On Wednesday, 1 October 2025, Fondazione Pastificio Cerere presents MLNKV, a solo exhibition by the artistic collective Mastequoia, curated by Giuliana Benassi and accompanied by a text by Giuliana Benassi and architectural historian Francesco Marullo.

The exhibition will be open to the public from Thursday, 2 October to Saturday, 22 November 2025.

Since 2004, the artistic collective Mastequoia—composed of Gabriele Silli, Giacomo Sponzilli, and Carlo Gabriele Tribbioli—has worked on collaborative projects in which their individual practices and personal journeys intersect and overlap, sharing research themes, tools, and fields of action.

Mastequoia’s work generally stems from performative elements, around which works are produced that develop across a broad and diverse range of media: from photography to sculpture, from graphics to drawing, to video.

In the solo exhibition at Fondazione Pastificio Cerere – MLNKV – the collective presents a constellation of photographic and sculptural materials, along with architectural apparatuses, created around a character derived through appropriation and distortion of the figure of the revolutionary Russian architect Konstantin Stepanovič Mel’nikov (Moscow 1890–1974). The character was developed through a cycle of private performances, which gave rise to the imagery conceived by Giacomo Sponzilli and the photographic prints that form the iconographic core of the project. The body of Melnikov is now, and for the first time, evoked and presented to the public—dispersed in his limbs, his skin, his organs, and his mask—laid to rest among the structures of his boudoir, surrounded by elements of his trousseau and the photographic records of his past appearances, gestures, and poses, marked by a persistent tension between balance, collapse, and falling.

The exhibition includes works created in collaboration with Chinese artist Wanmei.