“To create a small flower is to insist on tenderness in a world of extraction—to dissolve meaning into the sacred, envisioned not above us, but in the very flesh of the world.”
Hyperobjects is thrilled to announce Hembryo’s exhibition program which will run from May to October 2025 at our gallery space in Rome. Following the open call The Anthropocene Will Collapse, a blissful selection board—composed of philosopher Timothy Morton, researcher and writer Laura Tripaldi; artists Evelyn Natalia Bencicova and CROSSLUCID; and researcher and curator Ginevra Ludovici—has selected four artists, each paired with a curator. Together, they will transform Hembryo into a living installation, proposing new reconfigurations of worlds and affective landscapes beyond the Anthropocene.
The practices of VVXXii & Cityofbrokendolls (sound Meuko! Meuko!), Giuseppe Salis, Linda Lach, and Hara Shin investigate and reformulate the centrality of human subjectivity and the dominant paradigms of knowledge production. Performances, engravings, sculptures, and video installations dissolve the illusion of separation between nature/culture, past/future, life/death, opening space for the ambiguous, the emptied, the evoked, the reconstructed. Ambiguous relationships emerge between organic bodies, other than human materials, technologies, and memories, establishing a sensitive dialogue between biological impermanence and the desire for self-preservation, the compulsions of production and control in today’s hyperproductive society.
Hembryo proposes a perceptual experience focused not on the what, but on the how: how we move, how we feel, how we slip into one another. To create a small flower is an invitation to shift our gaze from definition to listening, from classification to intimacy. As symbiotic beings, rejecting the logics of domination—which separate, order, and hierarchize—means opening up to other forms of life, through an embodied ecological practice. “There is no determinism where there is mystery”, wrote Oswald de Andrade in the Anthropophagic Manifesto (1928).
Mystery emerges as a generative force: that which escapes, resists capture, and opens up new ways of feeling, re-cognizing, shifting. It is in the encounter with mystery that a sense of the sacred can arise. Not a transcendent, hierarchical experience, but one pulsing through the immanence of flesh and the encounter with matter. A feel of the sacred that nests within ambiguity, shared vulnerability, and the fragile bonds between bodies. In this attunement to the present moment, the sacred does not impose itself — it emerges, silently. It blooms through a gentle encounter with alterity. Can you feel it?
EXHIBITION DATES HEMBRYO 2025:
– May / VVXXii & Cityofbrokendolls, sound by Meuko! Meuko! curated by Camilla Giaccio Darias
– June / Giuseppe Salis, curated by Giuseppe Armogida
– September / Linda Lach, curated by Maddalena Iodice
– October / Hara Shin, curated by Camilla Giaccio Darias
John Cage: A Flower
To create a small flower is to press softness into matter.
To create a small flower is to insist on tenderness in a world of extraction.
It is a refusal.
To create a small flower is to allow matter to mutate, to whisper, to remember.
It is to make space for a language that dissolves meaning in favor of feeling.
Here, the flower is survival, ritual, reclamation—
a site where eros and entropy coexist.
A pause. A breath.
The slow unfolding of presence.
To create a small flower is to reclaim the incubator—not as a site of sterility,
but as a space of becoming.
To create a small flower, they gathered what the wind had left behind—
threadbare scraps, a piece of wire, translucent resin.
Nothing loud. Nothing grand.
Just enough to hold a little light.
To create a small flower is to perform a fragile gesture—
an offering—born from reclaimed matter, sensitive ecosystems, and post-organic rituals.
By foregrounding the how of things—the process, the touch, the slowness—we begin to hear
the subtle sound of bodies blooming from resistance.
REVELATIONS OF DIVINE LOVE
VVXXii & Cityofbrokendolls with sound by di Meuko! Meuko! curated by Camilla Giaccio Darias
Revelations of Divine Love explores the invisible tensions between matter and space. Inside a metallic, pulsating, and reflective cubicle, a confined figure exposes its exoskeleton. It touches, smells, observes, transforms. Its presence narrates a dramaturgy of adaptation in which the body, contaminated by the sensual, allows itself to be traversed. A throbbing sculpture evokes a motorcycle and transfigures the performer’s body, dissolving its edges and shifting its posture. Rigidity and softness merge into an exoskeleton in which the body becomes part of a decaying ecosystem inspired by endosymbiosis: the subject loses its boundaries, generating a small death, an emptying of meaning, a dramaturgy of disappearance that reveals an intimate mutation. The prosthetic body of the cyborg exhales every will to possess, inhabiting the symbiotic sacredness of the encounter. Flesh and metal merge in mimesis. The body simmers and becomes threshold, surface, icon–recognizable yet alien. A choreography of surrender, where decay is not loss but revelation. In the paradox between autonomy and dependence, its graceful gaze activates Hembryo as a living organism, simmering between eros and dissolution. A mute, sensual, and repulsive body that reinvents itself in its loss.
