation. At other times, choices must be made. For the Italian Pavilion at the Biennale, I had a discussion with the curator Cecilia Alemanni because the staircase we had designed was not accessible to people with disabilities. I was asked for a ramp, but I had to weigh up the aesthetic and functional needs of the work and those of accessibility. In the end I insisted, while knowing that I was excluding a portion of the public, because modifying the project would have weakened the final impact of the work. I do not believe that one must always sacrifice the strength of a work in order to make it universally accessible.

  

  The pathway-work Il Ritorno unites performance, time and territory. How can such a complex experience be transposed into traditional exhibition modes without losing its performative dimension?
  In this work we wanted to work on absence, or rather on an idea of waiting, of advent. The public was asked for an act of faith, that is, to imagine that in that precise moment in which they were inside the place of the advent, the place towards which the action of the return was tending (the Sculpture Garden designed by Carlo Scarpa), this return was actually taking place elsewhere, between Amsterdam and Venice precisely. It was a matter of working on the evocative power of a radical gesture, which excludes the physical presence of an object in the exhibition space but at the same time opens onto a possible imaginative dimension.

  How crucial is the curatorial or critical text for the understanding of the work, and what distinguishes an effective text from a superfluous one?
  I have always given great importance to the story that lies behind a work. Our archive grants ample space to this narrative part, because my works lend themselves to a complex narrative. Today, however, I see that there is little time to really focus on a work, and many texts are simply “copy and paste” of information taken online. Building a text that truly serves a purpose requires either a great sensitivity, which few have, or great dedication and study. It is a complex job.

  CRITIQUE AND FUTURE

  
  To criticise a work, is it necessary to place it in its present context, or is sensitivity alone enough?
  The work must resonate in its present. But it is also true that there are works that transcend temporality. I am more interested in this aspect: when a work manages to exit a contingent dimension and opens up to a broader, absolute reflection, almost outside of time, reaching a degree of absoluteness that makes it always current.

  Looking to the future, how do you both imagine and hope the relationship between artists and curators will develop?
  Too often I encounter an approach that I would define as “extractive” or “parasitic”. And this does not concern only curators: at times, artists themselves lack fundamental practical skills. There is a widespread incapacity to read a space, to manage the complexity of an exhibition set-up, to know even just how to “hammer in a nail”. This incompetence leads to delegating or to settling, weakening the final result. A curator, for me, is someone who engages with the work at all levels, from the logistical bases to conceptual research. I believe we will witness a natural selection: the current situation will put many fragilities to the test and will reward those who work with seriousness and dedication, those who are willing to start from the basics and build a real path of knowledge.

  What qualities should a curator possess today to create real added value?
  A curator is a person who has dealt with the full complexity of making an exhibition. A person who has also understood what it truly means to set one up: from how you move a crate to how you install a work, up to communication and economic strategies. It takes humility in recognising that there is a long path to follow before being able to curate an exhibition. You have to start from the basics.

  Press releases and projects such as Produttivo connect your work to debates on raw materials and socio-ecological changes. What is the role of the artist in this debate? Does an artist need to be an activist?
  I am not interested in creating works by default in order to follow the wave of a specific debate. Those works risk dying once the debate is over. I prefer to work on complexity, creating works that aspire to a more absolute value, almost outside of time, but which precisely for this reason lend themselves to different perspectives of investigation. A work such as the Sulcis Carotaggi can be read as a reflection on sculptural form, but also as a comment on the extractive economy or on the psychological perception of space. A complex work remains communicative over time and can be questioned by different urgencies, including the ecological one, without being confined by it.

  Beyond new production methodologies, what exhibition strategies and formats do you imagine could help regaining time, complexity and quality?
  New and different strategies must be activated. Each of my projects is born as a response to a situation or a limitation, which in some way generates a possibility and therefore an innovation. My studio, for example, is an absurd place in which to think of making sculpture; it is almost impossible in itself; and yet, this limitation pushes one to think of different strategies, to rethink the way of producing, perhaps returning to a certain way of making art. It is fundamental to return to a less agitated and compulsive dimension of making. Production must be reduced and more time dedicated to individual works, if only to regain that complexity in giving form to works that is progressively being lost. The general quality is decreasing notably. A lot is produced, exhibitions are made continuously, many of which are absolutely useless: they are more like parties that leave nothing behind. I believe that more and more a natural selection will be made between those who have embarked on this path thinking it was a shortcut and those who instead have taken it very seriously. We must try to make the complexity that lies behind a work understood, invest in its history, in everything that sustains it.

  Linda Rubino

  Studio Giorgio Andreotta Calò

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  The text has been translated in English using AI

  by

  Linda Rubino

  November 20 · 25

• Interview with Marta Magini: body practices between stillness and movement

  IT

  In this conversation, artist and performer Marta Magini explores oscillation as both a poetic and physical key to her practice. Through an interdisciplinary approach that weaves together design, visual arts, and performance, she investigates the thresholds between movement and stillness, making visible what usually remains at the margins of perception. 

