Macchiato Cultural Festival – Collective Exhibition, curated by Collettivo Macchiato in collaboration with Associazione Culturale Spiazzi, Venice, Italy.

Presented from 7 to 15 February 2025 at Spiazzi / ISOLAB in Venice’s Castello district, Macchiato was conceived as a cultural festival blending visual art, music, performance, workshops, poetry, and social conviviality. Designed to revive Venice’s winter season and reinforce the community’s bond with creative practices, the event showcased seven emerging artists whose work responded to the city’s lagoon life. The collective exhibition emphasized the encounter as both a sensory and symbolic exchange, anchored in sharing and dialogue.

Mi relaziono perché sei diverso / I connect with you ’cause you’re different is a reflection on the transformative nature of human connection and the essential role of diversity in shaping identity.
This triptych captures a static yet spontaneous moment of human connection, translating into visual form the idea of mutual transformation through encounter. The work draws inspiration from urban graffiti and a specific observation: how street art shifts when construction pallets—bearing layers of sprayed marks—are moved and reassembled. In these imperfect alignments, new images emerge, blending fragments into unfamiliar, hybrid faces.
The piece reflects on how individuals, too, transform through contact—exchanging parts of themselves and forming new, shared identities. Without overt didacticism, the work gestures toward the necessity and vitality of diversity. It subtly references anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, who, in reflecting on biodiversity and culture, wrote: “It is not the grass itself that interests the herbivore, but the difference between species of grass.”

Mi relaziono perché sei diverso (I connect with you ’cause you’re different)
Oil and spray paint on cotton, triptych
230 x 130 cm
2025