Following the performance, a club spin-off will take place featuring a live set by Meuko! Meuko! and a DJ set by Slikback.
DEEP TIME
Giuseppe Salis curated by Giuseppe Armogida
In the face of the ostentation of self-preservation that characterizes the culture of hyper-production and hyper-information, Deep Time is configured as a gesture of affective cartography: a willingness to inhabit the inevitable mutability of matter and its meaning over time. Salis subverts the idea of the archive as a device of fixation and absolutization of knowledge, proposing a pseudo-archaeology of matter and information, in which history, nature, and memory are intertwined in an incessant layering of digital debris. Found images fished from the depths of the digital ocean, re-emerge between the folds of the pictorial surface as post-organic relics. These images gradually lose their recognizability, are emptied of symbolic meaning, and dissolve into hybrid forms: figurations made of plasticized relics that recall the aesthetics of a contaminated future. The result is a poetics of deep time, a failed genealogy of human and nonhuman technologies, capable of cracking the linearity of historical narrative and destabilizing the illusory hegemonic will to control and archive the “truth.” The future emerges as a material presence that acts the present: it defuses it, deconstructs it, hacks it in its supposed neutrality and extractive claims to representation. An entangled trace of a fossil to come.
SHELLY ATOM
Linda Lach curated by Maddalena Iodice
Linda Lach’s practice is deeply rooted in the experiences of his earliest moments of life. Rescued shortly after birth, she was immersed in a calm healing space–an environment that seeded a vital and ongoing relationship with technology and bodily memory. Lach reanimates a space of tenderness and slowness. His sculptures establish this protected environment through the use of reclaimed, translucent, and malleable materials such as resin, latex, aluminum, and breast milk. Each sculpture emerges like a forgotten past, revealing a certain tenderness in its etched surfaces that hold fragments of poetry, unspoken thoughts, flickers of embodied memories. Shelly Atom is a metallic poem – a sentient form that inhabits the space between things, held in an incubator that nurtures and respects its silence. In the use of clinical matter, intimacy blossoms highlighting the space between. These delicate forms resist the hardness of the materials they inhabit. Instead, they speak in murmurs, in warmth, in the slow unfolding of presence. For Lach, isolation is an act of resistance against the atomization of social life imposed by capitalist systems. It holds space for rebalancing, for regeneration, for the quiet act of being with oneself at a slight distance. It also serves as an invitation: to coexist, to bear witness, to linger in calm and gentleness.
MONUMENTAL ETHER. BODIES.
Hara Shin curated by Camilla Giaccio Darias
Monumental Ether. Bodies. is a documentary installation that explores interwoven temporalities across three sites shaped by anthropocentric violence: Kückenmühler Anstalten in Szczecin (a former site of Nazi forced-sterilization programs), Lisbon’s Tropical Botanical Garden (once the Colonial Garden), and Seoul’s Tancheon Stream (rooted in the legend of Dongfang Shuo’s death). Hara Shin constructs a tapestry of re-lived memory through a multi-species narrative of erasure, survival, and reanimation—probing how dead bodies might return to life, and how tragedy can be reconfigured into new forms of existence. The installation’s nonlinear structure mirrors the layered realities of these places, and how communities of the past, present, and future coexist within sites of marginalization and ecological-political crisis. At its core is MOANA, a fictional character from the future who poses questions about its entanglements with humans, natural phenomena, and technology. Drawing from Manifesto Antropófago by Oswald de Andrade (1928), cannibalism emerges as radical acts of cultural resistance—where bodies, flesh, and plants traverse, digest, and assimilate across histories. Through these ritual acts of devouring each other, the work enacts a continuous unfolding of memory and presence, where the past is not buried in death but arrives—very much alive.
