The exhibition opens with the work of Vettor Pisani, for whom the island represents a constant symbol of eternal return and a continuous alternation between catastrophe and rebirth, isolation and openness, memory and desire.

In Laura Gianetti’s works, the island takes shape as both body and landscape, assuming the form of an ecological warning and a possibility of arrest. Photography and sculpture offer snapshots from the abyss, in which the island’s emergence and submergence as a utopian horizon opens onto an awareness of the present.

Matteo Peretti addresses the theme of the island as a site of proliferation and ruin within contemporary language. Agglomerations of objects and consumer materials become microcosms suspended between accumulation and cultural and productive catastrophe.

Philip Topolovac’s works focus on mental projection toward real, imagined, or lost places. Sculptures and installations evoke individual and collective utopias, sedimented like archaeological remains and suspended between memory and desire, ultimately tending toward dissolution.

Finally, Sebastian Stumpf explores the island as a physical and performative experience. Through actions documented in photographs and videos, his work questions the unstable boundaries of landscape and body, imagining new possibilities of perception.

The journey toward the island begins with Vettor Pisani, who conceived the island as an inner projection and a double in which catastrophe and rebirth, isolation and openness, memory and desire alternate.

In his works, the Island of the Dead by Arnold Böcklin appears repeatedly, returning as a symbolic place in the Virginia Art Theatrum – Museum of the Catastrophe in Serre di Rapolano (Siena), his Philosophical House, as well as on the islands of Capri and, above all, Ischia, where he spent long periods of his life.

In his drawings, the image repeatedly links the profile of the island to that of the forehead of the figure gazing at it, while in the PVC digital collages various sacred and profane figures (from Oedipus and the Sphinx to Umberto Bossi) stand out centrally like ghosts, prophecies, and memes on a stage.

Pisani’s entire oeuvre—self-defined as R.C. Theatrum – Rosicrucian Theatre, a theatre of the psyche in which esoteric doctrines are cited as a way out of the tragic history of the ego, of Oedipus, and of the West—projects onto the island an eternal return of catastrophe and virginity.

In the two works on display, ‘La Sposa di Vettor Pisani’ and ‘La fidanzata di Gino Vampirelli’, the repetition and conceptual duality of ‘eros and thanatos’ are represented in the alchemical image of the Muse with a skull and skeleton, set against the backdrop of Böcklin’s island.

A parallel vision of figure and island appears in Laura Gianetti’s photographic work Pantalassa, part of the Orogenesis series (2008).

Here again, a female figure becomes the island itself, gazing upward with her mouth open to receive a drop of water falling from above.

The image evokes scenarios of drought, introducing a warning and an ecology of the mind.

The depicted profile is inspired by Gorgona, Europe’s last prison island, part of the Tuscan Archipelago National Park. This unique reality—both a protected natural environment and a model of social and rehabilitative practice for inmates—is set in contrast with the impossibility of a suffering ecosystem.

The sculpture I swear this is the last time presents itself as a resin parallelepiped containing the cast of a hand in plaster and stabilized moss. The intimate scale of the work recalls the gesture of an oath, transforming it into a silent and solemn act. The hand, an instrument of making and building, here becomes the site of historical responsibility. Through it, humankind has shaped the world, but has also exploited and consumed it.

The title evokes a fragile promise, repeated and perhaps already broken. The moss—alive yet stabilized—introduces a nature deprived of its vital cycle, reduced to a relic that survives as a trace of a lost balance, while the resin further crystallizes its condition of stasis. The sculpture thus takes the form of a submerged island, separated from time and from the world. If in Pantalassa the island emerges as a sign of drought and lack, here submersion becomes a metaphor for arrest. The only possibility of survival lies in stopping the hand. The oath remains open, entrusted to the gaze and responsibility of the viewer.

As in the work of Vettor Pisani, virginity in Matteo Peretti’s practice functions as the counterpoint to catastrophe. In the former it is embodied by the Muse, in the dual version of Virgin and Prostitute, while in the second, innocence and irony, the detonating agents of the work.

His works, composed of agglomerations of toys, are islands of childhood and, at the same time, catastrophes of consumerism, technology, and language.

This same radical synthesis is found in his installation and performance works, which possess a strong communicative and reflective character.

Among these, an installation featuring crates of glass bottles and an amphora is re-presented in a version adapted to the space, differing from the original 2018 configuration in which the crates formed an island.

While this work shines a spotlight on the islands of consumerism, omnipresent and invasive in the gallery space as in reality, through a comparison between individual water requirements in the past and present, the second work on display develops the series of works created with plastic materials such as bags, plastic bottles and PET, representing the islands of waste that now occupy the sea like continents.

Visual and mental projection toward a place characterizes Philip Topolovac’s works, whether it be an unknown site—such as a decommissioned satellite drifting through space—a place of memory like the Colosseo Quadrato in the work Brazier, or an imagined location such as the technological “Aggregates,” mysterious islands positioned in the corners between walls and ceilings.

The exhibition presents an evolution of Topolovac’s famous work “I’ve never been to Berghain”, in which the famous Berlin techno club is imagined as a cork model similar to an archaeological find from the past seen from the future, reproducing the Baroque tradition of reproducing iconic monuments as precious cork souvenirs.

The interpretation of the title alludes to the fact of never having been there and to the projection of a desire, therefore to a utopian place and a utopia that existed in the transformation of an industrial production site into a techno club.

The work “and the music played on” features several wax models of Berghain melted on top of each other to represent individual memories and utopias that have vanished.

As a tension toward a place or toward infinity, the island is a recurring motif also in the work of Sebastian Stumpf.

In particular, in the first work exhibited, Iles san nom (2022), he traveled by kayak along the northern Atlantic coastline of Brittany (France), photographing fragments and rocks that cannot be named due to their small size and their mutable condition depending on the tide. Part of the exhibition consists of the map of the explored route.

In his site-specific performance on the remains of the Neronian Bridge on the Tiber River in Rome (2024), he stands vertically upside down, balancing on one hand. On view are two photographs from the work Tiber, capturing different moments of the river’s water level, in its aspects as island and ruin.

Through his individual and isolated actions, which appear extreme and subversive, Sebastian Stumpf overturns predefined conceptions of space, often projecting them back onto the very sites of performance in order to make a new possible experience perceptible.