In addition to preserving and promoting ceramic works by great contemporary masters, Spazio Ex-Caserma is also an active centre for research, thanks to its collaboration with national and international partners. The project also includes initiatives and workshops aimed at schools of all levels, to promote knowledge and experimentation with ceramics.
1 – Garden – Remo Salvadori – No’ si volta chi a stella è fisso, 2025
A terracotta work that reprises a form dear to Remo Salvadori, repeated throughout his oeuvre in various materials and dimensions. Its title is an aphorism by Leonardo da Vinci in which the artist recognizes his own journey — a phrase to be practiced rather than merely declared. The work originates from an earlier process involving two paper elements that the artist kept with him and occasionally arranged in a similar manner.
2 – Yona Friedman – Model made for Documenta 11, 2002
A model created on the occasion of Documenta 11 in 2002, illustrating the housing modules conceived by Yona Friedman (circles inscribed within a cube). Each module can be combined with others to create more complex structures — the expression of a modular and mutable architecture capable of infinite aggregation and decomposition according to need. In his writings and projects, Friedman draws with incisive and direct language the concept of an aggregable housing module: a structure with a shared roof under which inhabitants define for themselves the forms, functions, and spatial distribution.
Documenta in Kassel (Germany) is one of the most prestigious contemporary art exhibitions in the world. In 1955, artist and curator Arnold Bode inaugurated the first Documenta in Kassel. Over the decades, the event has evolved into an unmissable appointment for the avant-garde of art. Documenta11, the eleventh edition of the exhibition, was held in Kassel from June 8 to September 15, 2002, under the artistic direction of curator Okwui Enwezor.
3 – Gino Sabatini Odoardi – Untitled, 2023
Gino Sabatini Odoardi’s work recalls one of his most cherished elements: the traditional tavern glass, which in its ceramic form loses its customary transparency in favor of a new material and chromatic transposition. The artist has intervened on each glass with a pencil, tracing seismic-like graphic lines.
4 – Fabrice Hyber – Untitled, 2021
A series of hand-crafted ceramics made by Fabrice Hyber during the installation of his permanent work at No Man’s Land Foundation. The artist collected stones from the walnut grove where he was working on his piece La quercia e le noci (The Oak and the Walnuts) in 2021, then created ceramic casts in various colors, transforming the solid stone into a hollow form — a bowl ready to hold and preserve other shapes.
5 – H.H. Lim – Still life, 2023
A rusted gas cylinder is immortalized as if in a photograph, cast in ceramic. The piece encapsulates the poetic tension between the imperceptible danger of a potentially explosive object and its familiar presence in everyday life.
6 – Alberto Garutti – Sehnsucht, 2018
The title Sehnsucht is a key word embodying a concept typical of German Romanticism. It expresses yearning and longing for love, nostalgia for the unattainable, and the painful desire for something beloved yet unreachable. Two vases inhabit the exhibition space — near yet far, thinking of each other but unable to meet. Conceived as complementary forms, they could perfectly fit together to compose a single shape, but instead live in separate rooms. The work becomes a metaphor for art itself — existing only through the viewer’s amorous and futile desire to approach it — as well as a small tale of encounter and the ambiguous, indecipherable void separating people and things. Pink like human skin, the pair of vases carry within their separation a subtle suffering: the work is the immaterial presence of what cannot be touched, of the space between things. The silent tension between the two objects unsettles the exhibition space.
7 – Marco Bagnoli – Araba Fenice (model), 2011
Images of shadow and light duplicate and repeat in a hypnotic play of stillness and motion, at the center of which appears the Phoenix, the outline of a mythical figure constructed within the void created by the assembly of three sculptures. A sacred bird, symbol of birth and rebirth, of ephemeral appearance and eternal form. Dante also evokes the Phoenix in the Divine Comedy, in Canto XXIV of the Inferno. Since the Middle Ages, the Phoenix has symbolized Christ’s death and resurrection. For alchemists, it represented spiritual rebirth and alchemical transmutation — the mythical figure associated with the philosopher’s stone. A figure beloved by Marco Bagnoli, it recurs frequently in his work, layered with these multiple references.
8 – Gülsün Karamustafa – A Pendantive for a Brave Woman, 2024
The work pays tribute to a pioneering writer who fought for civil and women’s rights: Suat Derviş (born 1903 – died 1972, Istanbul). She was a revolutionary feminist journalist, columnist, and novelist. Born during the Ottoman Empire, she continued her life as an emancipated woman in the Turkish Republic and became one of the most prolific authors of her time. Throughout history, ceramics have often been used by women as ornamental and bodily expressions; therefore, a ceramic pendant bears her portrait, originally published on the cover of the most important women’s magazine of her era, where her first feminist essays appeared. The pendant is adorned with special handmade ceramic beads of various shapes and vivid colors, produced specifically for this project — each bead celebrating her precious virtues: intellectual, writer, journalist, columnist, feminist, human rights defender, revolutionary, and political prisoner.
9 – Giuseppe Stampone – De prospettiva pingendo, 2025
Giuseppe Stampone’s practice spans multimedia installations, video, and Bic-pen drawings — a technique common to many of his projects. His recent works focus on reinterpretations of iconic European masterpieces such as Fra Angelico’s Mocking of Christ, Rembrandt’s Abduction of Europa, and Gustave Courbet’s The Artist’s Studio. In this case, Piero della Francesca’s Brera Altarpiece serves as his model for reinterpretation, echoed in the title itself: De prospectiva pingendi (“On the Perspective of Painting”), the painter’s 15th-century treatise on perspective. This Renaissance text, foundational to the visual arts, explores disegno (the act of drawing and depicting figures), commensuratio (spatial arrangement), and coloro (the application of color).
10 – Vedovamazzei – My Weakness, 2014
The delicate ceramic sculpture depicting a stack of floral mattresses contrasts sharply with the harsh reality it subtly evokes — the social crisis of homelessness. In cities across the world, discarded mattresses become makeshift beds for those living on the streets. Hence the title My Weakness, a reflection on the fragility and vulnerability of those who find temporary refuge in such precarious shelters.
11 – Donatella Spaziani – Untitled, 2012–2025
Donatella Spaziani’s figures appear delicately silhouetted on chipped ceramic tiles, fragile and sometimes broken. They resemble shadow theatre figures, echoing the artist’s own body in space. In this work, the figures are visible only through the peephole of a cell door. The viewer’s gaze, confined to the narrow aperture, is drawn into the intimacy of these drawn presences, whose movements suggest those of a person in captivity.
12 – Luigi Ontani – Volo Diavolo = Giudizio Universale d’Abruzzo, 2025
For years, Luigi Ontani has been building his own “ideal library”: volumes made entirely of ceramic, each matching the size of an actual book. Here, the book pays homage to the famous 16th-century fresco in the Church of Santa Maria in Piano in Loreto Aprutino, known as the Ponte del Capello. Ontani isolates a detail depicting the damnation of souls — a unique motif in Abruzzese art and a rare case in art history. The Ponte del Capello, connected to Persian iconography, shows a narrowing bridge spanning a river: only the souls unburdened by grave sins may cross to Paradise, while the others inevitably fall into the fiery river below, dragged into Hell. Ontani reproduces this detail on both sides of the ceramic book, with four small devils completing the imagery.
13 – Felice Levini – Gli orecchini di Venere, 2023
A protruding sculpture embodying the temporal idea of 24 hours, with two hands holding the sun and the moon — day and night, gold and silver — inviting viewers to reflect on the circularity of time.
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