Roman Rhapsody
Collective exhibition with Sultan Çoban, Gabriel Stöckli, Margaretha Jüngling, Viola Leddi and Eva Zornio at Lateral Roma
15.03.26-04.04.26

Roman Rhapsody is a collective exhibition that emerges from the shared condition of living and working together as residents at the Istituto Svizzero over an extended period. The word «rhapsody» derives from the ancient Greek «to sew» and «song», suggesting sewing songs together. The show could be therefore understood like an instrumental composition. Shaped by shared lived experiences in Rome and by the collective framework in which their practices temporarily converge, the artists’ research unfolds at Lateral Roma through proximity, exchange, and everyday coexistence. Each practice maintains its own rhythm and logic while remaining open to contamination, friction, and mutual influence. The exhibition thus becomes a field of relations—an environment that allows multiple forms of attention and engagement to exist side by side.

This large drawing is part of a series that I started during my residency at the Swiss Institute in Rome, where I was interested in the tension between christian symbolic and carnivalesque cosmogonies. I discovered the latter through the French anthropologist Claude Gaignebet, which showed me an entire worldview and its myths, rituals and calendar, which gradually disappeared at the beginning of the modern period. This more joyous “version” of christianity – which had a certain porosity with pagan practices – contains however very poetic and inspiring motivs, which influenced my drawings and some poems I wrote during my stay in Rome.

In Marelle, I depicted an almost life-size hopscotch game that leads to an anamorphosis of a skull, which I borrowed from Holbein’s “The Ambassadors”. This children’s game represents a rite of passage, a moment of transition – from childhood to adulthood, from life to death – in which we go from an asymmetric, instable position (on one leg) to a symmetric – stable – position (standing on both legs). It’s a motif that might be linked to labyrinths that can be found in certain cathedrals (in Ravenna or Auxerre for example), which were used for circular dances during carnival and possibly also represented the pilgrims journey to redemption. It is a drawing that speaks of change, and the journey that we are on. 

Switzerland sweet Switzerland
Exhibited during the exhibition «The pastry show» at Dagnino in à Rome.
18.11.25-23.11.25

In this exhibition I am showing a series of three plates made of chocolate. This type of plates were produced in ceramic during the 18th century for bourgeois and aristocratic families, and include a trompe-l’oeil representation of wood and an engraving with a landscape, which I chose to replace with images of swiss glaciers.

The combination of the wood that suggests a homely atmosphere, the images of glaciers, as well as the fact that they are made out of chocolate – for the production of which Switzerland became famous – results in a very stereotyped representation of “Swissness”.  But this sweet reminds us above all of our bitter colonial past in which Switzerland has participated, even though it has gone through great lenghts to hide it. The swiss companies that invented the very popular milk chocolate chose to publicise the origins of their milk – showing the swiss alpine life, mountains and cows – instead of mentioning the origins or working conditions of the main ingredient of their product. This marketing worked very well, since today the average swiss person eats about 11 kilos of chocolate per year. Given that Cocoa beans do not grow in Switzerland, the ecological toll of this industry is not negligible and contributes greatly to global warming.

I chose to work with chocolate because of its organicity: I liked the idea that this idealistic representation of switzerland will decompose and eventually disappear. It also resonates with the undergoing changes of the landscapes and alpine life that these companies used in their marketing, since they are menaced in their existence by global warming.

Man isst was man isst
Film made in 2025 thanks to a research grant awarded by the Geneva Cultural Service

After “Flunked”, I wanted to make a less narrative animated film and work on the relationship between matter and animation in order to offer a reflection on stop-motion. I wanted to explore what fascinates me about this medium: animating the inanimate, bringing it to life. To play with this ambiguity, I animated perishable, organic materials, which allowed me to highlight their decomposition process. The result is a composition reminiscent of a classic still life. After a short while, the song “Life Is Life,” taken from a video of Diego Maradona training – with the sound of the crowd still audible – begins to play, and a character made of organic, edible materials gets up and starts dancing. It dances and dances, and as they do so, we can observe the different elements rotting and falling apart, and see the change that time has wrought on the character.

This film allowed me to continue my practice of sculpture and installation in a different way, where I like to work with fragile materials and put them to the test with techniques and crafts that I repurpose in a “DIY” way. The temporal dimension is important here: the animated elements become a kind of clock bearing witness to the filming time, where two weeks are reduced to three minutes.

Link: https://youtu.be/1PsF5yV5RC8