  When our body cannot find a stable balance, it makes an almost imperceptible movement, the oscillation. It isn’t necessarily a sign of weakness or confusion. In fact, its very ambiguity is what makes it so compelling. It can signal the uncertainty that comes before a decision, but also the return to calm after an effort. Think of Sylvia Plath’s fig tree metaphor: Esther Greenwood sits between two branches, and each fig represents a possible life. But lingering too long among the options can become paralysis. Oscillating between equally desirable alternatives though only one may truly resonate. “Do I move or stay still? Do I do it or not?”. Yet oscillation is also what happens afterward: when the wave quiets, a direction is chosen, and balance slowly returns. In its mathematical purity, oscillation is a sine wave that never breaks: it slows, accelerates, continues. Perhaps oscillation is not a doubt to overcome, but a necessary motion. A space to pass through. And perhaps balance isn’t a fixed point, but a moment when we choose to go along with the rhythm. 
  This idea lies at the heart of the practice of Marta Magini (Senigallia, 1995), an artist and performer based in Venice. After studying Design and Visual Arts and completing a Master’s in Performing arts, she developed a research focused on the body and movement, and their relationship to activity and inactivity. We first met Marta during a studio visit while she was a resident at the Bevilacqua La Masa Foundation in Palazzo Carminati in Venice. What struck us immediately was the arrangement of her room: sheets pinned to the wall, metal plates scattered across the table alongside books, and a desk lit by the shy March sunlight filtering through the window. After the effort of climbing the entrance stairs, stepping into that space felt like holding our breath so as not to disturb a fragile atmosphere. We felt the urge to understand more, to ask her about the choices she had made. 

  

  THE INTERVIEW WITH MARTA MAGINI 

  Your path moves across design, visual arts, and performance. How have these shifts shaped your journey over time? 
  My path has been rather intricate, and at first glance, maybe even chaotic. But in truth, each step, especially in academic settings, was led by a kind of falling in love: with a context, a way of doing things, or an approach to study. It’s as if I’ve gradually fine-tuned my sensitivity to what truly interests me. What’s helped me most is a certain slowness that’s part of my nature (and that I’ve come to appreciate), along with many unconventional cues, decisive clues, and intuitions that prompted detours. Looking back, I see how these transitions, from design to visual arts to performing arts, weren’t ruptures, but shifts, evolutions, and integrations that sparked one another. Moving through such diverse languages and contexts helped develop a perspective that exists between disciplines and looks for connections, even in unfamiliar territory. 

  What draws you to move between mediums rather than committing to just one? 
  I feel uneasy relying too strictly on a single discipline. I’m far more interested in the possibility of entering from the side, exiting through the back, placing different knowledges side by side, even fraying the edges in an undisciplined way. I cultivate this expressive freedom with dedication and practice, and I see how precious it is: not just to keep my research alive, but also in working with other artists. In collaborations, and even in performances for other artists, the encounter itself demands openness: toward the other person, their tools, their sensitivity. This kind of relationship gives me space to explore what I don’t yet know, to pursue things I wouldn’t even allow myself to imagine alone. 

  Looking back, which concepts marked the beginning of your research? 
  During my Design studies, I worked a lot with ideas of non-functionality, malfunction, opacity, and repetition. I began to understand how important bodies are in the world of design. These were elements somewhat out of place in that academic context, but they started shaping my vision. From there, a thesis in Aesthetics on blurriness led me to Iuav to study art theory and history. At the same time, I continued training in dance and performance practices. Over time, the two paths started informing and contaminating one another. 

  

  THE TOPICS OF MAGINI’S WORK 

  When did you begin working with the idea of oscillation? 
  About three years ago, though I’d say the interest had been forming long before. One day, replying to a message, I realized that for weeks I had been answering “how are you?” with “like a swing”. That recurring phrase, rooted in something personal, opened up a wider reflection. A particular way of observing emotional states (not only my own), but more importantly, bodies, their movements, and the relationship between activity and inactivity began to take shape. That phrase turned out to be a clue. Since then, oscillation has become a recurring theme in my work as a way of being in the world, a condition of the body and mind, a way of moving through time. 

  What fascinates you about this oscillating state? 
  I’m drawn to the underlying ambiguity that every form of swaying carries or generates. Within it lie pause, suspension, relaxation, pleasure, joy, play, life but also waiting, boredom, fatigue, discomfort, obsession, burnout, and death. A child swings in the arms of an adult, the adult rocks the child, and the hanged man sways too. There’s sweetness, and also obsession. Obsession, and also sweetness. Oscillation is both motion and stillness. It’s an incipient movement, a threshold: something that could evolve or come to a halt. An activity that may look like inactivity and vice versa. I’m interested in working within these cracks, where movement is minimal but dense. 

