REJECTED LOOP by Margherita Citi e Giulia Gaffo

curated by ife collective
Serre Querini, Vicenza
20–28 September 2025

Part of Meeting Gardens Festival. Scrabula by Bucce Studio, with the patronage and support of the Municipality of Vicenza and the support of Fondazione Roi and Fondazione Monte di Pietà.

Bodies inhabit and are inhabited, in a social space made up of relationships. In their living and interacting, they in turn produce places, individuals and interactions, within which they act and exist. In this flow, our bodies alter the ecosystems of which we are a part, humanising them, leaving marks that we in turn interpret as natural expressions - unaware as we are of our continuous intervention.
In doing so, human bodies reiterate mechanisms of selection, domination and abandonment in an endless loop of waste: embodied, violent, elusive gestures. Ultimately, what is waste if not a residue, something that remains? In its insignificance in relation to human consideration, waste exists and is determined like every body with which it shares the earth.

In the Serra Calda, we find Margherita Citi's works with the Soft Toys series: broken branches can be glimpsed among the dense vegetation, like solitary, negligible presences with irregular and disproportionate shapes. Soft toys, in their reproduction of real or imaginary subjects, are objects that transform and immobilise. In Citi's works, however, the subject of the representation is waste, creating a short circuit between reassuring forms and the predictability of the object, in a continuous return to rejection, emphasised by the twisting of gestures of domination and violence, which bind these ungainly presences with aluminium ties and cables.

Giulia Gaffo's installation, quasi bianche, quasi morte (né corridoi, né giardini) takes us to another dimension, where fragmented forms emerge from the darkness. What remains of the body in social space after its death? The carnivorous plants fossilised with porcelain are themselves containers of corpses that have altered their appearance and architecture. These white elements are traversed by a loop of 3D images where scans of flowers without their texture highlight the encounter between landscapes that do not exist and ruins as fragile as bones.

Photos by Andrea Rosset and Giulia Gaffo.