Bridging Worlds

Bridging Worlds is a site-specific exhibition by XAARCHIVE studio (Sofia Lorenzo & Nayla Cefarelli), part of suMISURA, the exhibition season where selected artists analyze spazioSERRA, both as content and container. Here, the rules that constitute it are daily emphasized, exploited, deformed, remodeled, and sometimes annulled. The exhibition is on view from Thursday, September 26, to Saturday, October 26, 2024, at the Milano Lancetti train station.

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XAARCHIVE, through the languages of installations and interior design, explores the boundaries between nature and artificiality, promoting the inclusion of all life forms as an essential element. Their works combine vegetal elements and organic materials with technological and aesthetic processes, creating a harmonious dialogue between the natural and the artificial. Environmental sustainability and regeneration are central to their research, which is expressed through repeated and remodulated projects depending on the space that hosts them.

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XAARCHIVE brings to spazioSERRA a window into the future, where technology and nature coexist in a balance that is both wild and controlled. A near and plausible future, where the ground has become too hot to inhabit, leading humanity to use technology to survive and thrive by transforming excessive heat into an energy resource, turning a threat into an opportunity. It’s a future where we accept the untamable and the unpredictable, embracing the uncontrolled and spontaneous beauty of the natural world, recognizing its intrinsic, dramatic, and sublime design that takes us beyond the end of an anthropocentric era.

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spazioSERRA hosts an underground environment filled with pipes, tanks and organic soil, where elements like fungi and aquatic plants freely proliferate. The structure is perplexing to those who observe it. In his reflection accompanying the exhibition, Professor Alberto Delorenzini wonders, “But what can grow here, in a glass-walled enclosure, artificially lit and housed within an underground space through which multitudes circulate? More so, why should anything grow? (...) However, in the most hidden places, in the least apparent stratum of life, fungi, mosses, or lichens probably grow, timidly claiming their space.” We also wonder who built the structure, who the inhabitants of this underground realm are—perhaps a futuristic iteration of humanity itself? And what has happened to the planet, making it necessary to grow our crops underground? Is it still possible to leave this train station and live outside safely?

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XAARCHIVE’s response to spazioSERRA’s exhibition theme, suMISURA, is a rejection of the impulse to quantify, regulate, and measure, arguing that the path toward future innovation involves, to some extent, the ability to let go and create space for alternative forms of intelligence, different species, and the development of life in its multifaceted essence. In our human quest for a perfectly tailored daily life, we risk losing the spontaneity and unpredictability that make life truly interesting. Bridging Worlds invites the viewer to adopt a more fluid and adaptive approach to existence: by letting go of the need for control and measurement, we can open ourselves to a world rich with serendipity, complexity, and diversity. Through technology, humanity becomes a facilitator of the new future.

Bridging Worlds presents the hope of a possible future and the boldness to remain optimistic in times of crisis: What if, instead of resisting change, we adapted to it? What if we started thinking about what tools we have to live in this world rather than being overwhelmed by it?

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EVENTS

Friday, October 25, 2024 @ spazioSERRA
An in-depth talk on the exhibition with XAARCHIVE and professionals related to the project’s themes.