​Crossings/
Attraversamenti

​The airport is a distinctive spatial and temporal apparatus: an architecture designed to organise movement, regulate flows and facilitate passage between places, communities and cultural systems. Within it, experience is structured by procedures, waiting periods and trajectories; time is measured in departures, connections, delays and arrivals. The space itself is traversed by bodies that rarely settle there: they pass through it, inhabit it provisionally and perceive it as an interval between an origin and a destination.

It is within this context that Crossings situates sculpture, introducing a condition that appears to run counter to the airport’s function. The artwork sets its own permanence against the prescribed mobility of the place; a duration of looking against the speed of movement; a perceptual interruption against the continuity of flows. Sculpture does not merely occupy space: it temporarily alters its order, prompting visitors to develop a different awareness of the body, distance and presence.

The project takes crossing as its field of inquiry, understood not merely as movement from one place to another, but as an experience of contact and transformation. Every crossing entails a boundary, a threshold: a zone in which seemingly stable categories — reality and representation, matter and image, stillness and movement — enter into negotiation. The works of Dario Agrimi, Christian Loretti and Pietro De Scisciolo articulate this tension through heterogeneous practices and visual languages. Their differences are neither subsumed into a single stylistic principle nor subordinated to a formal synthesis; rather, they constitute the very structure of the project. The exhibition thus takes shape as a field of proximity between distinct positions, in which each work retains its autonomy while also reshaping the perception of the others.
The plurality of materials and modes of expression — from sculpted works to pieces combining fired clay and aluminium castings, and hyperrealistic subjects — makes visible the heterogeneous nature of sculptural presence. Matter manifests itself as surface, volume, weight and trace of a process; the image, when it approaches verisimilitude, calls into question the codes through which we recognise a body or an object as belonging to the real. A gap opens between these dimensions: what appears familiar may prove unsettling, while what presents itself as inert matter may acquire an almost corporeal quality — an ability to hold the gaze and orient the surrounding space.

In this sense, sculpture is not merely an object of contemplation, but an agent of relation. Its presence establishes distances, suggests trajectories, interrupts or redirects movement; it enters into dialogue with architecture and bodies in motion, transforming the act of viewing into a situated experience. Visitors encounter the works not outside the journey, but as it unfolds: while waiting, moving through the space or heading towards a destination. The artwork thus enters the airport’s ordinary temporality and produces a momentary suspension — an interval in which attention can, if only for a few moments, withdraw from the functional logic of transit.

Crossings therefore understands the airport not as a mere exhibition venue, but as an active component of the curatorial framework. The site intensifies the interplay between permanence and movement, recognition and disorientation, between what can be crossed and what, instead, holds us in place. The works neither illustrate travel nor offer a single, definitive representation of it: rather, they question its perceptual and symbolic conditions, bringing to the fore the provisional nature of every encounter and the possibility that a place of passage may, for a moment, become a place of experience.

Within the flow of the airport, each sculpture presents itself both as an interruption and as a new point of orientation. It does not bring the journey to a halt, but temporarily alters its rhythm; it does not remove visitors from movement, but opens within it the possibility of a pause. It is in this tension — between crossing and permanence, continuity and interruption, familiarity and estrangement — that the exhibition traces its course.

Nicola Miulli
Direttore artistico