The pristine whiteness of a room in the Galleria Alfabeto Bianco is disrupted by Camilla Alberti's immersive installation, transforming the space into an artist's studio. Typically, visitors are accustomed to admiring artists' works only when they are finished, polished, and gleaming in exhibition halls. Here, however, they have the opportunity to witness the generative process firsthand. Although Camilla Alberti (Milan, 1994) dabbles in various artistic techniques, she is primarily a sculptor. The walls are lined with the technical tools and materials necessary for the production of her sculptural series Unbinding Creatures—currently consisting of 35 pieces. The eye roams over various objects, some of natural origin, others man-made. There are fragments of steel, aluminum, and iron—scraps and remnants of industry—alongside roots, lichens, and woods from different plant species. Even though we have daily interactions with each of these elements, it's hard to recognize their origins. Some are mechanical components of very ordinary objects—like bicycles or cars—but the part without the whole loses its meaning. The same applies to the plant species, which, when removed from their original context, are difficult to identify. The artist's methodical approach thus includes a multitude of elements that blend together simultaneously, yet do not overlap, resulting in an immersive installation where the artist's studio straddles the line between a botanical lab, a body shop, and an artistic creation space.
All these materials are the result of urban or rural explorations, during which the artist collects what society discards or forgets. These are alienated objects, carefully and precisely gathered by Camilla Alberti and set aside for a hypothetical future. During the collection and accumulation of material, every decision is postponed, allowing the fragments to interact with each other in this space: objects no longer inert executors of our commands, but forms and signs with their own stories subject to new interpretations and discoveries. To describe the atmosphere in this room, the words of French poet André Breton come to mind: "These are objects that daily fall under our senses and compel us to consider everything that might be outside them as illusory" (Crisis of Objects, 1936). Even today, in this room, we are faced with the silent life of things, the mystery that accompanies objects that ignore and are ignored by humans.
ARTIST: Camilla Alberti