Article by Floriana Savino
For the year 2026, the Italian Pavilion of the Venice Biennale Arte will host the exhibition Con te, con tutto by artist Chiara Camoni, curated by Cecilia Canziani.
On the people of the Apuan Alps, writer Maurizio Maggiani has woven the novel and poetry of a rich history of dignity and Resistance. The son of two humble yet proud partisans of freedom, he relives the necessity of a time that fought against dictatorship, restrictions, and discontent, accompanied by the genuine feeling that comes from the taste and scent of the land. Along the paths of a creative journey of rediscovery, artist Chiara Camoni (Piacenza, 1974) has also chosen the landscape of Alta Versilia, in the heart of the Apuan Alps, as the place for her studio. For years now, in Seravezza, the artist has nurtured a shared dream of art and female collaboration. A glance at the many interviews Camoni has given over time reveals her deep desire to accompany the creation of much of her work with a collective dance of many hands—one that involves dialogue, a smile, and the living presence of a continuous exchange.
Among the materials that most characterize Chiara Camoni’s artistic practice is, without any doubt, the gentle skin of the earth: clay. Drawing on the archetypal potential of this natural element, the artist continues to weave stories that tend to unfold within a project praising the world’s ecosystem. Camoni’s Sisters often appear within the gallery space adorned with fragile and perishable elements—flowers, leaves, dried branches—which, together with the quiet power of a small lit candle, evoke the beauty of a passage of existence that is as inevitable as it is natural. In 2017, during a residency in Montelupo Fiorentino, the artist wrote in her notebook (which later became a foundational part of the resulting project):
[…] I walk through the streets and the surrounding landscape. At first unconsciously, and then more clearly, I feel a certain harshness. A mixture of unease, interrupted at times by elements of beauty […] There is playfulness and awkwardness. There is the wolf and the porcupine. Light and darkness. Masculine and feminine. Fear and smile. Content and container. The vase and the sculptures. […] We worked on the vases, the most archaic and necessary object. We worked simultaneously on two sides. With our eyes closed and looking elsewhere.
Moving from ancient archaeological and Paleolithic testimonies to the well-known and debated editorial phenomenon of The Da Vinci Code (2003) by Dan Brown, the element of the vase condenses and carries with it a symbolic significance of remarkable influence. In recalling the richness and multiplicity of the feminine, the vase welcomes visions, treasures, enigmas, and narratives that grant Camoni’s art the enchantment of a mythology written through the female body. Clay, for one or more goddesses who do not belong to a specific time and know no division of being, gives rise to the possibility of stitching together fragments of a world that listens to otherness. At the Italian Pavilion of the 2026 Venice Biennale, Chiara Camoni presents the exhibition Con te, con tutto. Curated by Cecilia Canziani, the solo show promises the texture and breath of an artistic journey that restores the fragments of a fragrant pantomimic garden.
