L’INCANTO
- 8 hours ago
- 3 min read
Opening saturday 4 june 6.30PM
5 june- 18 june 2026
curated by Niccolò Giacomazzi
Project promoted by the Department of Culture of Rome Capital, Azienda Speciale Palaexpo, and Fondazione Mattatoio – Città delle Arti.
From Friday, June 5, 2026, the spaces of Teatro 1 – La Pelanda at the Mattatoio in Rome will host L’Incanto, an exhibition project by John Cascone and Veronica Cruciani, curated by Niccolò Giacomazzi. The exhibition is conceived as an immersive experience in which environmental installation and video come together to create a single perceptual field. L’Incanto will be open to the public until June 18, 2026.
At the core of the exhibition lies the idea of enchantment, understood not simply as an aesthetic emotion, but as a perceptual and cognitive event: the moment when reality reveals a possibility that language has not yet organized. The exhibition unfolds through the environmental installation Il Respiro (The Breath) and the video work L’Ignoto Sconosciuto Altrove (The Unknown Unknown Elsewhere). Through Il Respiro, Teatro 1 is transformed into a traversable environment composed of trees, lights, sounds, and camping tents, evoking the atmosphere of an undergrowth forest and inviting visitors to engage with a different intensity of perception. Within this landscape, the projection of L’Ignoto Sconosciuto Altrove takes shape, structured in four chapters and emerging from a long research process developed across diverse urban and natural contexts.
L’Incanto does not follow a linear narrative logic; rather, it establishes a continuous relationship between the experience of space and the moving image. The environmental installation is not merely a backdrop, but guides visitors into a dimension of heightened attention and listening; the video, in turn, reorganizes and reactivates this experience. In this way, L’Incanto creates an ongoing interplay between perception, memory, and imagination, never settling into a single, fixed meaning. Within this process, nature assumes a decisive role—a presence capable of disorienting and expanding the field of experience. It is precisely within this suspension that it becomes possible to imagine other forms of relationship with the living world, and other ways of seeing and inhabiting it.
Born from four years of workshops, dialogues, and site-specific practices, the project brings together a shared investigation into the limits of the imaginable and the conditions of vision. Through the collaboration between John Cascone and Veronica Cruciani, L’Incanto takes shape as a unified device in which space, sound, image, and language intertwine to create an experience that does not simply represent the unknown, but makes it perceptible.
Throughout the exhibition period, the video will be screened daily at three scheduled times: 4:30 PM, 5:30 PM, and 6:30 PM. On the occasion of the exhibition’s finissage, on June 18, 2026, the exhibition catalogue—designed by DITO Studio—will also be presented as a further editorial reflection on the research and journey developed through L’Incanto.
John Cascone is a visual and sound artist working across performance, video, installation, and participatory practices. His research explores the relationships between space, fiction, and language. His projects have been presented at institutions including the MAXXI, Palazzo Esposizioni, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Auditorium Parco della Musica, the Segal Center, and Kauno Paveikslų Galerija. As a sound dramaturg, he has collaborated on numerous productions directed by Veronica Cruciani, including Accabadora (based on the novel by Michela Murgia), The Maids (Le Serve), and Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare.
Veronica Cruciani is a theatre director active in some of Italy’s leading theatrical institutions, including Teatro di Roma, Emilia Romagna Teatro Fondazione, Teatro di Napoli, Teatro Nazionale di Genova, and Teatro Stabile del Veneto. From 2016 to 2019, she served as Artistic Director of Teatro Biblioteca Quarticciolo. In subsequent years, she received both the Premio Hystrio alla Regia and the Premio della Critica ANCT. Her work moves between dramatic theatre and contemporary research, developing an authorial approach that reinterprets classical texts while embracing contemporary dramaturgy as a tool for investigating the present. Since 2015, she has collaborated with visual and sound artist John Cascone on a range of performative and installation-based projects.
Information
L’INCANTO
John Cascone and Veronica Cruciani
curated by Niccolò Giacomazzi
June 5–18, 2026
Mattatoio di Roma, Teatro 1 – La Pelanda
Piazza Orazio Giustiniani 4 – Rome
Free admission
Opening hours: Tuesday to Sunday, 4:30 PM – 7:30 PMClosed on Mondays
Video screening: three daily activations at 4:30 PM, 5:30 PM, and 6:30 PM.
Comments