Pinksummer is pleased to present

Of Water and Other Reflections for Change

30.06.26 – 13.09.26

Opening 30.06.26 | 6.30 pm

GAS – Galleria Andrea Sansovino; Cisternone; Chiesa della Confraternita del Suffragio | Monte San Savino, Arezzo

Of Water and Other Reflections for Change is an exhibition that begins with the still, crystal-clear water of the great two-nave Renaissance cistern of Monte San Savino. Once fed by underground springs, the Cisternone supplied water to the local community through spouts set into the ancient walls of the town.
In L’eau et les rêves (“Water and Dreams”), Gaston Bachelard, who grew up near a river, argues that freshwater is the truly mythical water, unlike seawater, which is inhuman and perilous, closer to the infinite. Water is the element that most profoundly substantiates dreaming; it is the substance that, by dissolving solidity, induces a rêverie on existence and all that exists.

Reflecting on the fluid dissolution of constructs, it seems fitting to place within the cistern a work by Luca Trevisani that alludes to the phantasmatic and ritual origins of our civilization. This is a sound piece in which the artist translated into Morse code the geographical coordinates of the Addaura, a cave near Palermo that is currently closed to the public but preserves invaluable prehistoric petroglyphs. Using a software freely available online, he then converted the Morse code of the cave’s coordinates into sound, creating a timeless mantra detached from any specific place: astral.

These reflections, or further reflections, continue in different forms within the Baroque Church of the Confraternity of Suffrage, built through the expansion of the earlier sixteenth-century Church of the Holy Trinity. This is a largely undiscovered site: although the exterior has recently been restored, the interior has remained closed to the public until now, and Luigi Ademollo’s fresco cycle depicting the Deposition from the Cross has been removed for conservation purposes.

We imagined this space enchanted by the iridescent reflections of two Foam sculptures of varying dimensions by Tomás Saraceno, a series of works with a “liquid” consistency. In fact, the Foams evoke foam itself, the internal geometry of a fractal that can be found anywhere throughout nature. In the third and final volume of the Spheres Trilogy, devoted to contemporary society, Peter Sloterdijk allows spheres to dissolve into foam. Foam symbolizes the end of monocentric narratives and, in some sense, an attempt to reorient subjectivity after the collapse of interventionist ideas. After all, life is always a matter of finding a form again.

Here, works by three more artists will also be presented, all addressing the reordering of identity and ecology, because, as Félix Guattari argued, no ecology can exist without first engaging in the psychological transformation of the individual.

Inside the church visitors will therefore encounter Mark Dion’s remarkable cabinet Davy Jones’ Locker, a piece of furniture whose two doors feature a seagull based on one of Dion’s drawings, intricately inlaid with different wood species. Created for the American artist’s 2021 solo exhibition By the Sea, presented by Pinksummer in a seventeenth-century palazzo on Genoa’s Strada Nuova, the cabinet contains a series of glass vessels in which the artist has sorted marine debris collected on Genoa’s beaches according to type (plastic balls, bottle caps, cable ties, and other objects returned by the sea). The drawer of the cabinet contains a map of Liguria and its beautiful yet exploited sea, much like every sea everywhere on Earth.

Also on view will be a light box by Peter Fend, the American artist who, since the 1970s, has transformed his artistic practice into environmental activism. The sign recalls the colors of IP gas stations, but the words “Global Desert” reveal the true consequence of fossil fuel consumption: the transformation of the planet into a global desert.

The last work is a lamp by Michael Beutler, constructed from humble building-site materials with the aid of machines that he designs and often exhibits alongside his artworks: sort of large, electricity-free devices bringing artistic production closer to traditional craftsmanship. Beutler’s anti-consumerist approach views empowerment promoting self-sufficiency as a catalyst for change within the ontological foundations of society.

The exhibition continues at GAS (Galleria Andrea Sansovino), directed by Giuseppe Simone Modeo.

On the entrance staircase, In a Convex Mirror, a ceramic work by Mariana Castillo Deball. Within the practice of the Mexican artist, who is based in Berlin, this ceramic piece evokes a kind of anthropological universal related to material culture as a repository of technical knowledge. The work, originally presented in the artist’s 2022 solo exhibition of the same title at Pinksummer, is decorated with slip and features a perforation. This perforation evokes the “kill holes” used in ancient Latin American burial rituals; the Klein bottle, a mathematical object that connects interior and exterior by creating continuity between them; and the Mexican piñata, the pentolaccia that, in the European tradition, marks the end of Carnival and the beginning of Lent, and which missionary monks used as a tool for the evangelization of Indigenous peoples in Mexico.

Here, recent papier-mâché Treasure Boxes by Michael Beutler will also be presented: small sculptures inspired by the salt boxes once found in rural homes, created from the remnants of the large participatory and disorienting installation Onion, presented by Pinksummer last February.

Making its debut in the rooms of GAS at Palazzo Sansovino is Muffa semiotica (“Semiotic Mold”), a recently produced installation by Luca De Leva composed of short poems, assembled from fragments of text taken from the package inserts of personal care products: a form of self-erasure exercise connected to the project Thyself Agency, through which the artist proposes a series of exercises designed to disrupt habitual behavior. Among them is the temporary exchange of lives, which De Leva describes as a radical inward journey activated by abandoning one’s own routine and mimicking that of another person. He defines Thyself Agency as a “travel agency.”

The gallery will also present Georgina Starr’s feminist and alchemical tarots, used in her latest film Quarantaine, in which two young girls pass through a portal (a hollow tree trunk), leave behind the reality of a London park and surrender themselves to the unknown: a world governed by different rules, new educational systems, and mysterious languages to be learned. The installation consists of thirty-three watercolors from which the artist also produced an edition of cards.

Luca Trevisani will be represented in the gallery by a sculpture from his series Ai piedi del Pane (“At the foot of bread”), works made of bread molded with shoe soles, stabilized with resins and placed upon a precious wooden cobbler’s tool wrapped in pure gold leaf. The work evokes the human journey and the invention of bread as a decisive turning point in the progress of civilization. Trevisani maintains that diet functions as a form of social sculpture, shaping behaviors, habits, and pathologies.

In the drawings also presented in the gallery, Mark Dion appropriates the format of scientific classification charts used for educational purposes, only to divert their notations, arbitrarily and often humorously, toward culture and some of today’s most pressing ecological concerns.

We also wished to include in the exhibition a collage by Tobias Putrih, created as a kind of daily meditation inspired by the simple act of eating an egg for breakfast, breaking its shell, and transforming the fragments into a perfect, exquisite spatial composition.

Finally, the gallery will present two Spidermaps by Tomás Saraceno, spider webs transferred onto paper. These works are created by inviting spiders of different species to collaborate sequentially within an open carbon-fiber frame.In this instance, once the spiders have completed their work and been removed, Saraceno carefully transfers the web onto paper, preserving its original perspective and dusting it with graphite powder to make it visible against the white surface. Each web is then framed and protected with Museum Glass. The title always specifies which spider species collaborated (whether social, semi-social, or solitary), how many weeks they worked, and, if the carbon-fiber frame was rotated during the process, by how many degrees. Saraceno began collaborating with spiders around 2009, inspired by the superstring theory and the holistic sensibility that the microcosm reflects the macrocosm, and that the spider web resembles dark matter: the substance that constitutes approximately 70% of our universe and forms the vast cosmic network supporting galaxies and worlds.