“Acquilunio” by Emanuele Caprioli at Museo Sant’Orsola: a Dialogue of Light, Water, and Memory

From 4 December 2025 to 4 January 2026, Museo Sant’Orsola in Florence hosts Acquilunio, the first solo exhibition by Emanuele Caprioli (Milan, 1993), an exhibition project born from a direct encounter with the work of Andrea “Bobo” Marescalchi.

Andrea Marescalchi, Senza-titolo, [farfalline-+-teoria-della-potenza-del-continuo]

The show is part of the initiative Uno, qualcuno, chicchessia: sulle tracce di Andrea Marescalchi, promoted by the Marescalchi Archive to mark ten years since the artist’s passing and supported by Toscana in Contemporanea 2025.

Curated by Valeria D’Ambrosio with the contribution of TAB – Take Away Bibliographies, Acquilunio explores the relationship between natural forces and human presence, placing at the centre two primary elements: water and light. It is from these two entities—ephemeral, mutable, yet capable of leaving deep traces—that Caprioli’s project takes shape. An artist who has long worked on the threshold between atmospheric phenomena and collective perception, Caprioli brings into view what usually escapes notice: condensation, reflections, luminous gradients, micro-events that shape our everyday experience of space.

At the heart of the exhibition is the visual dialogue between two new site-specific works by Caprioli and two pieces by Marescalchi from the archive: Untitled (Farfalline), a small paper work from the mid-1990s that intertwines mathematics and calligraphic gesture, and Cascata, a large-scale piece created in the final years of the artist’s life. Installed within the still-in-progress spaces of Museo Sant’Orsola, these works open up a conversation on time—its repetitions, its shifts, its hidden currents. Marescalchi’s work, in fact, resists linear readings: his production unfolds as a single continuous body, where themes, forms, and passions resurface like movements of water.

Bobo studio via toscanella © Museo Riz à Porta, 1997 -1

Acquilunio is the outcome of an artist residency undertaken by Caprioli between July and October 2025 at the Marescalchi Archive. Supported by TAB, he explored materials, works, and documents, generating not only the exhibition but also a collective publication gathering reflections, images, and writings produced during the residency.

The choice of Museo Sant’Orsola—a space in transformation that will officially reopen in 2026—amplifies the exhibition’s atmosphere of suspension and metamorphosis. As part of the exhibition cycle The rose that grew from concrete, Acquilunio engages with ideas of regeneration, of traces that endure through time, of spaces reborn through art.

Uno qualcuno chicchessia, Foto Giulia Lenzi

Caprioli, who works with primary elements such as light, air, fire, and water, offers here a delicate, perceptive meditation on our relationship with the world. His practice, which often involves the public as an activator of invisible phenomena, finds fertile ground in dialogue with Marescalchi: two distinct sensibilities united by an ability to listen to what unfolds at the margins, in the folds of the real.

Centro per l'arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci

Viale della Repubblica 277, 59100, Prato

Date

21 novembre – 10 maggio 2026

Luigi Ghirri. Polaroid ’79–’83: A New Look at the Master of Italian Photography at Centro Pecci

From 22 November 2025 to 10 May 2026, the Centro per l’arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci in Prato presents a truly unique exhibition: Polaroid ’79–’83, curated by Chiara Agradi and Stefano Collicelli Cagol, with a display designed by Ibrahim Kombarji.

Luigi Ghirri,  Amsterdam, 1980, Courtesy eredi di Luigi Ghirri

This is the first institutional exhibition in Italy entirely dedicated to the Polaroid work of the artist who more than anyone else transformed the visual imagination of late 20th-century photography.

Ghirri—an essential and much-loved figure—has always moved in a space that blends conceptual rigor with emotional immediacy. In his images, everyday objects, layered landscapes, and anonymous figures become fragments of a world he observes with poetic precision, revealing what often remains invisible even as it lies before our eyes. The Polaroids he shot between 1979 and 1983 amplify this dual nature: on one side, a reflection on the image and its rules; on the other, the instinctive, fragile, instantaneous gesture of instant photography.

The more than one hundred Polaroids selected for the exhibition trace the evolution of a surprisingly experimental phase. During those years, Polaroid provided Ghirri with a generous supply of film and cameras, even inviting him to Amsterdam to test the extraordinary 20x24 Instant Land Camera, capable of producing extra-large photographs in just over a minute. In these images—small or monumental, intimate or unpredictable—an unexpected Ghirri emerges: less controlled, more playful, fascinated by the immediacy of seeing the result of the shot.

