La Fortuna Della Fragilità started from a conversation between Marcela Calderón Andrade (b. 1991, Pasto, Colombia) and Tommaso Spazzini Villa (b. 1986, Milan, Italy), two artists who explore themes that range from impermanence to the impossibility of interpreting reality in an unequivocal manner, from a fascination for change to the creativity of nature.
Marcela Calderón Andrade’s works come from her observation of the complexities of relationships in nature. Her pieces frequently incorporate organic components, like seeds, leaves or the internal membrane of eggshells, to create sculptural works of unbearable lightness.
For this exhibition, the Colombian artist presents seven works from her Enchura project. Hongo explores the shape of a tiny mould (Rhizopus stolonifer) that grows on the decaying skin of certain fruits, magnifying its delicate connections into an architectural scale microcosm. Círculo-Infinito, Churo-Espiral and Vibración-Onda, from the Vestigio series, are made using the inner membranes of eggshells—a natural protective barrier of life. These membranes possess a remarkable ability to mend themselves post-breakage, through the memory that the material maintains, in a process of destruction and reconstruction.
The exhibition is completed by Red, a light net woven from thin paper threads that is an invitation to remember, repair and look after the network of fragility on an emotional, physical, biological, and political level.
Tommaso Spazzini Villa is showing some works from his Ombre series: originally created as shadow boxes – small dioramas that paid tribute to Lucio Fontana’s Little Theatres – these Ombre, or “shadows”, find a new, broader, site-specific dimension within the exhibition space. Central to the artwork is the interplay between shadow and light source, where dry leaves are used to evoke evanescent images and enigmatic silhouettes. This exploration is a reflexion on the ambiguity of nature and the metaphysical potential of illusion, offering a sensitive extension of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.
Accompanying these pieces, the artist also presents a video linked to his Self Portraits, an ongoing participatory art project conducted within Italian prisons in 2018 that has never been exhibited before. This project engaged four hundred inmates who were asked to choose words from single pages of The Odyssey, to recompose a sentence within each excerpt. The resulting work is a rich tapestry of cross-references and contemporary relevance, bridging the timeless narrative of Homer’s epic with the intimate, suspended time of human experience. Despite the apparent disparity between these works, there is a consistent, unitary research: detecting minimal gestures hidden in everyday life that help us find elements unveiling the delicate complexities of humanity. This deeply humanistic research is consistent with the scope of the exhibition, maintaining a close connection to the tangible realities it addresses.