Milan, October 15 (askanews) – From October 15, 2026, to January 31, 2027, in the spaces on the ground floor and first floor of the Lavanderia, the Elpis Foundation presents the group exhibition Phantom Armour, curated by Veronica Botta: existing works, new productions, and site-specific interventions by Giammarco Cugusi, Sarah Margnetti, Luca Petti, Maria Positano, and Lorenzo Zerbini inhabit the space in a choral journey.
The project does not unfold as a succession of independent works, but as an exhibition organism made of correspondences, presences, and references. Veronica Botta introduced the project to askanews: "The theme of the exhibition is phantom armor, a theme that introduces a contradiction in itself: it associates the theme of armor, a structure that can be offensive or protective, and then draws on a very specific symbolic and aesthetic system, with the theme of the phantom, an evanescent element, a ghost, and thus loses its current function and materiality and opens up to this new form of vision and imagination.
It's an invitation to artists to interpret and articulate it according to what it evokes within their practice, their artistic research. It can therefore refer to a system of exoskeletons, protective systems, defensive structures, or even attack mechanisms that can be both real and imaginary. At the same time, it can also refer to the idea of an amulet, an ornament.
Each of the artists involved has found their own way to interpret this theme within the project: from specific installations to sound interventions, from works that can be walked through to those that dissolve or transform their materiality throughout the exhibition. And the exhibition itself is intended as a sort of journey. The invitation is to visit it at different times because there are works that can transform along the way, some luminous works that completely transform the space, others that reveal themselves only through the sunlight that casts shadows. It's an invitation to return to revisit these works and this exhibition at different times. There are also elements that are hidden in the space or sound interventions that appear only at a certain moment and therefore it is effectively an invitation to allow oneself to be free to lose something, some fragment and then be able to rediscover it at a later time. Maria Positano's sculptures in Esercizio alla manca are two casts of a shield from the collection of the Gaetano Filangeri Civic Museum, made of a soluble material, subjected to the action of water through vaporization and direct contact throughout the duration of the exhibition, making physically evident how the artist has questioned the loss of historical memory and the issues of conservation. Giammarco Cugusi in Santa Lucia uses control devices such as the saint's eyes and, on the foreground, moving mechanical arms with luminous supports that create a passage of light whose path in the space cannot be anticipated. On the two ground-floor windows, Sarah Margnetti creates site-specific pictorial interventions in which oversized hands hold and manipulate curtains as if to regulate the exposure of light in the room. Lorenzo Zerbini's bronze chrysalises recall a species of butterfly. extinct in Milan, and the insect-repellent aluminum curtain becomes a threshold, protecting but also dividing the space. Finally, there are Luca Petti's plant-animal hybrids, with the occasional element of sound breaking through. Light, sound, and matter are in constant flux. The project is accompanied by a Public Program, including a performance conceived by Giammarco Cugusi for the feast of Saint Lucia on December 12th and a metalworking workshop led by ASTRA ASTRA ASTRA and Margherita Potenza on November 7th.
Askanews