Virginia Zanetti. La danza del sale

From January 15th to February 14th 2026, BUILDING TERZO PIANO presents La danza del sale, a solo exhibition by the artist Virginia Zanetti (Fiesole, 1981), curated by Giulia Bortoluzzi.

The exhibition brings together a selection of photographic, video and sculptural works that document and expand on the theme of impermanence and transformation of state, a line of inquiry the artist initiated through a site-specific intervention and collective performances in the saltworks of Margherita di Savoia (BT). Zanetti offers a collective narrative in which the natural environment—characterised in this case by the presence of salt—and the social fabric of the community, expressed in the activity of harvesting the crystalline compound, converge in a common process of transformation.

The representation of this process, in which nature reclaims the knowledge and products created by man, emerges in this exhibition from fragments of salt gathered as relics of a disappearing past, generated by the natural deterioration of crystallised sculptures created in the summer of 2023 under the guidance of salt worker Raffaele Valerio. These fragments derived from the works, originally obtained from the process of mineral solidification on work tools and collective symbols of the Apulian community, are the tangible trace of impermanence, not only of ancient memory that is dispersed in parallel with the community fabrics that preserve and pass it on, but also of man’s desire to control the geological and climatic processes of the Earth. In this absence of control, the artist acts to preserve the impossible by activating an ecstatic dance of rebirth. Not only that: in the new and unprecedented phase of analysis of this process of evanescence and preservation, presented for the first time exclusively in the exhibition for BUILDING TERZO PIANO, Zanetti chooses to respond to fragility with his own language, using glass to imprint the cast of objects otherwise dispersed by the passage of time.

BUILDING TERZO PIANO presents a selection of photographs and a video documenting the performance entitled La danza del sale, 2023, created in collaboration with choreographer and dancer M^ Teta Lonigro, salt worker Valerio and a group of local community members. The dance retraces the movements of the workers, deprived of their tools and their productive function. The physical presence of these objects is only virtually evoked through repeated gestures, creating a path of both ideal and real transformation. The artist has constructed a shared gesture, a community ritual to transform work into dance, action into contemplation, experience into sensitive knowledge. Salt, a mineral that connects the civilisations of the Mediterranean basin in a network of relationships, thus becomes the narrator of a metamorphosis that transforms the designed object into organic material, destined to be reabsorbed into the natural cycle. Salt becomes living—and therefore perishable—matter in these evolving sculptures that crystallize fragments of shared memory.

The origins of this research trace back to the project Fari e torri del fuoco segreto (Margherita di Savoia, 2023), promoted as part of the CoHeN project, funded by the Interreg Greece–Italy 2014/2020 Program, the Pino Pascali Foundation, and the Department of Tourism, Cultural Economy and Territorial Enhancement of the Apulia Region, with the support of Atisale and curatorship by Christian Caliandro and Nicola Zito. Developed in dialogue with the local community and the landscape of the saltworks of Margherita di Savoia, around Torre Pietra, the project led Zanetti to focus on memory and the processes connected to salt extraction. Inspired by the work of artist Pino Pascali, Zanetti studied the movements of salt workers within the evaporation basins and the shared codes that characterise the local community.

As Virginia Zanetti notes: “My works have a function of transformation, inversion of states or conditions. In my research, the Other, in opposition to the Self, constitutes the starting point for exploring ideas of separation and disharmony, with the aim of enabling the recognition of our bond with the community we belong to, and with the surrounding social and natural environment. […] Among the motivations behind the genesis of my works is the desire to understand the functioning of life and the relationships that support it, starting from an idea of non-duality between phenomena and the force that sustains them. […] Material and immaterial forms merge when the performative act becomes object and the spectator becomes artist through a mode of collective development. Each of my actions seeks to bring forth a renewed sense of existence and renewed affective knowledge, through relational dynamics and shared codes, in an attempt to make the artwork an integral part of the environment and community for which it is conceived.”

Zanetti‘s works exhibited in La danza del sale at BUILDING TERZO PIANO are evidence of a real process of transformation that has taken the form of a ritual. Gesture, matter and collective memory are intertwined: the performative action has been deposited in the material, transforming it into living memory and poetic testimony.