first-hand experiences led my gaze to explore how camouflage operates as a survival strategy within disturbed habitats, how they assert agency.  Sculpture, for me, necessarily involve an intensive co-labouring with native organisms over seasons. 

chromatic layering marks my signature: it’s an attempt to bring to the fore gestures of adaptation, boundaries and the ambivalence of belonging. 

still learning.

the ground zero happened in 2013: i found myself living under the same roof as a family of honeybees.  they swarmed indoors and settled for months, making my space theirs. was it a negotiation or an entanglement across realms? answers are still wandering.  we’re not so separate, i realised though.   this encounter marked my career shift from investigative journalism into visual arts.  subsequent, spontaneous cohabitations over seasons have led me to study their languages across sociobiology, art, architecture and ethnographic methodologies. i consider my research as a journey exploring the sense of awe and displacement, of being a participant, yet not a part, within communities mutually othered (urphänomen, 2016–18; tamed h/abit series, 2019–ongoing).

then came the moths. i owe much to their controversial labour, often labelled pestilent yet now recognised as vital for reducing forms of pollution. both of us depend on same environmental cues to stay healthy.  we me a decade ago by mistake, when i was an art student showcasing in a museum for the first time, perhaps with more excitement than awareness. after one month, the museum temporarily closed due to moth infestation: my first major exhibition (in buono stato, opera prima, 2016) became a sublime, unplanned collaboration, spreading life and decay across the pinacotheque’s walls, being the visitors the unique witnesses.

a mechanism of doing and undoing has since become my methodology: a way of listening to, processing, and conveying certain choreographies of control embedded in our relationality (esercizio di decenza, 2022; in secret dens, 2024). the creative process starts from the moment I collect organic materials from apiculture waste anywhere, and demands intensive labour distributed across different stages and methods.  techniques span across mosaic, fresco, carving, sculpting, feral practices, renaissance oil painting, coexisting with moths’ feeding, nesting, disruptions and life cycles until their winged presence physically alters surfaces and structural integrity of materials.  the process remains open until someone takes care of it, whether they are pollinators or human beings.  patterned environments – continuously reshaped by every organism that comes after, evolving in turn – embody, in my vision, the bare sense of existence.

chromaticity has multiple meanings in my practice, it first sets a physical space where things may happen underneath, regardless of my intervention: thereby species boundaries dissolve (the conference without any/body, 2024–ongoing).