Close your eyes.
Breathe.
Imagine.
Here underwater nothing weighs you down. The water is warm, pink, silent. This silence does not distress you. It wraps around you slowly.
The space around you is not yet a place. It is becoming. Transforming slowly, as if getting comfortable with its own shape. The walls let color pass through without resistance.
There is no time.
Or better: there is no rush. And this makes everything different.
There is nothing to understand. Only to stay. Stay long enough to notice something changing.
Mistakes surface as living traces, as something that remains even when not planned.
Someone is having fun while bringing all this to life.
Color arrives before forms, matter before meaning. This is where everything begins.
Flaminia Veronesi was born in Milan in 1986, where she lives and works today. Her artistic practice explores fantasy and wonder as territories of freedom through a playful and open approach. Materials coexist without hierarchies. Forms remain in continuous transformation.
In her work, play is a method. Making with hands is a way of thinking. Textiles, ceramics, polymer clays, drawing, painting, glass engraving, and installation interweave in research that proceeds through attempts, deviations, possibilities.
After living between London and Paris from 2005 to 2020, she studied at Central Saint Martins and earned a BA in Fine Art at Chelsea University of Arts and Design.
At the center of her practice remain joy, wonder, and the idea that matter, when listened to, opens new worlds.
Everything begins with the walls.
Not as background but as origin. Color spreads, expands, takes possession of space and slowly transforms it into elsewhere. The walls become skin. They absorb gesture, hold traces, change temperature. They are no longer limits. They begin to suggest. Space stops being neutral and starts to breathe, to sigh.
Is there an image, memory, or sensation at the origin of your visual world?
"The sense of joy and wonder from when I played as a child. I want to communicate the same joy that, at bottom, I believe is the joy of being free. Playing with my parallel worlds, where 'let's pretend' is possible, makes everything possible and frees our spirit from conditioning and self-imposed fears. Joy frees the future from our limits."
Color begins to take form on the walls like suspended water. Black and blue start to interweave in space. The first forms emerge suspended, floating between surface and depth. Space seems to breathe with them, alive, attentive, present.
Flaminia lets worlds be born slowly from matter that lets itself be touched, changed, surprised. There are no hierarchies, no rush. Each new appearance is an invitation to marvel, to enter an elsewhere never seen or explored.
Imagine an ideal place to welcome your universe. What light would it have? What temperature? Would there be silence or sound?
"I often paint my universe. It is pink, silent, and the temperature is welcoming."
While we talk, the space around her begins to mutate like a body in metamorphosis. It does not construct. It explodes from within. Flaminia's hands open invisible currents and from these, creatures are born that seem to breathe, bend, swim in the air itself. Forms that were not imagined, shapes that speak without voice.
There is no boundary between what exists and what takes form. Surfaces, light, materials react. Nothing stays still long enough to be only decoration. It is like watching a thought become body. Or is the opposite happening?
Do you feel more like a "mystic of matter" or a "scientist of the marvelous"?
"Both. For me, art is a science that questions the world through wonder. Enchantment is the state of mind that allows us to welcome the new and continuous metamorphosis as a resource, not a threat. I try to place the viewer on the threshold of new worlds, inviting them to feel wonder. But it is from matter and thinking with hands, playing and transforming matter into something that was not there before, that the new emerges."
Watching her create, you perceive that freeing the mind makes every metamorphosis possible. It is not technique, not project. It is vital flow, a dance of intuition and matter, where space and world breathe together with her.
If you entrusted a message to the future inside one of your works, which would you choose and in what material would you hide it?
"The message I entrust to my works is to exit the era of anthropocentrism, dominion, and violence through stupor mundi and learn to live on this world as part of a system of interconnected living beings. To do this, we must understand that life and death, happiness and pain, beginning and end coexist. For materials, I have no preferences."
Flaminia moves from one wall to another, adds, changes color. She laughs, observes, plays. It is a return to childhood, that pure joy. Human conventions jump away, everything we believe in gets surpassed, space opens to imagination and everything is accepted. Nothing is wrong.
Your works seem to live in circular time, where everything returns and transforms. How do you live time in the studio: more like ritual or experiment?
"It is fun, free time for play."
The works finally take their place. Suspended mermaids, imaginary fish, swaying sculptures. Each element is living presence in space.
Whoever crosses the space perceives this joy. It is palpable, contagious, a shared freedom.
You said fantasy is a way of knowing for you. Is there an image you are still trying to make visible but has eluded you for years?
"For the moment, no."
Has a material ever failed you and from that failure a new direction was born in your work?
"Always. If you look at my drawings and paintings, they are full of visible errors. My language is based on valorizing error and free experimentation."
Flaminia moves slowly through the space, adjusts the statues, straightens them, suspends drawings on walls. Each gesture is delicate, precise but light. She seems to dance in the world she has just created. Space completes itself slowly but never loses its vitality, its lightness.
In your works, the image seems to be born before the idea. Do you ever discover what you wanted to say only after a work is finished?
"Of course, even eight years later, and this fact has always impressed me. Works have their own level of reality where they move. Works by artists of different eras are probably interconnected too."
Everything is ready. Each element finds its place, connected and vibrant.
Breathe. Open your eyes.
You do not need to understand every choice, do not need to know yet where you are. You are in a place suspended between reality and imagination that pulses, breathes, lives, ready to surprise you.
Only after crossing this universe with open mind and heart does wonder reveal itself. The place finally takes its name and with it comes the joy of discovery, the smile of surprise, the certainty of being truly underwater.
We are in Bar Sotto il mare.
Giulia Ballerini
Giulia Ballerini (known as Quby, Turin, 2002) graduated from Liceo Classico Massimo D'Azeglio and trained as a photographer at the European Institute of Design. Over the past six years she has worked as a waitress, an experience that taught her the value of energy and connections that form between people.
For Quby, photography is the most authentic means of expression: a tool that reveals what words fail to say. Through her lens she weaves her own experiences with those of others, transforming each image into a fragment of a larger story. She loves to chase light, let herself be drawn to shadows, and discover narratives in details that often go unnoticed.
In her artistic practice she seeks poetry in cracks, in silence, and in traces left by time, exploring emotions both intimate and universal. For her, photography is a way of existing in the world and leaving a mark: a bridge between her inner world and the observer's gaze, to narrate what remains submerged but desires to emerge.
@giulappa