Forlì, Cosimo Veneziano's art as a reminder of the flood of 2023

Almost two years after theflood that hit Romagna hard, leaving a deep mark on the cities of Forlì, Faenza and much of the surrounding area, the Dino Zoli Foundation in Forlì is proposing a new art project. On Saturday, May 3, 2025, at 7 p.m., it will inaugurate L’Acqua del Duemila, a solo exhibition by Turin-based artist Cosimo Veneziano (Moncalieri, 1983), curated by Nadia Stefanel and Matteo Zauli, in collaboration with the Carlo Zauli Museum. The initiative was created in response to the dramatic flood of May 16, 2023, an event that changed the face of Romagna and urged the Dino Zoli Foundation to take action through art to stimulate a shared reflection on prevention, land management and the value of collective memory. The exhibition, which can be visited until June 7, 2025, is part of a broader project that the Foundation has initiated in the past two years, promoting artistic research capable of generating debate, involvement and awareness among the citizenry.

“Water possesses an innate and extraordinary force,” says Nadia Stefanel, “capable of imprinting its passage, in the event of a flood, on our tangible world. The walls of homes are mute witnesses to these stories; they tell of objects pushed against them by the rushing force of floodwaters. The trace left behind is not only a physical mark but a memory of times past that invites reflection on the subtle but vigorous power of nature. [...] The white shadow drawn by Cosimo Veneziano leaves space for the memory of the objects in the houses before the flood and recounts a part of experience, making visible what is no longer there, a continuous transition between materiality and immateriality. The drawings are not only works of art but also a method of storytelling that interweaves the concept of permanence with that of transformation, because they preserve the memory of what has been, activating a silent dialogue between the visible and the invisible. While water erases the tangible traces of lives lived, it nonetheless incites us to look beyond the visible and preserve memories more resiliently. In this process of inner restructuring, we learn that true treasures do not reside only in material objects, but rather in the invisible ties they cultivate between past and future, between people and their shared histories. Cosimo Veneziano’s installation is a collection of memorabilia lost in the flood, when the devastating force of nature transforms, in an instant, the ordinary into the extraordinary, the whole into a fragment. The set of hanging drawings, one next to the other, tells this, that in a world where natural disasters are a sad reality, floods prompt us to reflect on the transience of life and the intrinsic value of our memories.”

Cosimo Veneziano, who since 2022 has been carrying out a reflection on the morphology of the Italian landscape and in particular on the state of rivers, was selected to give visual form to an event that is as traumatic as it is emblematic. The artist therefore chose to work on the individual and collective memory of the people affected by the flood, collecting testimonies, memories and objects that emerged from that tragedy to transform them into works that move between drawing, installation and sculpture. L’Acqua del Duemila is mainly articulated in two installations conceived specifically for the spaces of the Dino Zoli Foundation and realized also thanks to the use of fabrics produced by Dino Zoli Textile, confirming a close dialogue between art and business, between territory and production.

The first installation, titled Untitled 2, presents a series of silkscreen prints depicting animals and fragments of landscapes disrupted by the flood, enriched by a plant pattern inspired by river plants. The images, which start from photographs taken in the affected places, were subsequently treated by the artist with a pictorial intervention that employs soils collected precisely during the days of the emergency, in 2023, by the Carlo Zauli Museum. The result is a visual layering that blends document, material and artistic gesture, returning the visitor to a dense, multisensory and deeply symbolic experience.

The second installation, titled It’s Not What, consists instead of about 300 drawings, each representing an object lost or found during and after the flood. The objects turn out to be fragments of existences, silent witnesses of interrupted or transformed lives. Their collection stems from direct encounters between Veneziano and the inhabitants of the affected areas, turning into a great visual archive of what the water took away but what memory can restore. The exhibition in Forli also represents the conclusion of a journey divided into three stages. The first two stages of the project had been presented at the Mountain Museum in Turin and the Carlo Zauli Museum in Faenza. Both sections will be presented again in this exhibition, making the exhibition itinerary complete and coherent. These works include a sculpture inspired by the iconography of the Fountain of the Po, located in Turin’s Piazza CLN, and five vases made with the historic Gino Geminiani workshop and turner Roberto Reali, a tribute to Lucio Fontana’s ceramics and its value of formal innovation.

Also on display are two important contributions made on the occasion of the May 2023 flood. The first is a photograph by Silvia Camporesi taken from the project Fragile Sublime, curated by Nadia Stefanel, printed on Dino Zoli Textile fabric, which continues the dialogue between images and typical materials of the territory. The second is the work We are not alone, the result of a collaboration between Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari, acquired by the Dino Zoli Foundation to help raise funds to support families affected by the disaster.

Forlì, Cosimo Veneziano's art as a reminder of the flood of 2023

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