  How do you explore unproductivity as a value? 
  Oscillation is also a way of exploring unproductivity as a value. I work with gestures that don’t produce obvious results, that linger in time. I’m drawn to movements that leave subtle marks, to gestures that whisper. I focus on the threshold between movement and stillness ‒ where it’s unclear whether the body is about to move, is coming to a stop, or is simply waiting. That’s where important questions arise: where does the impulse to move come from? When is a gesture useless? How does movement shape our experience of time? For me, there’s something vital in this idea of unproductivity ‒ it allows me to inhabit time differently, to slow it down, or bend it. It’s a time that shimmers, but without spectacle. 

  How do you conceive repetition in your work? 
  Repetition has always played a central role, and held deep fascination, not only as a formal tool but as a method. Repeating means crossing through something multiple times, flipping it, circling back, returning. Only then I can reach the surprise ‒ even in what I already know. 

  

  THE PROJECTS BY MARTA MAGINI 

  Your work  Luccica segreto  was awarded at the 107th Bevilacqua La Masa Collettiva. What is it about? 
  Luccica segreto (movement II in six parts) explores the dynamics of bodies and materials in oscillation: a study of movement as a tension between stability and instability, presence and disappearance. The work consists of six zinc engravings that break down a simple gesture: a body standing upright sways like a metronome. The moment of perfect balance never appears. The piece focuses on subtle shifts and instability. Even the viewer must move in order to see it: your gaze oscillates and enters into a dialogue with the represented body. A fine line under the figure’s feet hints at gravity, a central concept in my work. 

  In which new directions is your practice evolving? 
  Right now, I’m diving deeper into drawing, more than I had expected. It’s a practice I’m exploring with both an analytical and highly pared-down approach: tracing, copying, photocopying but never drawing freehand. This method allows me to observe the details of movement and its most delicate implications. I’m also developing a new performance project that builds on what I began with Swinging is like saying no no no (2023). My collaboration with Nicola Di Croce is continuing as well. With Nicola, I always find myself stepping outside my own research, a third space emerges, one that doesn’t belong fully to either of us but works incredibly well. We’ve just started a new piece titled The Skies Are Not Human, inspired by Bohumil Hrabal’s book Too Loud a Solitude. 

  What role do you imagine for curating in supporting a practice like yours? 
  To me, curating makes sense when it stems from deep listening. In my experience, I’ve met curators whose sensitivity has played a decisive role: they’ve helped me understand, clarify, even unlock certain aspects of my work. My practice needs time, closeness, silence, and a lot of emptiness. These are fragile but fundamental conditions. I believe this is where curating can be most powerful: becoming a discreet ally, a presence that knows how to hold space for what has yet to emerge. 

  Linda Rubino 

  https://www.instagram.com/marta.magini/

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  Linda Rubino

  August 7 · 25

• Art meets science in Loris Cecchini’s exhibition in Venice

  IT

  What happens when contemporary art dialogues with the physics and architecture of the past? The Venetian exhibition “Leaps, gaps and overlapping diagrams” by Loris Cecchini at Ca’ Rezzonico was not just an exhibition of sculptures and installations, but a visual laboratory in which complex scientific concepts take shape through matter.

  Loris Cecchini (Milan, 1969) is an artist recognized on the international scene for his ability to combine art, science and architecture. His installations explore the organic growth, modularity and vibration of matter. His works have been exhibited in museum contexts such as the Palais de Tokyo in Paris and the MoMA in New York. He also participated in the Venice and Shanghai Biennales. 

  LORIS CECCHINI’S EXHIBITION IN VENICE

  Leaps, gaps and overlapping diagrams, curated by Luca Berta and Francesca Giubilei, was on display until 31 March 2025 at Ca’ Rezzonico – Museo del Settecento Veneziano. The permanent collection tells a fragment of an era in which art and science were closely linked, albeit with different languages. Cecchini’s works fit in as organic presences, structures that intertwine with Baroque frescoes and furnishings. If in the eighteenth-century art was a means to amaze, persuade and tell mythological or allegorical stories, today it can be a vehicle to explore the invisible connections that regulate the universe. The exhibition unfolded in several rooms of the museum, starting from the external portego, where two large installations welcomed the visitor. Waterbones and Arborexence are composed of metal modules that aggregate into fluid shapes, as if they were growing spontaneously on the façade of the building. The reference to crystal lattices and molecular structures is clear: Cecchini builds a bridge between the microscopic world and the macroscopic experience of urban space. 

