On Saturday, June 21, 2025, Arte Sella in Trentino opens Lotta per l’esistenza, a solo exhibition by Marzia Migliora, curated by Lorenzo Fusi. The exhibition takes place between Villa Strobele and Malga Costa, two symbolic spaces of the Trentino contemporary art park, and offers a reflection on the relationships between living species, environmental transformations and collective memory. The exhibition is divided into three groups of works, the result of a direct dialogue with the landscape of the Sella Valley.
The title is inspired by Charles Darwin’s evolutionist thought and in particular the notion of competition between species contained in his treatise The Origin of Species. Nevertheless, Migliora’s approach departs from the Darwinian idea of survival as an outcome of strength and adaptability. Instead, the artist looks to the concepts of mutualism, co-evolution, and interdependence, which are now central to reflections on contemporary ecology. In Struggle for Existence, each work evokes an interconnected world in which different forms of life cohabit, influence, and modify each other.
The itinerary begins at Malga Costa with three paper dioramas belonging to the series Paradoxes of Abundance, begun by Migliora in 2017. Placed in niches, the dioramas introduce visitors to unstable and imaginative environments, in which scientific elements are intertwined with fantastic visions. Paper, a fragile and easily degradable material, becomes a metaphor for the vulnerability of the ecosystem. Among the elements depicted appears the Bostricotypographus (Ips typographus), an insect that found an ideal habitat among the trees felled by storm Vaia in 2018 and helped redefine the surrounding landscape. Also at Malga Costa, the multipurpose space hosts a paper and paper mache installation. The scenic and constantly changing environment proposes an imaginary landscape inhabited by beings that elude all classification: giant mushrooms, glacier outlines, constantly evolving hybrid forms. The work evokes a natural theater where the narrative is no longer anthropocentric but eco-centric, centered on a multiplicity of living and mutating presences. The installation is accompanied by Run fast and bite hard(2022), a sound track created in collaboration with noisemaker Marco Ciorba. The soundscape expands the perceptual dimension of the work, moving between natural and artificial, biological and technological boundaries.
The exhibition continues at Villa Strobele with Cronaca dell’Assenza, a nucleus of works on paper obtained from a direct intervention on original pages of the illustrated weekly La Domenica del Corriere. The artist erases, with surgical precision, the human and animal figure from the scenes depicted, leaving a deserted but memory-laden landscape to emerge. Mountains, forests, valleys become the sole witnesses of the events narrated by the captions, in a narrative suspension that transforms Nature into the active subject and guardian of time. In this part of the itinerary, Migliora shifts the focus from the visible to absence, suggesting a future in which man, gone, has given way to a new natural centrality. Nature, in Migliora’s works, is an active protagonist, capable of speaking, resisting, transforming. The landscape becomes the theater of a continuous negotiation between species, a shared scene in which all life forms participate in the “struggle for existence.”
The exhibition also marks the start of a new collaboration between the artist and Arte Sella. As part of the project is the reopening of the mountain trail connecting Malga Costa to Villa Strobele, a path closed after damage caused by storm Vaia and currently being restored. Underlining the institution’s renewed commitment to the integration of art and nature, the former stable building has also been reopened and transformed into a space designed to host events dedicated to visual arts, dance, theater, music and design. The revitalization of the former stable comes thanks to the collaboration with Levico Acque, an established partner of the art park. Accompanying the exhibition is a bilingual (Italian and English) publication, edited by Lorenzo Fusi and published by Dario Cimorelli Editore. The volume collects texts and images of the works on display, offering a critical insight into the artist’s work.
Marzia Migliora, born in 1972 and active in Turin, is an interdisciplinary artist who uses photography, video, sound, installation, performance and drawing. Her research, which has always focused on memory and the human condition, has taken on a multispecies perspective in recent years, questioning the cultural and environmental implications of the ecological crisis. Her works have been presented in Italian and international institutions, and are part of important public collections. She is represented by the Lia Rumma Gallery in Milan and Naples.
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| Marzia Migliora brings to Arte Sella a reflection on survival in the ecological age |
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