For the 2026 edition of Art City, the spaces of the Carlo Gajani Foundation are contaminated by the work of visual artist Claudia Amatruda. The exhibition was born from an intuition of curator Sara Papini in collaboration with the curators of the Fuorisedia collective, to reflect on how to construct and enhance an exhibition itinerary within Carlo Gajani’s home-studio.
Claudia Amatruda’s body – technological, aquatic, cyborg – enters the spaces of the Foundation, a place that preserves the presence of the artist who lived there and which today welcomes a new form of the body as language. The focus of Amatruda’s research is hybridisation with the assistive devices made necessary in her life by a degenerative disease: not subtractive elements, but synthetic extensions that, absorbing the regenerative logic of the marine world, propose an idea of future and hybrid corporeality.
The exhibition, set entirely in dim light, is a tribute to the darkroom, turning the house-studio into an almost theatrical environment: the rooms remain dark while beams of light isolate photographs, sculptures, installations and video performances, allowing for slow, physical observation. Intuition created thanks to the curatorship of Fuori sedia and Sara Papini. The works transform the domestic space into an ecosystem in which the human and non-human body is landscape, archive and device of adaptation.
Co-curator Sara Papini talks about the exhibition in dialogue with the artist:
Sara Papini: What was it like to interact with the Foundation’s environment?
Claudia Amatruda: Interacting with the Foundation was difficult and stimulating at the same time. Entering a space already inhabited by an artist’s works means having to quickly understand how to make your own work coexist without disrespecting the place that welcomes you. It is a delicate balance and a great responsibility. I hope I have succeeded in this endeavour.
Can you reveal some of the works on display?
Of course. I will focus on two works in particular: Autoritratto Cyborg n.1 (Cyborg Self-Portrait No. 1) and Pinna Nuova (New Fin).
The centrepiece of the exhibition is the kinetic installation Autoritratto Cyborg n.1, funded by the C.M. Lerici Foundation and exhibited for the first time in Italy. It is a tank filled with water, supported by a metal structure and activated by a motor that generates continuous oscillation without ever causing the water to spill out. I consider this work a self-portrait because, despite being a mechanical body, it reveals the tension between control and instability: a body in constant search of balance, in which water becomes a metaphor for adaptation and dependence on the devices that regulate its movement.
Continuing along the exhibition route, we enter a more intimate room, immersed in darkness, from which Pinna Nuova emerges, a transparent resin sculpture made from a cast of my back. From it sprouts the dorsal fin of a marine mammal, an evolutionary extension of the animal that ensures buoyancy and survival in water. The sculpture thus takes the form of a mythological creature: invisible until light passes through its transparency, making it visible in space.
Sara Papini
