Arshake’s Banner is pleased to welcome Raffaele Fiorella’s (Barletta, 1979) Corteo —a procession of fantastical figures drawn from his suspended worlds, created in physical spaces using a variety of techniques and materials. In the digital realm, they now find themselves in a different state of suspension.
They walk through the digital dimension to the rhythm of time marked by the soundtrack composed for the occasion by sound artist Gabriele Panico. In this ethereal state, they retain the density of the sculptural material that gave them life in other worlds and contexts within the artist’s universes, always occupying an ambiguous position between fantasy and reality. The profiles of these liminal entities stem from the digital translation of the terracotta sculpture series Per una lunga attesa. In the sculptural works and in physical space, these creatures are generally seated, waiting for something; now they enter the digital space and walk, albeit always in a state of suspension and engaged in a continuous negotiation between balance and deformation, between growth and collapse.
Their journey challenges established ways of inhabiting, perceiving, and representing the world, just as Francesco Careri points out in his Walkscapes, as he reconstructs the genealogy of walking by traversing a wide range of experiences: from the nomadic journeys of prehistory to medieval pilgrimages, from Dadaist and Surrealist drifts to Guy Debord’s Situationist dérive and the Land Art practices of the 1960s and 1970s. He argues that walking:
is an art that embodies the menhir, sculpture, architecture, and landscape. From this simple action have developed the most important relationships that humans weave with the territory.
The space where Fiorella’s creatures march is a space devoid of recognizable coordinates, frozen in an eternal state of possibility. Time slows down and condenses into matter, made tangible even in the shadows they leave behind.
The march, whether funeral or celebratory, advances with that sense of lightness that seems to come from Calvino’s universe—a lightness that eludes weight without depriving it of its intensity, and that traverses space for an infinite time and within an interval where every transformation becomes possible.
Raffaele Fiorella (original sound: Gabriele Panico), Corteo, 2024–2026
This work, featured in the Arshake banner, is a transposition of a project created in 2024 and presented as part of the group exhibition “Play Dead!” at the Kora Centro del Contemporaneo (December 2024–March 2025) and as part of the group exhibition “Dove non siamo stati,” at the Santa Scolastica Archaeological Museum in Bari (organized by ARTES and sponsored by the City of Bari, curated by Giuliana Schiavone, with artistic direction by Elisabetta Sbiroli, set design by Vera Granger, and general coordination by Roberta Giuliani—October–December 2025).
Raffaele Fiorella (Barletta, 1979) is a visual artist and educator. After earning a degree in Sculpture from the Academy of Fine Arts in Bari, he completed a master’s degree in Multimedia Content Design in Florence. His work combines sculpture, installation, and new media, exploring Land-escapes: inner landscapes where memory, matter, and light converge through video mapping and digital projections. He lives and works in Puglia, where he teaches Digital Applications for the Visual Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bari, balancing his artistic practice with his work as a professor and researcher.
