Never be pure, states artist Giulia Cenci, who, in her sculptural practice, recovers remnants from everyday life and industrial waste to lead her sculptures and installations into a surreal dimension, beyond the confines of reality. In the act of selecting discarded materials, rubber, metal, aluminum, her poetic vision emerges: every element is found and transformed through a process of recycling and hybridization that questions the very essence of things and of people.
Her works inhabit a liminal space, where the boundaries between human, animal, and artificial collapse, leaving room for new possibilities of existence. Cenci does not create isolated sculptures; she builds choral environments, where matter, found and altered, becomes a fragment of a dispersed collective narrative.
The exhibition the hallow men, which inaugurates Project Space, Palazzo Strozzi’s new venue dedicated to emerging art, curated by Arturo Galansino, takes shape as a posthuman landscape, a scenography of exhaustion, in which the borders between organic and inorganic, human and non-human merge into a single material plane. The title refers to The Hollow Men, a 1925 poem by T. S. Eliot, which resonates with the condition of the figures that populate the installation:
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw.
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
(. . .)
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;
(. . .)
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
Cenci seems to translate these words into three-dimensional forms suspended between inertia and tension, between gesture and collapse. In the first room, a screw conveyor, an industrial machine used to lift water, is suspended between floor and ceiling, resembling a column, a gesture of suspension and interruption. Around it gathers a forest of humanoid mannequins with canine heads, wolf-men, as the artist calls them, whose thin, curved, weary bodies seem bent under an invisible force, dehydrated by a symbolic thirst. Among them, Cenci introduces the narrative tension of relationship: two figures lean on each other, a gesture of mutual support, a fragment of liturgical storytelling in sculptural form.
The second room stands in contrast to the first in its density: while the first is filled with presences, the second is empty, rarefied. In the half-light, a three-headed figure titled Lady emerges, appearing to float in the dimness, in a contemplative space that forces the viewer to slow down.
Further on, a crouching figure, wrapped in hand-stitched aluminum mosquito netting, stands as a sentinel before a non-existent threshold, bearing witness to the impossibility of crossing and the tension toward a denied elsewhere. At the margin, a long table displays copies of sketches, drawings, and studies, documents through which the artist allows us a glimpse into her process, her practice of transformation, of rescue and reassembly; not mere additions, but traces of thought.
Giulia Cenci’s work is an act of world-making: she creates wild habitats, environments in which the organic and inorganic, the human and the bestial, the object and the body become indistinguishable. Her sculptures inhabit ecosystems where one loses familiar reference points, a dark, shadowy world of precarious beings in balance. The exhibition display becomes part of the work itself, it completes it, extends it, translates it into shared experience: the floor on which the figures rest, a black tatami made from recycled tire rubber, erases all distinctions and creates a suspended environment in which everything is immersed in the same matter. Here, value, hierarchy, and the separation between what is powerful and what is marginal dissolve. The world Cenci imagines is somber and shadowy, but also radically horizontal. Hers is a practice that, though grounded in a lucid diagnosis of an alienated and precarious world, invites us to imagine other populations, other ecologies.
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