  LORIS CECCHINI AT CA’ REZZONICO 

  Continuing inside, on the second floor, Cecchini has installed Wallwave Vibration (Chorus Transition Probabilities), a modular sculpture that develops like a wave on the wall surface. The title itself refers to the concept of transition probabilities, a key element in quantum physics to describe how a system can change state over time. 
  On the third floor, in front of Giandomenico Tiepolo’s fresco, Il Mondo Novo, was Zigzags Particles (Telescope I), a telescope alluding to scientific observation and the revelation of new perspectives. In the eighteenth century, the new world was a metaphor for the geographical discoveries and optical illusions that fascinated the Venetian aristocracy. Now, Cecchini’s work invites us to explore the fundamental structures of reality through the gaze of contemporary science. 
  Leaps, gaps and overlapping diagrams was not just an art exhibition, but a journey through the constituent elements of matter. An opportunity to reaffirm that the boundary between disciplines is increasingly blurred and that art, when well-conceived, can be an extraordinary tool to make the invisible visible. 

  Linda Rubino 

  https://carezzonico.visitmuve.it/it/mostre/archivio-mostre/loris-cecchini-leaps-gaps-and-overlapping-diagrams/2024/03/20130/mostra-loris-cecchini/

  https://www.loriscecchini.com/

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  by

  Linda Rubino

  July 17 · 25

• In Venice Gulnur Mukazhanova and textile art as a mirror of the soul  

  IT

  The exhibition “Memory of Hope” by Kazakh artist Gulnur Mukazhanova, hosted in the Sala delle Colonne at Ca’ Giustinian in Venice, is configured as a journey into memory, identity and spirituality through the language of weaving. 

  The exhibition Memory of Hope in the Sala delle Colonne at Ca’ Giustinian is part of the project È il vento che fa il cielo. La Biennale di Venezia sulle orme di Marco Polo. It is an initiative of the Biennale’ Historical Archives curated by Luigia Lonardelli to celebrate the 700th anniversary of Marco Polo’s death. The Biennale’s Historical Archives thus becomes a reservoir of active memory, where the past is not just documentation but living material to build new narratives. The first stage of the project was in Hangzhou, China, with Il sentiero perfetto. The second stage, in Venice, featured Gulnur Mukazhanova, who explored the geography of a lesser-known journey, that of Marco Polo’s father and uncle, Niccolò and Matteo, across the Kazakh steppes, a place of connection and exchange between East and West. 

  GULNUR MUKAZHANOVA IN VENICE 

  Gulnur Mukazhanova (b. 1984, Semipalatinsk), after specializing in textile arts at the National Academy of Arts in Almaty, moved to Berlin in 2008 and attended the Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weißensee, deepening her knowledge of textile art and establishing a dialogue between her culture of origin and the European context. The Kazakh artist’s attention is therefore focused on little-known archives and stories, giving shape to works that combine the need to recover one’s origins and the desire to project oneself into the future. The Venetian exhibition invited the visitor to walk around the work along its perimeter, in an environment that has become a place of introspection. The three layers of fabric that cover it represent the different dimensions of human existence: body, mind and soul. Developed in an infinite shape, if observed in plan it reveals lines that ideally rise towards heaven and descend towards the underworld, resting on an oval platform that recalls a flame, a symbol of transformation and renewal. The layers depict the symbolism of the tree of life which, in the Kazakh nomadic tradition, has a profound meaning of union between the sky, the earth and human beings. The weave of fabrics, pouring like a waterfall onto the last layer, reflects the formation of personal and collective identity, the soul of every individual and society, suggesting that it develops through experiences lived thanks to the body and the mind.  

  THE WORKS BY GULNUR MUKAZHANOVA 

  The work communicates with the space by incorporating the columns that, from simple architectural elements, become visual obstacles capable of stimulating the visitor’s imagination, encouraging them to ask themselves what lies behind the columns. The layering of fabrics evokes a non-static identity. Many different textiles have been used: the merino wool felt stands out and it symbolizes the connection to nomadic cultural roots, the combed merino wool has been chosen for its fineness and softness, the white silk recalls light and the vegetable viscose velvet, a fabric historically produced in Russia until the 1980s, then banned for environmental reasons. All this is combined with scraps from Chinese production. Each fabric is worked differently to express specific conceptual qualities, incorporating symbols such as the dragon, a mythological creature as a metaphor for rebirth, continuity and spiritual guidance, and the phoenix, which evokes the ideas of regeneration and beauty. “In the archives there is living matter […] The archive is that instinct that we all have to classify in order to understand ourselves,” explained the curator Luigia Lonardelli during the presentation of the project at Ca’ Giustinian. 
  After Venice, the project will stop in Istanbul in the autumn of 2025, continuing the path of research and dialogue between cultures along the stages of Marco Polo’s journey. 

  Linda Rubino 

  https://www.labiennale.org/it/news/la-mostra-‘gulnur-mukazhanova-memory-hope’

  https://gulnurmukazhanova.com/

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  by

  Linda Rubino

  June 26 · 25