A Conversation with Nico Vascellari: Between Nature, Metamorphosis, and the Ongoing Dynamic of Conflict and Rebirth
Nico Vascellari
SP: A room of great historical significance, still bearing the scars of the 1943 bombings. How did you approach the space, its wounds, and its historical stratification? How does your research fit into this intertwining of memory and contemporaneity that the room itself embodies?
NV: The Sala delle Cariatidi is also, not just, memory–and as such, it is stratified. Its wounds are not merely traces of the past but active elements that engage in dialogue with the present. Nothing is hidden; you just need to listen.
My intervention fits into this tension between permanence and metamorphosis, between what has been and what can still happen.
I do not impose, I welcome; I do not close, I amplify. I believe that contemporaneity is defined precisely by this ongoing dialogue with what precedes us, by knowing how to inhabit its tensions without reducing them to a singular narrative.
SP: “Pastorale” recalls the 1953 exhibition of Guernica in the same Sala delle Cariatidi, emphasising the role of art as a witness to the darkest moments of history and, at the same time, as a possible tool for social transformation. In a present marked by conflicts and tensions, do you believe art should be limited to testimony and denunciation, or can it also open spaces for the construction of new possibilities? In your role as an artist, do you think you have an individual responsibility, and if so, in which direction would you like to move?
NV: “Pastorale” arises from a reflection on the function of art as a tool for connecting the past and the present, between individual experience and the collective dimension. The reference to Guernica and its exhibition in the Sala delle Cariatidi is not just an homage but a recognition of the power of art to inhabit trauma, to give it form and voice. However, I believe that the role of art is not limited to testimony or condemnation. Art is a living organism, capable of generating fractures but also openings, new possibilities for perception and relationships.
I don’t think of art in terms of moral responsibility, but as necessity. The artist is not a spokesperson; they do not impose absolute truths but rather question, destabilise, and create spaces where the latent can emerge. In this sense, my work always moves within the tension between memory and transformation, between resistance and possibility. I believe art must maintain this ambiguity, without reducing itself to a tool for propaganda or simple testimony. It is in the openness of uncertainty that new imaginaries are created.
SP: In “Pastorale”, we find a tension between human violence and the destructive power of civilisations with the regenerative force of nature. In your works, nature is not just a backdrop but a constant in your research. As a living element that interacts with the human being, why do you think nature holds a power of resistance and transformation that art can evoke or make visible?
NV: Nature is an active, autonomous, unstoppable force, constantly transforming.
A form of absolute resistance. In “Pastorale”, this tension between human violence and the regenerative capacity of nature becomes central: what man destroys, nature metabolises, reworks, reinvents.
I believe art has the ability to make this process visible, to amplify it. Not in the sense of idealising it, but in highlighting its force and ambiguity. Nature is not just a victim; it is also an agent, and art can reveal its voice, its silent yet devastating resistance. It is not an abstract idea; it is a body, a movement, a dynamic of conflict and rebirth that continues to surprise us and escape our control.
We are the centre only because we are unable to look from perspectives other than our own. A multitude of solitude.
SP: You return to Milan more than 15 years after your performance “I Hear A Shadow” in 2009. How has your artistic language evolved since then? What elements of your past research do you find in “Pastorale”, and what represents for you a break or a new direction?
NV: Every work of mine arises from a tension between continuity and change. “I Hear A Shadow” was a piece in which sound, body, and space intertwined to create an expanded perceptual dimension, where the audience was not just a spectator but part of an immersive process. In “Pastorale”, this dynamic persists but manifests in a different way: the relationship with space is no longer only physical but also historical and material, and the dialogue with the memory of the Sala delle Cariatidi amplifies its stratification.
Over time, my language has evolved without losing some central elements of my research: the energy of gesture, the tension between construction and ruin, sound as matter and presence. If there is a break, it is perhaps in how I now confront the temporality of the work. If in the past the performative element was often ephemeral and linked to immediate action, today I am interested in creating forms that absorb time, that retain traces and continue to transform even after their realization. “Pastorale” is a step in this direction: a work that lives in the tension between the past that generated it and the future that will redefine it.
