On Wednesday 12 and Thursday 13 November, four exhibitions will open at four venues in Rome, part of the curatorial project “Invocations”. Each exhibition is part of a broader curatorial project that explores the relationship between the human body and the non-human bodies of the world we inhabit. Guiding this path is the term “Invocations,” taken from a lecture by James Hillman, in which the psychoanalyst describes invocation as a call to invisible spirits that involves a displacement of the human subject from the center of the scene “towards the wings (the sides), in an anti-modern gesture that ignores the ego, the hero, the intentions, and the biography of the person”. The first episode of the curatorial project, “Invocations. Becoming Animal”, was inaugurated in Milan on October 22. Here are the details of the BIENALSUR 2025 cartography in Rome.
Km 11148 - Ambasciata del Brasile a Roma - Galeria Cândido Portinari
Invocations. Contact Ecologies
The exhibition project brings together artists engaged in a critical reinterpretation of specific territories and geographies. The works on display foreground minoritized narratives and counter-readings that propose a bodily approach to the concept of place. The body becomes both a measure and an tool of inquiry, used to interpret the landscape through reflections, overlays, or even direct assimilations. Visions of Brazilian territory, explored by artists who have gained international recognition precisely through their research on the theme of identity such as Lia Chaia, Paulo Nazareth, and Claudia Andujar, intertwine with the work of artists like Maria Thereza Alves, Brazilian by birth but based between Naples and Berlin, Pamela Diamante, and Ettore Favini, who reflect on different regions of the Italian geography.
Artists: Maria Thereza Alves (BRA/ITA), Claudia Andujar (BRA), Lia Chaia (BRA), Pamela Diamante (ITA), Ettore Favini (ITA), Paulo Nazareth (BRA).
Curatorship: BIENALSUR, Benedetta Casini (ITA)
More information, here.
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Km 11148,5 - Spanish Embassy in Rome
Invocations. My Mortality Should Move You
.“Perhaps the clearest metaphor for the project of subjectivizing the object is a sculpture. What the shaman does is more or less this: sculpting subjects into stones, conceptually sculpting a human form, that is, removing from the stone everything that previously prevented us from seeing the ‘human’ form contained within it.”
— Eduardo Viveiros de Castro
The exhibition project at the new headquarters of the Embassy of Spain in Rome brings together a selection of artists who engage with the materiality of stone. The exhibition’s title, My Mortality Should Move You, is taken from the poem “Conversation with a Stone” by Wisława Szymborska, in which the Polish poet imagines entering into dialogue with the lithic subject. Throughout the conversation, the inevitable distances between the two bodies—the human body of the poet and the mineral body of the stone—emerge, along with their respective temporalities. Artists: Karina Aguilera Skvirsky (USA/ECU), Veronica Bisesti (ITA), alfonso borragán (ESP), Florencia Caiazza (ARG), Jon Cazenave (ESP/País Vasco), Valentina Furian (ITA), Matteo Guidi y Giuliana Racco (ITA/CAN), Juan Gugger (ARG), Estefanía Landesmann (ARG), Caterina Morigi (ITA), Itziar Okariz (ESP/País Vasco), Jorge Yeregui (ESP).
Curatorship: BIENALSUR, Benedetta Casini (ITA)
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Km 11149 - Palazzo Braschi - Museo di Roma
Invocations
Chiara Bettazzi: Encounter Objects
Matías Ercole: They Have Seen the Sun Fall
This exhibition, presented alongside the upcoming Villas and Gardens of Rome: A Crown of Delights at Palazzo Braschi, brings together two site-specific projects that offer different perspectives on contemporary vegetal landscapes.
Artists: Matías Ercole (ARG), Chiara Bettazzi (ITA) Curatorship: BIENALSUR, Diana B. Wechsler (ARG) and Benedetta Casini (ITA)
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Km 11151 - Auditorium Parco della Musica Ennio Morricone
Invocations. A Sound Deep in the Ear
The exhibitions that make up the BIENALSUR itinerary in Italy, between September and December 2025, outline a conceptual journey that explores the relationship between the human body and the non-human bodies of the world we inhabit: animals, the natural landscape, plant intelligences, and stones as archives of millennia-old time. Guiding the exhibition path is the term "Invocations", taken from the lecture La Cultura y el Alma Animal given by James Hillman in Caracas in 1994, where the psychoanalyst describes invocation as a call to invisible spirits, an offering or propitiation that implies a shift of the human subject from the center of the stage “toward the wings (the sides), in an anti-modern gesture that ignores the ego, the hero, the intentions, and the biography of the person, shifting attention toward the margins”.
Artists: Friedrich Andreoni (ITA/DEU), Giorgia Errera (ITA), Lihuel Gonzalez (ARG), Jacopo Mazzonelli (ITA), Marc Vilanova (ESP), Andreas Zampella (ITA) Curatorship: BIENALSUR, Benedetta Casini (ITA)
