In the 90’s you worked extensively on the meaning and impact of areas outside capitals or major cities as lateral territories. How do you envision their impact nowadays in a global society?
Art, as I understand it, always inhabits the marginal. The peripheral is not necessarily something geographically localized, but something discovered at the center. In the 1990s I worked a great deal on the concept of the lateral, on provincial life, at a time when the province was not fashionable. What I love about the province is its naivety, which I transfer into my work. When you live in a small town, everything becomes a myth. Today many marginal cities want to resemble large cities; they want to absorb themselves into the same image and this, in my opinion, risks destroying them. Yet in the periphery there still exists a form of magic that escapes change, an unplanned beauty. PRAISE BE TO UNCONSCIOUS BEAUTY.
Would you agree in saying that a dance floor is never simply a dance floor?
For me, the dance floor is a field that lights up, altering the perception of space. HYPNOTIZING SPACE. In my work CIRCUS, this traveling circus that I presented in various cities, it becomes evident: the tent, the suspended mirrors, the car headlights continuously bouncing light around, the sound crossing through the square all construct a moment in which space is no longer simply a container, but an active condition. Space does not remain still: it is captured, reflected, fragmented. This is why the dance floor, as in CIRCUS, is never simply a dance floor: it is a device that suspends reality and gives it back as a luminous, unstable, shared experience.
Will you ever leave Milan? And if so, where would you go?
MILAN TAKE ME WHERE I AM
“Echo and Narcissus” is your new neon installation, a single word that reads: ECHO. The work was created for a collateral project of the 2026 Venice Biennale at Casa Sanlorenzo. The installation is placed on a bridge near the Basilica of Santa Maria della Salute in Venice, within the group exhibition WAVES, curated by Sergio Risaliti and Cristiano Seganfreddo. Could you talk about the origin of the idea and how it was developed?”
The work draws from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, particularly the myth of Echo and Narcissus: two figures who never truly meet, but instead reflect, pursue, and consume one another in the space between word and image. ECHO thus becomes a suspended presence. In Venice, this resonance naturally intensifies: the city itself is made of passages of water and stone, of voices rebounding through the calli and fading into the canals. The word placed on the bridge emerges from this condition of threshold. The bridge does not simply connect two shores: it is a suspension between two worlds, a device that holds together what remains apart. The decision to reverse the word introduces a further overturning of perception, interrupting the habitual direction of language. Positioned in this way, the luminous word ECHO is reflected in the waters of the canal below, gradually disappearing according to the movement of the water.
Marcello Maloberti and Domenica Bucalo in conversation March 2026, Milan.
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