Good morning! Welcome to Artissima 2025. This is the AudioGuide project and you are listening to tour number 2, titled On Dignity. This itinerary explores the many forms of identity and relationship, questioning the meaning of “dignity” as a space of resistance, care, and mutual recognition. The journey opens up an inquiry into the self and the other in fragile times—times marked by conflict, injustice, and a contemporary condition strained by systemic violence, hyper-visibility, and constant demands for hyper-performance. Within this landscape, artists take on a revolutionary, countercultural gesture: a movement of mutual care and openness towards others, translating into a poetic, everyday act of disobedience against indifference and stereotype. In this space, vulnerability becomes both threshold and possibility—a force that drives us to reassert the value of life and difference. The reflections we’ll encounter today invite us to "stay with the trouble", as Donna Haraway wrote—to resist the impulse to turn away from the complexity of the contemporary world, and instead to inhabit it consciously, restoring the centrality of relationship. In recent years, this attitude has evolved into a broad cultural and political practice, rooted in an inter­sectional framework that spans not only artistic expression but also ecological movements, transfeminist collectives, and scientific research communities—a shared way of responding to the challenges of the present. On Dignity calls for a continuous re-negotiation of the value of identity—both individual and universal—through a constellation of works, research, and languages that reveal its many facets. The experience gathers collective reflections before arriving at a more intimate, affective dimension, where vulnerability and closeness become gestures of affirmation and self-representation. The AudioGuides were developed for Artissima by the advisors of Arteco. This route was curated by Camilla Zennaro. We are ready to go. Pause your player and head for the Monologue/Dialogue section, where our tour will begin. You will find the Fuoricampo gallery stand along the Pink A corridor at number 5. Press play once you are there.

Welcome to the Monologue/Dialogue section. The Fuoricampo Gallery from Pisa, dedicated to young artists and experimental research, presents today for Artissima 2025 a project by Davide Sgambaro. In front of us, the wall’s surface bears the marks of an action we haven’t witnessed—an event that withdraws from presence, yet continues to make itself felt through its material consequences. You might be wondering: have we perhaps arrived too late? Davide Sgambaro’s practice embodies forms of resistance to the identity paradoxes and stereotypes embedded in today’s social and cultural order. In this work, titled Whistle and I Will Come to You (my love), the artist introduces an element of risk and unpredictability, intervening directly on the stand panels using pyrotechnic materials. The explosion—controlled, yet never entirely foreseeable—creates a constellation of marks, burn traces, and patterns that repeat without ever coinciding. What we are looking at, then, is a trace of action, a physical memory of the event that produced it, where authorship merges with chance and intention expands into an open-ended process. Whistle and I Will Come to You (my love) belongs to a wider series of related works Sgambaro has been developing since 2022.It occupies a temporal space in which the performative dimension is replaced by a posthumous time—the time of the residue. The artist seems less concerned with the gesture itself than with its invisibility. It is within this short circuit that a narrative glitch emerges—an interruption both ironic and critical within the exhibition flow. In his works, Sgambaro questions the very necessity to produce, to display, to perform—as though every attempt at manifestation were destined, inevitably, to fail. The resulting fracture reflects a broader, shared condition: that of a generation suspended between the desire to act and the awareness of its limited agency. The tension between revolutionary energy and systemic impotence becomes, paradoxically, a condition of possibility: a restrained gesture, an unrealised act that nonetheless carries collective political weight. If you’d like to explore Davide Sgambaro’s work further, the GAM in Turin is inaugurating "L’Intruso" — a programme inviting him to engage in dialogue with the museum’s exhibitions and collections. This concludes our first stop. Pause your player and head for the Janizewski Gallery in the Main Section along the yellow corridor, at number 12. Press play once you are there. I will be waiting for you!