Luigi Ghirri, Alto Adige, 1980, Courtesy eredi di Luigi Ghirri

Alongside the photographs taken in the Netherlands, Ghirri brought with him objects collected in his native Emilia: postcards, small souvenirs, domestic elements that reconstruct elsewhere a familiar mental landscape. Even far from home, he builds suspended micro-worlds where memory and assemblage blend with ease.

The exhibition speaks directly to younger visitors: in an era when instant images are the norm—between smartphones, filters, and constant sharing—the universe of Polaroid becomes an opportunity to reflect on the materiality of photography, on the time of waiting, on the manual construction of an image. It opens an unexpected dialogue between analogue and digital.

Centro Pecci Prato, Luigi Ghirri Polaroid 79-83, ph Andrea Rossetti

Polaroid ’79–’83 fits into the broader program of Centro Pecci, which over the years has hosted major monographic exhibitions dedicated to leading figures of international contemporary art. The strength of this exhibition lies precisely in revealing a lesser-known Ghirri—playful, experimental—allowing even general audiences, already familiar with his iconic works, to discover a chapter that has often remained in the background.

Centro per l'arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci

Viale della Repubblica 277, 59100, Prato

Date

21 novembre – 10 maggio 2026

Enej Gala brings his “Acquaintances” to the window of garage BENTIVOGLIO

Until 6 December 2025, garage BENTIVOGLIO presents a new site-specific intervention dedicated to artist Enej Gala, who animates the street-facing window of via del Borgo di San Pietro in Bologna with three marionettes from the series Acquaintances (2020–2021).

Enej Gala, Tri marionete iz seije. Acquaintances, 2020-2021, garage BENTIVOGLIO, Palazzo Bentivoglio ph. Carlo Favero

The project continues the curatorial direction of the garage: a hybrid, essential space designed to showcase works from the Palazzo Bentivoglio collection in a completely different context, one capable of transforming them and generating new questions.

At the core of this intervention lies the notion of displacement: moving the works outside the collection and placing them inside the garage means observing what happens when they are deprived of the network of visual relationships that usually sustains them. If inside the museum the marionettes exist within a precise ecosystem of references and juxtapositions, here they suddenly find themselves alone, compelled to redefine their own way of inhabiting space. As curator Davide Trabucco notes, “nothing is born to stand in solitude: we always think of things in relation to other things.”

Enej Gala, Tri marionete iz seije. Acquaintances, 2020-2021, garage BENTIVOGLIO, Palazzo Bentivoglio ph. Carlo Favero

A new display support was specifically designed to host Gala’s marionettes: an L-shaped metal bar anchored to the wall, functioning both as a structural support and as an ideal bridge to the previous installation dedicated to the netsuke. This bar becomes a kind of conceptual hinge, allowing the work to inhabit the garage without fully adapting to it, maintaining a distance that preserves its identity. It creates a constant tension—almost a silent conflict—between the space the work needs in order to communicate and the space the garage needs to reveal itself as an autonomous aesthetic device.

Two marionettes hang from the bar, like figures suspended in a moment of anticipation, ready to be animated or to tell a story that can be sensed but never fully disclosed. A third appears more discreet: it rests directly on the floor, in a corner of the window. This minimal gesture suggests that even the ground, in a place like this—a small secular sanctuary devoted to looking—can naturally become a pedestal.

While in the collection the Acquaintances inhabit a chapel, protected and far from the street, in the garage they rediscover direct contact with the outside world: they return to their theatrical origin, to the narrative and performative function that is inherent to every marionette. Here they offer themselves without filters to passers-by, gifting a moment of suspension, wonder, or questioning to those who walk down the street.

Enej Gala, Tri marionete iz seije. Acquaintances, 2020-2021, garage BENTIVOGLIO, Palazzo Bentivoglio ph. Carlo Favero

With this intervention, Tri marionete iz serije: Acquaintances, garage BENTIVOGLIO continues its exploration of the relationship between artworks and context, opening up new interpretations of the collection through small yet meaningful shifts. The next appointment, scheduled for Arte Fiera 2026, will be dedicated to Temporali by Alberto Garutti, in the version created for Palazzo Cusani in 2015: a key work in his reflection on the shared responsibility of looking.

garage BENTIVOGLIO

via del Borgo di San Pietro 3A, Bologna

Date

21 novembre – 6 dicembre 2025