Corpus et Vulnus: A Poetics of the Wound
The Latin title – Corpus et Vulnus, meaning Body and Wound – is already a declaration of poetics. It directly references the 2023 book of the same name (IP Editions), which offers a critical reading of the works of Antoni Tàpies, Anselm Kiefer, and Claudio Parmiggiani—three central figures in the history of contemporary art, united by a vision of art as torn surface, carnal memory, and material imbued with history and spiritual tension. That theoretical investigation has now become a visual body, a video, a lived space.
THE VIDEO: 40 MINUTES IMMERSED IN THE BREATH OF ART
At the core of the exhibition is a 40-minute video that does not simply document but reinvents the language of installation through a tight yet meditative montage of macro images. The viewer is transported into a visual and sensory journey through forms, textures, shadows, and material vibrations. Detail is the undisputed protagonist: the gaze dives into the weave of the material, the folds of pigment, the tension between mark and surface, the vibration of color and light.
This visual choice is far from accidental. It is a methodological statement: to look closely, to penetrate the skin of the work, to grasp its inner pulse. The goal is not to display the artwork in its entirety, as in a traditional exhibition. On the contrary, the video dissolves all distance and invites the viewer to become part of the work itself, as if sharing in its breath, its mutations, its wounds.
ART AS A LIVING ORGANISM
The central concept of Corpus et Vulnus is art as a living, porous, wounded organism. Not an object to contemplate, but a subject with which to engage. The featured works—born of individual practices as well as a shared curatorial process—present themselves as Artistic-Communicative-Organisms: unstable, reactive entities capable of silently dialoguing with the environment, the audience, and collective memory.
In this vision, every work is a vulnerable body, a field of tension between presence and absence, between construction and disintegration, between materiality and spiritual resonance. Vulnerability is not a weakness but an essential condition of the artwork. It is what makes it alive, permeable, generative.
PLACES THAT SPEAK
The project has taken shape in three deeply meaningful locations:
Velletri – former Papal Prison: A place inscribed with themes of wounding and imprisonment, both physical and symbolic. Here, art confronts historical memory, bodily and spiritual confinement, and layers of time.
Paris – Italian Cultural Institute: A cultural bridge between Italy and Europe, between tradition and contemporaneity. Here, the project takes on a transnational dimension, engaging with the emerging artistic research of European schools and academies. Paris becomes the nexus of an open, plural dialogue.
Rome – Museum of Villa Altieri: A museum space in the heart of the Eternal City, a site of cultural sedimentation and tension between past and present. In Rome, the project reaches its point of culmination, entering into dialogue with the history of art, architecture, and collective memory.
FROM THEORY TO PRAXIS: THE BOOK AS MATRIX
The video and the entire project draw inspiration from the book Corpus et Vulnus: Tàpies, Kiefer, Parmiggiani, curated by Illuminato himself. The book explores the concept of the wound not as trauma to be healed, but as an opening, a possibility of knowledge, an access to the mystery of the body and the world. The three artists—Tàpies with his scratched and transcended matter, Kiefer with his historical narratives in lead and ash, Parmiggiani with his imprints and light relics—represent three manifestations of a single poetics: art as marked flesh, as a gesture that brushes against the invisible.
The transition from book to video is an act of embodied translation: theoretical reflection becomes vision, time, space. Critical thought takes form in images, sounds, and silences.
A MAP OF THE CONTEMPORARY
Corpus et Vulnus is also an open map of international contemporary art. Not only because it involves different places and audiences, but because it acts as a device capable of embracing—and in some way synthesizing—the multiple directions of current experimentation. From painting to sculpture, installation to video art, performance practices to dialogue with new technologies, the project feeds on the plurality of languages and poetics.
Particular attention has been given to the work of young artists from European schools and academies, whose fresh and often radical perspectives have enriched the project with new energy and unexpected visions. IOSONOVULNERABILE is not a showcase but a living laboratory where art confronts the fragility of existence, limit, and transformation.
VULNERABILITY AS RESISTANCE
In a contemporary world dominated by performance, visibility, and control, speaking of vulnerability is a subversive act. It means restoring value to imperfection, fracture, and incompleteness. It affirms that the strength of art lies not in its invulnerability, but in its ability to be touched, to open up to the other, to leave a sensitive trace.
In this sense, Corpus et Vulnus is also a political act. It invites us to consider artistic practice as a form of resistance to cynicism and standardization, as a space of authenticity and exposure of the self. The artist is not an omnipotent demiurge, but a sensitive body exposed to the world, traversing it and being traversed in turn.
AN AESTHETICS OF THE WOUND
The aesthetic running through the project is one of the wound, of the mark, of the echo. It is not a smooth or pacifying beauty, but a raw, restless beauty that questions and involves. The works speak of fragility, but with strength. They challenge the myth of integrity, autonomy, and the closed, finished work. Instead, they present themselves as open processes, traces of a passage, residues charged with meaning.
This aesthetics of the wound is also manifested in the video’s soundscape: silences, breaths, subtle or broken sounds accompany the images, creating an emotional landscape that envelops the viewer and invites deep listening.
A LIVING ARCHIVE-WORK
Corpus et Vulnus ultimately positions itself as both archive-work and living-work. Archive, because it gathers a multiplicity of voices, experiences, practices, and visions. Living, because it does not close itself within a definitive format, but continues to evolve, to shift, to interact with the contexts in which it is presented.
It is not a work to be exhibited, but to be inhabited. Not an end, but a point of departure for new inquiries, new dialogues, new wounds to cross.
