Corpus et Vulnus is neither an exhibition nor a documentary film. It is a crossing. An immersive experience that unsettles the categories of display and representation to open a space for relation and vulnerability. At the heart of the IOSONOVULNERABILE project—conceived and realized by Sergio Mario Illuminato between 2023 and 2025—Corpus et Vulnus unfolds across three symbolically charged and culturally stratified sites: the former Pontifical Prison in Velletri, the Italian Cultural Institute in Paris, and the Villa Altieri Museum in Rome. Different places, united by a common tension between memory and transformation, between wound and possibility.
The Latin title—Corpus et Vulnus, body and wound—is already a poetic statement. It refers directly to the book of the same name, published in 2023 (IP Editions), in which Illuminato offers a critical reading of the works of Antoni Tàpies, Anselm Kiefer, and Claudio Parmiggiani. Three seminal artists of contemporary art, bound by a shared vision of the artwork as wounded matter, as carnal memory, as a surface charged with history and spiritual tension. That theoretical reflection, centered on the wound not as trauma to be healed but as opening, as passage, now becomes visual body, lived space, sensitive immersion.
At the core of the project is a 40-minute video that radically reimagines the language of art installation and documentation. It does not record or illustrate—it inhabits. Through tightly composed, contemplative editing and the obsessive use of macro imagery, the viewer is drawn into a perceptual vertigo. One enters the matter of the work, its folds, its ruptures, its textures. Detail becomes world: each fragment of pigment, each trace, each breath of light is a threshold. The work is not presented in its entirety, as it might be in a traditional exhibition, but is disintegrated and regenerated through a vision that abolishes distance—transforming the eye into skin and the viewer into listener. In this process, art is no longer an object to be viewed but a living organism to be encountered.
The central idea that animates Corpus et Vulnus is that of art as a living and vulnerable body. Each work is an unstable, porous entity—responsive to time and place, open to relation, communication, exposure. Vulnerability is not a limitation but the very condition that allows the work to live and generate meaning. The artworks are not simply exhibited, but exposed to: to memory, to gaze, to silence, to time. They are marked bodies, fields of tension between absence and presence, materiality and transcendence. Art is no longer a finished product, but an ongoing process, a trace of the human and the spiritual in transit.
The three exhibition sites are not passive containers, but active spaces, charged with history and voice. In Velletri, the former Pontifical prison speaks of enclosure—of the body, of time, of spirit. Here, art enters into dialogue with confinement and historical sedimentation. In Paris, at the Italian Cultural Institute, the project becomes a transnational bridge between generations and geographies, enriched by the presence of emerging artists from European academies. In Rome, at the Villa Altieri Museum, the work engages with the city’s deep historical memory, finding a momentary yet resonant point of convergence—one that is also a new departure.
The video arises from an embodied translation of the book Corpus et Vulnus: Tàpies, Kiefer, Parmiggiani. The three artists examined—through their distinct yet connected visual languages—share a poetics of the wound as sign and threshold: Tàpies, with his scarred and transcendent matter; Kiefer, with his alchemical and historical stratifications; Parmiggiani, with his absences etched in light. But the transition from theory to image is not illustrative—it is a creative act in its own right. Thought becomes body, time, image. The essay becomes visual breath. The text becomes silence, sound, pulse.
Corpus et Vulnus also offers a kind of map of the contemporary. Not by claiming synthesis, but by embracing multiplicity. Painting, sculpture, installation, video art, performance, and technological experimentation converge in a fluid, radical laboratory. This is not a showcase, but a living space where practice confronts fragility, limit, and transformation. Particular attention has been paid to the work of young artists from European art schools, whose fresh, sometimes raw perspectives inject new energy and unexpected directions. IOSONOVULNERABILE is not an exhibition: it is a site of becoming.
To speak of vulnerability today—within a system obsessed with performance, efficiency, and control—is a political act. It means reclaiming value for fracture, for imperfection, for the unfinished. It means affirming that the strength of art does not lie in its invulnerability, but in its ability to be touched, to be open to the other, to leave a sensitive trace. The artist, in this vision, is no longer a sovereign maker, but a receptive body—one that is exposed to the world and altered by it.
The aesthetics that shape Corpus et Vulnus are those of residue, of echo, of the trace. The works do not soothe—they unsettle. They do not pacify—they provoke. This is not a smooth or comforting beauty, but a rough, restless one that demands presence. Even the soundscape of the video—composed of breathing, suspension, fragmented silence—constructs an emotional landscape, enveloping the viewer and drawing them into an act of deep listening.
Ultimately, Corpus et Vulnus emerges as both archive and living work. Archive, because it gathers a multiplicity of voices, gestures, practices, and visions. Living, because it refuses closure—remaining open, transformable, in motion. It is not an artwork to be displayed, but one to be inhabited. Not an endpoint, but a beginning—an invitation to further research, to future dialogues, to wounds yet to be crossed.
