Ardent Is the Passage. Matter and Memory at the Fortezza Nuova in Livorno

From November 9, 2025, to January 10, 2026, the Sala del Forno at the Fortezza Nuova in Livorno hosts Ardent Is the Passage, a group exhibition by Noemi Mirata, Giampaolo Parrilla, and Redusa, curated by Bianca Basile and produced by Forno Project.

Detail Parrilla

Three young artists — from Catania, Bologna, and Naples — intertwine their individual practices around a shared vision: matter as an emotional archive, a living organism, and a field of transformation.

The title Ardent Is the Passage evokes both a physical and symbolic crossing. The exhibition is conceived not as a simple display of individual works but as a fluid environment where salt, wax, and pigment act as ritual elements in a collective geography of sensations. Salt preserves and corrodes, wax protects and yields, heat burns and regenerates — forces in tension that reveal the fragility and resilience of form.

Curator Bianca Basile imagines the exhibition as a space of transition rather than contemplation: a place where the artwork exposes its own vulnerability and the material becomes a vessel for care. “The artistic gesture,” Basile explains, “does not conceal the wound, but reveals it as a threshold — as a possibility for rebirth.”

Noemi Mirata’s installations and paintings explore natural metamorphosis, combining organic matter, memory, and botanical imagery. Her works evoke processes of transformation and impermanence, where the material becomes a metaphor for survival and renewal.

Giampaolo Parrilla blends painting with geopolitical documentation, reclaiming the symbolic potential of conflict imagery. His canvases and drawings do not narrate war itself but the psychic echo it leaves behind — fragments of collective memory suspended between data, myth, and emotion.

Redusa (Rebecca Miccio) works at the intersection of protection and decay, sculpting wax, salt, and iron into fragile yet resistant forms. Her works embody a ritual gesture, one that consumes itself even as it seeks to endure.

Detail Mirata

In the interplay between destruction and regeneration, Ardent Is the Passage becomes a meditation on time, trauma, and persistence. The exhibition invites viewers to dwell within the wound — to inhabit it as a site of passage, knowledge, and transformation.

Detail Parrilla

What emerges is the image of a new generation of artists who confront pain not as spectacle but as shared language. Through salt, wax, and pigment, they shape an art that burns quietly, holding within it the fragile beauty of what refuses to disappear.

Fortezza Nuova, Livorno

Scali della Fortezza Nuova, 4

Date

8 novembre 2025 - 10 gennaio 2026