Michele Ciacciofera. Lettere Mediterranee

opening: Tuesday, October 28th, 2025, from 5.00PM to 8.30PM

From October 29th to December 20th, 2025, BUILDING GALLERY presents the exhibition Lettere mediterranee by artist Michele Ciacciofera (Nuoro, 1969), represented in Italy by the gallery.

The exhibition, which is the second solo show that BUILDING has dedicated to the artist after Condensare l’infinito (2024), is displayed across three floors of the gallery and offers a comprehensive overview of Ciacciofera’s graphic, pictorial, sculptural, and installation work focusing on historical, anthropological, and political themes related to the Mediterranean, including new productions, historicized works, and previously unseen reactivations.

Memory, ancient and contemporary myths, archaeology, magic, literature, nature, and ecology are the open chapters that will allow visitors to interpret Michele Ciacciofera’s work from recent years according to a thematic itinerary conceived specifically for each floor of BUILDING GALLERY.

Alongside new works created specifically for the exhibition, Lettere mediterranee presents, for the first time in Italy, the reactivation of some of the artist’s emblematic works, such as the installations Janas Code (2016), Terra Madre (2024), and The Hand of Nature (2024).

The title of the exhibition, Lettere Mediterranee, refers to the central role played by the Mediterranean Sea in Ciacciofera’s life and artistic career. As the artist himself observes: “The Mediterranean is the infinite universeof my considerations, […] a mental map that corresponds to my own life, spent largely jumping from one island to another in a sort of ‘geographical’ marathon, of which I can only mention the beginning […]. Shortly after leaving Sardinia, I rediscovered Sicily, the island where I grew up, and the world of the Mediterranean […]. An essential part of my work is deeply imbued with the theme, in the broadest sense, of the Mediterranean, which is an inexhaustible source of inspiration for me. […] I am very interested in exploring ‘worlds’ where forms of archaism with remote and mysterious origins persist […].”

The exhibition path unfolds on the ground floor, starting with a key work in Ciacciofera’s artistic career, that is, Janas Code (2016): a work that intertwines personal memory, myth, and anthropological research through a poetic assemblage of sculptures, collages, and found objects, including fossils, ceramics, tiny terracotta clothes, natural fragments, and books made of seeds. The work, presented at the 2017 Venice Biennale, is a tribute to Sardinia and its precious, millennial, and silent cultural heritage, not only archaeological but also natural and anthropological.

Janas Code is thus the doorway to a series of paintings and sculptures, created between 2015 and 2021, which populate the exhibition space on the ground floor of the gallery, such as the paintings: Enchanted, Nature, Revisited (2015), Le Spectateur Émancipé (2015), Sandwiched Life (2021), The Cave of Words (2021), and Vanity Fair (2021), as well as the glazed ceramics: The Fire Worshipper (2023-2024), L’Homme Guépard n. 2 (2024), and The Man with a Flower in His Mouth (2024-2025).

On the first floor of BUILDING GALLERY, the mythological dimension confronts the hyper-consumerist and technological dimension of the present: in a sort of arena, several large ceramic sculptures with overlapping elements—including The Siren (2024) inspired by the literature of Tomasi di Lampedusa or L’Asino Rosa – Omaggio a Dioniso (2025), inspired by Greek mythology—interact with the large triptych The Artsphere in the Age of Amazonization (2021-2022), which features an all-seeing box, a symbol of both e-commerce and mass surveillance. The exhibition continues with an installation composed of numerous ceramic mask sculptures entitled The Debt to Human Guile (2024)—a tribute to Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem We wear the mask (1896) – which introduces the space dedicated to memory with the entire cycle of Memory Boxes (2013-2024).

The exhibition closes on the second floor of the gallery, where the multi-naturalistic vision of reality entrusts the future of all forms of life to the necessary interspecific dialogue.
In the center of the room, on the floor, The Hand of Nature (2024)—a circular green carpet on which countless small colored ceramic sculptures lie—dialogues with several works presented on the wall. On one side, the free canvas The Translucent Skin of the Present (2015-2016) is a genuine homage to the time when pictorial representation serves as the basis for 360 progressive layers of limestone created over an entire year. On the other, a series of glazed ceramic sculptures entitled Earth Island (2019-2022). The exhibition ends with Terra Madre (2024), an installation produced for the 6th Mardin Biennial (2024) in Turkey, consisting of two flags made of embroidered jute bags and a large geographical map made of felt.

Lettere mediterranee is a retrospective that retraces the highlights of Michele Ciacciofera’s artistic research, bringing together—alongside unpublished works that show the most recent evolution of his practice—more historicized and well-known works by the artist, already presented in exhibitions at public institutions such as the Venice International Art Biennale, Mardin Contemporary Art Biennale (Turkey), the MA*GA Museum in Gallarate, the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Rochechouart (France), the CAFA Art Museum in Beijing (China), and the Centre d’Art Contemporain Passerelle in Brest (France).

In conjunction with the exhibition, Michele Ciacciofera presents the installation The Nest of the Eternal Present at the 36th Bienal de São Paulo Not All Travelers Walk Roads — Of Humanity as Practice, curated by Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, co-curated by Alya Sebti, Anna Roberta Goetz, Thiago de Paula Souza, and Keyna Eleison.