BIOS
VVXXii (Italy) is an installation artist and sculptor, working between Europe, the United States, and Asia. In recent years he contributed to multiple projects as a scenographer including Romeo Castellucci, Motus, Markus Ohrn, Santarcangelo dei Teatri, LaMama Theatre NYC, Gessannerallee Zurigo, OÖ Landes-Kultur Linz. He took part as a sculptor for Arca, Melting Point NYC, and exposed his work in galleries, museums, and clubs like: Refuge Arts debut solo show, NYC 2019 / Melting Point NYC events 2019 – 2023 / The Shed NYC, Mutant: Faith with Arca, Bjork 2019 / ViceVersa Group Show, Istanbul 2019 / Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts, Taipei 2019 / Final Club, Taipei 2019 / AMPM space Taipei 2019; WWW Shibuya Tokyo 2019 / Saturnalia, Macao, Milano 2019 / I8I cave show, Los Angeles 2021 / I8I show, Traumabar Berlino 2021 / I8I Rite of Spring, Los Angeles 2022 / I Belong To The Crypt For Sure, Barcelona, Spain / Morgue, Domicile Tokyo 2023/ Reliquiarium, Fondo Gallery, Milano 2023 / The Mirror of Simple Souls, Tokyo, Copycenter Gallery, 2024 / Gast, Hessel Museum, New York / Hyperlink Athens, Greece, September 2024/
Cityofbrokendolls (Tokyo) is a Tokyo-based artist who works mainly in performance, photography and sculpture. She explores the process of affirming distortion and decadence. Her collaborative performance practice with VVXXii began in 2024.
Meuko! Meuko! (Taipei) is a music producer and live performer whose work is deeply rooted in Taiwan’s spiritual and urban landscape. She explores themes of techno-animism and urban escapism, particularly in her acclaimed release 鬼島 Ghost Island. Her live performances are dynamic and immersive, blending improvisation with field recordings and conceptual noise. These elements evoke both the decay and spirituality of her urban environment, drawing audiences into a rich, mythological soundscape. Among her performances in 2025 are: MUTEK (Tokyo), Grey Area (San Francisco), MUTEK (Montréal, Québec), Chemistry Creative (New York), Stihia Festival (Uzbekistan), Donau Festival (Austria), Rewire Festival (Netherlands).
Slikback (Kenya) (real name: Fredrick M Njau) is an electronic producer from Nairobi, mainly focusing on experimental music, noise, bass, and high-intensity rhythms. Over the years his sound has morphed into various forms all meant to be an expression of different ideas and emotions. Unbound by any specific thing, his unique blend of sounds can be found in his multiple releases. In addition to his own releases, he works with the likes of KMRU, Objekt, Shapednoise and Hyph11E and is currently releasing and touring the collaborative project AKA HEX with Aïsha Devi.
Camilla Giaccio Darias (Italy/Cuba) is a curator, writer and independent researcher. Her practice develops at the intersection of performance studies, feminist theories, neo-materialism and decolonial practices. Central to her work is the body, understood as a site of knowledge, power and resistance, with a focus on reactivating the sacred and ritual through embodied knowledge. She has collaborated with institutions and spaces such as Short Theatre 2024, MAXXI, GR*A, Alcova and galleriaotto. Her writing has appeared in InsideArt, GRIOTmag, la Repubblica, Hyperobjects, Clearing (NYC), Gratin (NYC) and MAD54 (NYC). In 2023 she curated The Perf.End in Milan, a group exhibition that brought together twenty-three emerging artists. Between Rome and London, she studied literature, gender studies, art business and contemporary art history at La Sapienza, Roma Tre and Sotheby’s Institute of Art. Since 2021 she is part of the editorial and press team of Hyperobjects. Since 2025 she is curator and project manager of Hembryo, in Rome.
Giuseppe Salis (Italy) is a visual artist whose research focuses on time and how its effects manifest on both organic and non-organic matter. With particular attention to the marginal and the residual, and influenced by personal memories linked to his homeland, Sardinia, the artist creates relics of non-existent pasts, testimonies of hypothetical futures. Giuseppe lives and works in Turin, he graduated in painting from the Albertina Academy of Fine Arts in Turin, and in new technologies at the Academy of Fine Arts of Brera in Milan. Recently, he participated in an artistic residency at Dolomiti Contemporanee and exhibited his works in group shows in Tokyo, Milan, and Turin.
