Living is passing from one space to another while trying not to get hurt (Georges Perec)

Vuoti abitati [Inhabited Voids] originates from a question that runs through the thought of Georges Perec in Species of Spaces: how can one describe a space without forgetting that it is always inhabited, even when it appears empty?

An uninhabited room is not pure volume, but a repository of gestures, the passage of bodies, and sedimented habits. Even when it seems devoid of events, a space silently holds minimal presences, traces, and vibrations. For Perec, the task of writing is to bring out this hidden density: What happens every day and recurs, the banal, the obvious, the usual, the common, the ordinary, the infra-ordinary, the background noise, the habitual.

It is this ability to bring what is hidden to light that animates the works on view in Inhabited Voids. Six artists, through different languages, investigate emptiness not as an absence but as a condition of relation. Objects, natural landscapes, night skies, and apartment interiors appear as if waiting for a presence to complete them, and their intensity emerges in the openness they offer to the viewer’s gaze. The void becomes a possibility for dialogue. The artist arranges the space and captures its resonances, while the observer projects onto it their own questions. Each work in the exhibition is, indeed, a fragment of an inner space where something has disappeared, yet an echo remains—inviting one to pause and engage with the invisible. A sweater, a tree, a piano, shards of broken dishes: portraits of an absence revealed through the artistic gesture.

From the historical painting of Giacomo Balla, which set the tone for the exhibition, to the videos by Susanne Kutter, depicting the moment when order cracks and a fracture opens, to the domestic ghosts of Alexandra Barth, the viewer is invited to retrace their own memories while reading the works. In Luca Vitone’s Non siamo mai soli, space materializes as a fabric of invisible presences, where voices, scents, and memories bring forth the subtle dimensions of inhabiting. In the works of Alain Urrutia, subjects emerge from obscure surfaces, and the act of looking becomes one of recomposition. And so, in Alexander Brodsky’s works, provisional architectures that disintegrate under their own weight, temporary monuments where ruin becomes contemplation, and the inevitable disintegration of matter turns into a poetic act of resistance. Collective and individual stories intertwine with the landscape, as in the snow-covered and seemingly inaccessible peaks of Yerbossyn Meldibekov, which reveal the traces of explorers who climbed them, of those who narrated them, of politicians who used them to mark borders—named and renamed to commemorate an event, a historical period, a supposed national hero.