Alessandro Quinzii Borgomainerio: Corpo sottile

On 17 September 2025, Alice nello spazio latente opened its first project in Venice with “Corpo sottile”, the debut solo exhibition of Alessandro Quinzii Borgomainerio. More than a traditional display, it unfolds as a ritual of transformation, where the artist acts not as creator but as facilitator of processes — from the spread of mould to the shifting states of matter. Visitors, too, are engaged as “subtle bodies” within this space of change.

The exhibition spans two rooms: one with works generated by mould, the other resembling both an artist’s studio and a Renaissance laboratory, where experimentation and uncertainty shape the creative process. In Venice — a city steeped in humidity, salt, and decay — mould becomes collaborator rather than adversary, infiltrating and rewriting surfaces. For Quinzii Borgomainerio, this decomposition is a kind of contemporary alchemy, where human and non-human forces share authorship.

“Corpo sottile” also reimagines the “Wunderkammer”. Historically, cabinets of curiosities displayed exotic “wonders” while concealing the wounds of conquest. Here, wonder and wound are inseparable: every body is fragile, every form vulnerable. The title draws on the idea of the “subtle body” — porous and mutable — which materialises in works where mould, bones, stones, and spores record the passage of time, dissolving boundaries between life and death, chaos and order.

The project resonates with avant-garde museology and Clementine Deliss’ “metabolic museum”: institutions understood not as static collections but as systems in motion. Each work in “Corpo sottile” undergoes cycles of growth, decomposition, and renewal, forming an ecology of transformation rather than a fixed archive. Fragility, here, becomes the true wonder.