On Friday, January 9, 2026, the exhibition Spontaneous Anatomies opened at the Parentesi exhibition space of TWM Factory (Rome). Curators Paola Farfaglio and Benedetta Carpi De Resmini have conceptually brought together two artistic paths that, in different ways, address the theme of food as an element of sharing, a cultural act, a symbol of identity, and a space of relationship. The title evokes what comes into being without being planned—what grows at the margins, in the folds of the living and of imagination.
The exhibition takes place at Parentesi, an exhibition space within Roma Smistamento, the cultural center of TWM Factory located on the first floor of the Arimondi District— a former industrial building that for years has hosted artists’ studios, residencies, galleries, and creative spaces.
The project explores elements in transformation: those of ingredients, of the gestures that shape them, and of art itself, which observes, dismantles, and recomposes reality. The exhibition presents itself as an invitation to reflect on how art and food share a common essence—that of continuous transformation, mutual nourishment, and the potential that arises each time we enter into a relationship with living matter.
It brings together works by several artists who worked throughout 2025 on two parallel projects: Anatomies of Nourishment, curated by Cities Art Projects (with Caretto-Spagna and Gaia & Greta Scaramella), and Roots and Routes, developed by Latitudo Art Projects within the European platform Magic Carpets (Camille Orlandini, Ombretta Gamberale, and Gaia Scaramella). Both projects involved various communities from
Caretto–Spagna, artists from Turin, show how culinary experiences connected to the harvesting and transformation of wild plants or cabbages, developed during the project, open up a reflection on biodiversity and interspecies relationships. Within the exhibition path, the work ESCULENTA is presented, transforming a simple wooden table into an active organism—a device that makes visible the continuous cycle of consumption > revitalization > regrowth.
Throughout the exhibition, a long wooden table is set up as an experimental site in which the metamorphosis of cabbages can be observed over the duration of the show: matter that is consumed, regenerates, and grows again. The table is divided into three sections, each designed for a specific and complementary function. The first section is dedicated to food preparation (salads, cutting, everyday gestures). The second is equipped for the revitalization of cabbage scraps, featuring a hidden water system that enables a slow, continuous process of reabsorption. The third section is devoted to regrowth: here, the regenerated cabbages are allowed to grow until the completion of their life cycle, from flowering to seed production.
Gaia and Greta Scaramella—an artist and a sociologist respectively—present the laboratory-based experiences centered on milk carried out at the Saxa Rubra school. Both have explored milk as a symbolic and cultural food, in which nourishment becomes a metaphor for growth, care, and sharing.
In the exhibition, Gaia presents Milk, a work in which milk, the primary symbol of nourishment, is transformed into absence: breasts filled with milk become empty strainers, from which the milk flows out and is lost. The work is a meditation on the importance of care and vital support, but also a reminder of the conditions of children who, in many war-affected areas, lack access to milk. It is a thought addressed to mothers who have lost this nourishment, or who can no longer offer it.
Greta, on the other hand, presents a series of milk fables, written and conceived by her, designed as short stories of symbolic nourishment dedicated to the children who took part in the workshops. These are tales in which milk becomes imagination, protection, and origin—a narrative form of care that accompanies and sustains, just like the first food we receive in life.
Within the Roots & Routes project promoted by Latitudo Art Projects as part of the Magic Carpets platform, artist Ombretta Gamberale presents a collective cookbook, Ricette memorabili (Memorable Recipes), along with a series of engravings born from the exchange of culinary traditions: family memories, recipes, drawings, and botanical prints created using dried aromatic herbs.
Her contribution—developed both with the family home L’Approdo of Spes contra Spem and with participants from the Biblioteca Galline Bianche—places food at the center as an affective archive, a space in which intimacy becomes a shared narrative. The stories and drawings collected in the cookbook were generated in a collective and family-oriented context, yet one that was also deeply reflective.
Play played an important role: children, families, and young people from the family home created their own cookbook, offering a mosaic of personal perspectives. Reflective, because the very conditions that enabled the production and circulation of these narratives are linked to an awareness that food holds multiple values—material and symbolic, and above all, personal.
Camille Orlandini, a French artist in residence at Latitudo Art Projects, also developed a project within Roots & Routes together with the family home L’Approdo and the participants of the Biblioteca Galline Bianche. Her project, Faire Pain Commun, is dedicated to water and bread, and in particular to rivers—the Tiber and its tributary, the Aniene—which flow alongside the neighborhoods where she carried out her residency. Water, a fluid, mutable, and multifaceted element, moves through territories, histories, and cultures, transforming them. This pervasive nature finds an analogy in the act of breadmaking, where the meeting of water and grain becomes a daily ritual and an ancient heritage. The study of water and grain allows us to observe how different societies have attributed meaning to these fundamental elements, using them to build social systems and cultural models. The artist presents a video installation, Impastare da una sponda all’altra del Tevere (Kneading from One Bank of the Tiber to the Other), which conveys this complex and vital relationship.
Finally, the work of artist Nordine Sajot, Ex-voto against war, is presented. During his residency at the Centre Claude Cahun in Nantes, as part of the Magic Carpets program, the artist developed a new section dedicated to the gestures of eating as a bodily language, using images related to food distribution in Gaza. His installation powerfully interrogates food as a political weapon of domination and, in particular, food deprivation as a tool of oppression. The work restores the everyday act of nourishment in its most vulnerable and urgent dimension.
January 10 – January 23, 2026
Roma Smistamento / TWM Factory
Via Giuseppe Arimondi 3, Rome