Our second stage takes us to the Main Section of the fair, at the Berlin-based gallery Janizewski. We now enter the intimate space of a bedroom. At the centre of the stand, an unmade bed evokes the presence of a restless body — one that stirs, sweats, and leaves traces of its passage. The motif of the bed lies at the heart of the precise and finely tuned conceptual research carried out by the German artist Rebekka Benzenberg: a site of emotional refuge, seductive yet at the same time a space of potential fragility and decay. Artists such as Tracey Emin, Louise Bourgeois and Felix Gonzalez-Torres have transformed the bed into a symbol of revolution — a place where intimacy becomes a political language. Benzenberg follows this lineage, driven by the impulse to make what is private and intimate both public and radical. In this work, Peace will come and with it sleep, the bed is inhabited by a reclining body — a resin sculpture created by the artist and covered with a veil, seemingly suspended in a fragile limbo between therapy and paralysing distraction. The piece takes shape from a cast of the Düssel nymph in Düsseldorf’s Malkastenpark — a vandalised statue, destroyed and never restored. Through this act of rewriting, Benzenberg condenses her reflection on the violence embedded in the condition of womanhood. Drawing from art-historical references and their implications for the concept of the body and femininity, the artist questions notions of trauma, pathologisation, and depression. Her perspective — partly autobiographical — embraces social contexts in all their complexity, reading mental illness as a form of reaction: a rebellion of bodies against the logics of contemporary capitalism. Benzenberg subverts the idea that life must produce value in order to be considered worthy, returning to vulnerability its transformative power. Hers is a subtle critique of the neoliberal logic that measures existence in terms of efficiency and productivity, relegating care and interdependence to the margins. Suspended between presence and absence, fragility and assertion, her works make visible what society tends to conceal: bodies and memories that refuse to be normalised. And so we ask ourselves — what kind of collective resistance can emerge from this very vulnerability? Pause your player and head for the lilac corridor in the Back to the future section. You will find the Lovay Gallery at number 7. Press play once you are there. I will be waiting for you!

The third stage on our journey takes us to the Back to the Future section, at the Lovay Gallery. We left Rebekka Benzenberg’s stand with a question: what form of collective resistance can emerge from vulnerability? An answer comes through the work of Gretta Sarfaty, one of the first artists in the 1970s to bring questions of gender to the centre of the artistic discourse, turning self-representation into a powerful political act. An activist and performer, Sarfaty was, during those same years, part of the Grupo de Vanguarda in Rio de Janeiro — an artist collective that worked in opposition to Brazil’s military dictatorship. For Sarfaty, the body has never been a subject to be displayed, but rather a field of resistance — a language of experimentation through which to assert the self. In 1979, when she took part in the Journées interdisciplinaires sur l’art corporel et performances at the Centre Pompidou, alongside figures such as Dan Graham, Lea Lubin and VALIE EXPORT, Sarfaty redefined the relationship between gaze and the female body. Through photography, performance, and painting, her research unfolds in a constant tension between vulnerability and power. Lovay presents here a selection of historical photographs and original photo-lithographs on acetate, produced between 1975 and 1978, from the series A Woman’s Diary and Transformations. In the former, Sarfaty explores the possibilities of autofiction through photographic manipulation: she deconstructs and distorts her own image, multiplies her face, alters her posture — creating a space between the familiar and the estranged. In Transformations, these layers converge into an obsessive process in which repetition questions gender categories and stereotypes, while simultaneously revealing the influence of Pop Art, consumerism, and the role of the media in the construction of female identity. By depicting herself as deliberately formless, abstract, at times even feral, the artist exposes her intimacy — generating a collective subjectivity. The photographs and photo-lithographs on acetate, along with the iconic Auto-Fotos series, document a body that becomes a critical surface, a site of negotiation. For Sarfaty, dignity is not a given condition, but a practice: the capacity to inhabit one’s own body and continually rewrite its boundaries. Pause your player and continue down the lilac corridor towards the Fonti gallery stand in the Disegni section at number 9. Press play once you are there. I will be waiting for you!