Giuseppe Armogida (Italy) teaches Aesthetics at the Academy of Fine Arts in L’Aquila and at NABA in Rome. His research interests concern the Neoplatonic tradition and the contemporary debate on image theory. In addition to several essays that have appeared in volumes and journals, he has published Timeo simulacra. Filosofia e traduzione (2014), Infinito confine. Plotino e il pensiero dell’Uno(2018), Roma nuda. 60 conversazioni sull’arte(2020) e Ritorno a Lascaux. Georges Bataille e la genesi dell’arte (2024). In his curatorial practice, examines ways in which power is encoded in language, behavior and collective identities. In 2020, he co-founded MINIERA, a curatorial project that aims to investigate the relationship between music, visual art and the sense of place by organizing art events in ever-changing spaces.
Linda Lach (Warsaw) ia a visual artist whose practice explores subjects of personal memory, care, bodily exhaustion and experience of isolation. Working with aluminum, resin, and synthetic fabrics, she utilizes intimate transparencies and self-overwriting signals as carriers that challenge the anthropocentric perspective. What does it mean to have a ‘body’? How to define its extents? By proposing an intersectional model of reality, Lach advocates for a heterogeneous reality that combines optimal efficiency of survival strategies with biological balance. Winner of the Grand Prix for Best Diploma at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw (2022) and the Strabag International Art Award (2023). His works were featured at, among others: Salzburger Kunstverein, Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Foksal Gallery, BWA Wrocław, Artagon Pantin, GSW Opole and Ars Electronica Festival, Eigen Art+Lab.
Maddalena Iodice (Italy) is an independent writer and curator whose practice moves fluidly across disciplines, encompassing curatorial work, writing, and forms of artistic expression. Her research approaches the body as a threshold—into the sensuous, the uncanny, the liminal, and the unspoken. Rooted in feminist epistemologies, it unfolds through writing, somatics, and curatorial methodologies, giving form to experimental workshops, editorial projects, and exhibitions. Iodice lives and works between London and Milan, she holds an MA in Culture, Criticism and Curation from Central Saint Martins in London and is co-founder of the interdisciplinary collective Provinciale11. Published by various international publications, her recent writings feature interviews and essays with the likes of, Liliane L&n, Jenna Gribbon, Amanda Wall, Zehra Dogan, Niamh O’Malley and Marina Abramovic.
Hara Shin (South Korea) is a Berlin-based multidisciplinary artist exploring hybridity, embodiment, and the entanglement of human and non-human agents. Through experimental film and multimedia installations, she rethinks hierarchy, appropriation, and pluralism. Her work has been shown at venues such as DAZ Digital Arts Zurich (2024), galerie weisser elefant (2023) and the DMZ Documentary Film Festival (2023), TRAFO Center for Contemporary Art in Szczecin (2022), and Art Center Nabi in Seoul (2021). She was a resident at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris and a laureate of In situ 2024–2025, supported by the Fondation Daniel et Nina Carasso. A Goldrausch alumna (2023), she was also selected for the 2024 Emerging Visual Artist Program by the Arts Council Korea. She studied at the Berlin University of the Arts (Meisterschülerin, 2021), Humboldt University, and Hongik University in Seoul (BFA, 2011).
HEMBRYO IS AN INCUBATION ZONE_
HERE WE PROTOTYPE DREAMS WHERE THE AGENTS OF INTRA-ACTION HAVE HUMAN ORIGIN AND NOT_
IN A PRESENT TIME WHERE PHYSICAL CONTACT SEEMS UNNECESSARY WE ARE AMNIOTIC LIQUID AND DIRECT CONFRONTATION_INTIMATE_CLOSE_ENCHANTED_
INTO HEMBRYO WE ARE MEAT INTO THE SLAUGHTERHOUSE_WHAT IS HUMAN AND WHAT IS MATTER IT HA NO MEANING_
AT THE HEMBRYONAL STAGE PF A PHENOMENON EVERYTHING IS FREE IN FLUX_
WE ARE IN THE POST-ANTHROPOCENE PREHISTORY_
H-HUMAN AGENTS_COMPUTATIONAL TENTACLES_ICONOCLASTIC SEDUCTION_WELCOME TO HEMBRYO
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