Delphine Valli. The Impossible Present. Caleidoscopio

From September 25th to October 25th, 2025, BUILDING TERZO PIANO presents The Impossible Present. Caleidoscopio, a site-specific project by Delphine Valli curated by Melania Rossi, which brings together a series of unpublished works and photographs, texts and installations, in a multiplicity of media. The exhibition occurs two years after the publication of the book The Impossible Present, published by Parallelo42 Contemporary Art, on the occasion of the artist’s research residency in Marrakech, after her victory of the Grant Italian Council for Research in 2021.

The Impossible Present. Caleidoscopio is presented as a multifaceted visual narrative, a layering of memories and an intertwining of art and life. The artistic residency in the red city at LE 18, a multidisciplinary cultural space located in the medina, was experienced by Delphine Valli (Champigny-sur-Marne, France, 1972) as a journey of reconnection with the Maghreb of her childhood, and with the visual culture in which she grew up until the age of sixteen which shaped her artistic sensibility.
Beyond the space-time horizon that separates places and experiences, the body of work presented in the exhibition explores the dialectical relationship between the tangible and intangible. Writing, which has always been present in Valli’s practice, becomes an essential form in the encounter with Arabic geometric calligraphy and photography, which draws with light, makes visible what is essentially absent.

The beam arranged in the space of BUILDING TERZO PIANO are the materialization of the graphic projects presented in the book, and relate to the void that surrounds them, entering into relationship with it.

The aim of the exhibition is to give back in a multifaceted way the project collected in the book, and, at the same time, offering an interpretation of the individual works made over time in light of the artist’s encounter with Islamic visual culture. Highlighting the most imperceptible aspects of the experience, The Impossible Present. Caleidoscopio plays on the constant relationship between the material and the immaterial, between memory, vision and creation.