Our journey continues with the Fonti Gallery in the Disegni section. Here we encounter the Zimbabwean artist Felix Shumba. Born in 1989, he currently lives and works in Masvingo, in the south of the country. Through a series of charcoal drawings created between 2024 and 2025, Shumba explores the intersections of memory, trauma, and power, situating his practice within the framework of postcolonial discourse. His works unfold within what the artist himself defines as Fold Fields Space: environments — both real and mental — marked by trauma, ecological damage, and military control. Among the central threads of his research are references to the violence accompanying the rise of far-right movements, as well as to erased episodes of colonial history, such as the chemical warfare conducted in Rhodesia — present-day Zimbabwe — under the segregationist regime that remained in power until 1979. The traces of colonial history become integral to a landscape that seems to breathe on its own: dense, porous, where every figure is both manifestation and symptom. Across the white of the paper, dark forms emerge — inverted trees, animals, faces — presences inhabiting a perceptibly contaminated ecosystem. The drawings are made using self-produced charcoal, created through pyrolysis — a process that transforms wood into a black, volatile material. This choice is not only technical but conceptual: every mark is a combustion, an organic residue that, in its ambiguity, becomes persistence. Within this horizon, Shumba’s visual universe engages with what philosopher Timothy Morton calls hyperobjects: pervasive entities that act beyond our perception and continue to manifest over time. The artist translates their presence into the sensible, making visible what endures — the lingering matter and trauma of the past. Taken together, Felix Shumba’s work interweaves speculative and dystopian narratives with an artistic lineage that has turned poor or humble materials into a language of resistance — from William Kentridge to Marlene Dumas, and through to the post-extractivist practices of the African diaspora. Working between historical archives and autobiography, Shumba investigates the structures of domination that continue to shape the present, constructing a poetics of persistence: a way to give form to trauma without fixing it, transforming the wound into a visual language. We have finished our fourth stop. Pause your player and continue just a little further to the Lehmann Gallery in the Present Future section, at number 4. Press play once you are there. I will be waiting for you!

Our journey concludes in the Present/Future section, with the Lehmann Gallery from Portugal. Founded in 2017, the gallery is dedicated to promoting contemporary Portuguese art on the international scene. For Artissima 2025, Lehmann presents the artist João Gabriel, whose practice invites us — with sensitivity and restraint — to discover a new nuance in the idea of dignity. In today’s public discourse, the word dignity is often invoked as a form of defence, rarely as a form of possibility. Yet the legitimacy of desire is earned within the fragile space between visibility and silence — between being merely seen and being truly recognised. In Gabriel’s paintings, this tension takes on a pictorial form: his subjects — male bodies immersed in a suspended, natural light — exist on the threshold of contact, never fully exposed. They inhabit an in-between time, where intimacy itself becomes an act of reclamation. Through a practice that is both traditional and radical — oil on canvas — Gabriel reaffirms the relevance of painting as a space of exposure and complaint and at the same time for introspection. In his nudes, he reworks a symbolic, nostalgic, almost pastoral dimension of desire, drawing from a visual imaginary inspired by underground queer cinema of the 1970s and 1980s — a crucial period for LGBTQ+ film-making. That era was marked by a brief but intense liberation of expression that, albeit brief, radically transformed the ways in which queer communities were represented — before the HIV epidemic abruptly interrupted it, bringing with it new forms of censorship. In Gabriel’s canvases, the memory of that suspended freedom resurfaces through the bodies he paints: vulnerable yet assertive presences, where intimacy becomes a gesture of resistance and self-affirmation. Though evocative, his painterly language goes beyond representation, contributing to the normalisation of queer and homoerotic narratives within contemporary art. It restores to artistic language the capacity to express the complexity of affection, showing how dignity is built through inhabiting one’s vulnerability — through the act of recognising oneself and the other, and through transforming closeness into a collective gesture of resistance. We finished our fifth and final stop. We hope that this course has stimulated and intrigued you. If you’d like another perspective on the art fair, go back to the info point or the AudioGuides landing page and select another podcast! See you soon and enjoy Artissima!