"OVERLAY" GROUP EXHIBITION
During the summer, I had the good fortune of being selected, along with my peers, to mount an exhibition at the university’s SU Gallery. This new project led us to collectively reflect on what kind of work we wanted to present: whether to repeat what we had shown in the Summer Show, develop something entirely new, or reinterpret our previous works.
What seemed most interesting to me in the end was to collaborate with other artists and explore the encounters that arise when different practices enter into dialogue.
Collaboration with Milena Orlandi.
The first collaboration was with my classmate, Milena Orlandi. Although we both work with organic materials — she with flowers and I with fungi — our approaches are very different. That distance forced us to step out of our comfort zones and to embrace uncertainty as part of the creative process.
Our starting point was a shared concept: the resilience of nature in the face of human actions, and humanity’s growing disconnection from the natural environment. We decided to create a sculpture that combined natural elements — hay, moss, lichens, and mushrooms — with leftover construction materials, such as fragments of concrete and stone.
We were interested in the tension between the living and the inert, between what humans transform for their use and what nature seeks to reclaim.
Without a fixed direction or predictable outcome, we assembled a three-dimensional puzzle that represented the fragility of the relationship between humanity and its surroundings. The piece, on the verge of collapse, visually embodied that thin line separating permanence from ruin.
Collaboration with Yihen Chen.
The second collaboration was with Yihen Chen, and in this case, the idea came together more quickly. We merged her interest in natural phenomena within the city with my fascination for organic processes, finding a shared ground in the condition of displacement.
Both of us come from different places and have experienced what it means to leave parts of ourselves behind — family, friends, experiences — to rebuild a life in another context.
This reflection on contemporary nomadism and the scars left by human movement became the core of the project. We identified a powerful metaphor in the roots that break through urban pavement: an image that speaks of resistance, adaptation, and the desire for belonging.
From that idea, we created two complementary murals. The first was a plaster cast that captured the empty space left by roots fracturing the ground; the second, facing it, was a mural of the same size made from Xuan paper (traditional Chinese rice paper) and sumi ink prints (black ink made from charcoal), recording the textures of those real roots.
Between the two works, the viewer found themselves in a symbolic space — the in-between territory of home and exile, of uprootedness and shared belonging.
These two collaborative experiences transformed the way I understand collective work. I learned that collaboration is not simply about combining forces, but about partially giving up personal control to allow something new to emerge through difference.
That act of letting go connects directly with the Stoic philosophy that guides my practice: accepting with serenity what is beyond my control, maintaining an ethical and creative disposition toward the unexpected, and trusting the wisdom of the process.
As Marcus Aurelius once said, “Nature loves change; what seems like destruction is, in fact, transformation.” In both projects, the initial uncertainty became a shared learning experience, and collaboration revealed itself as a natural extension of my research into mycelium — a network of interconnections where each part sustains the others.
These experiences reaffirmed my conviction that art — whether individual or collective — is a practice of listening, care, and balance with the world around us.
