From January 19 to February 3, 2026, Giulia Casartelli took over the studio to complete and present her series titled 55 caves. 55 caves is a series of watercolour paintings of 55 places that were offered to and lived in by the artist between 15 April 1986 and 31 January 2026. "At first I thought that people who do not accept this world do not build a home here. Then I thought people who do not accept this world do not build a home here, but live in someone else’s. Now I think people who do not accept this world build a home. People who accept this world live in caves they are offered."

The cave “is both the first and the last dwelling place”, Bachelard notes in Earth and Reveries of Will. An Essay on the Imagination of Matter (Dallas Inst Humanities and Culture, 2002). Home to some of our distant prehistoric ancestors, at Lascaux or Chauvet, it speaks to the meaning of human dwelling. “The act of dwelling develops almost infallibly as soon as one has the impression of being sheltered”, Bachelard emphasizes. To inhabit is to protect oneself from the unleashing of elemental forces and from human violence; it is to retreat into a delimited space, which wrests us from the boundlessness of the world, and to control the emergence of threats – animal, natural, or human – that no longer come from just anywhere, but must use the precise interval of the entrance. And precisely: “The perfect cavity is a closed world.” And this enclosed space is not conquered by man, it is directly given by nature, in the form of an almost supernatural grace: "The earth offers dens, lairs, caves" – whereas the house implies the mediation of a construction (my translation from French).

Giulia Casartelli is a curator, artist and workshop facilitator working at the intersection of verbal and visual practices.