On Wednesday, 1 October 2025, Fondazione Pastificio Cerere presents Invisibilium, a group exhibition featuring artists Giulia Apice, Ruth Beraha, Desirè D’Angelo, and Chiara Russo, curated by Giulia Tornesello.
The exhibition will be open to the public from Thursday, 2 October to Saturday, 22 November 2025.
Invisibilium is a group exhibition that challenges conventional experience of art. In an age of image excess and visual saturation, this project critiques cultural voyeurism and the false transparency of the present.
The term Invisibilium is taken from the title of a text by Augustine of Hippo, De fide rerum invisibilium (On Faith in Things Unseen), an invitation for the viewer to abandon sight and make an act of faith, dwelling in unknowing, experiencing a mystery not to be resolved but traversed.
In Mia Cara, an audio work by Ruth Bertha (Milan), a female voice feverishly repeats phrases of visual subtraction: “Stop looking at me” and “I don’t want to see you anymore.” The two phrases chase and converge, moving through the room and reclaiming the space between opacity and invisibility. The litany repeats, accelerates, and slows—a mantra of refusal against being reduced to an image. The women’s voices assert the autonomous production of their identity in a perpetual dance between visualisation and oblivion.
The sound of Mia Cara, which fills the halls of Spazio Molini—a mausoleum keeper and witness to the passage of time with its mouldy walls—is contrasted by the silence of Desirè D’Angelo’s (Frosinone) video work, Autoritratto 57. This piece, created in one of the Foundation’s basement rooms, explores the gesture of care as a primary form of human communication. A female figure rests her head on a man’s lap, who strokes the back of her neck for hours. The repetition, devoid of sound, transforms the gesture into a bodily act, somewhere between tenderness and automatism, comfort and resistance. The viewing device—a peephole through which the spectator can observe the scene—introduces a fundamental perceptual filter: we look from outside, from a threshold. In reactivating the mechanism of “looking without being seen”, we become excluded from full participation, yet included in an archetypal experience.
However, duration transforms the gesture. When the caress becomes a rub, another dimension emerges: the fatigue of caring, the wear of repeated gestures. Time is not neutral: it deforms, wears down, but it also reveals. In the gesture that wears out, we glimpse the limits of the parental function, but also its power: to remain, to continue, to touch. This is because the gesture between the two bodies in the video—father and daughter, but also protector and vulnerable, adult and infant, human and human—activates an intercorporeal memory that precedes individual narrative.
A constant emotional tension is felt in the space, created by Chiara Russo’s works, Giornali, arranged amongst the tunnels like in a medieval armory. The works consist of rolled-up paper newspapers pierced with spikes on the surface, reminiscent of a spiked mace. These hybrid objects, halfway between instruments of information and weapons of war, highlight the latent aggressiveness that characterises much contemporary media narrative, balanced between reality, fiction, and spectacularisation. The images and headlines reported in the media contribute to constant and collective emotional pressure, thus transforming the newspaper into an object of violence.
Alongside the bold headlines of Chiara Russo’s newspapers, the painted works of Giulia Apice (Frosinone) also elude the gaze. Her large painted sheets are folded to reveal only part of the design. The artist foregoes the total exposure of the image: subjects inhabit the canvases between draperies and transparencies, making themselves felt but not revealing themselves in scenographic appearances. They gain the possibility of privacy while remaining in public, asserting their presence while maintaining a sacred austerity—once again offering the viewer an act of faith: to believe in their existence despite being prevented from full visibility.
