Chiara Camoni's Permanent Installation at Palazzo Bentivoglio in Bologna

Italian artist Chiara Camoni (born 1974 in Piacenza) has created a permanent installation at Palazzo Bentivoglio in Bologna, inaugurated during ArtCity. The work, titled 'Ipogea' (2021), incorporates chandelier sculptures, furniture fragments, vegetal motifs, and mutable forms arranged as an unfinished, adaptable interior. Camoni describes her process as intuitive, moving step by step following the suggestion of the stones themselves, as if reassembling a puzzle. She aims to connect with an archaic, mythical past while bringing materials into the present, allowing visitors to live on the stones, sit on them, and use them as flooring. The installation includes a mysterious serpent-like figure called 'Serpentessa,' whose origin Camoni cannot recall. The artist draws inspiration from sociologist Silvia Federici's idea that alternative worlds inspired by commons emerge like grass through cracks in urban concrete. Camoni's practice combines collective processes and social research, with sculpture expanding into objects, utensils, architecture, and simulacra.