curated by Martina Cavallarin with Antonio Caruso

The natural phenomena afflicting and battering our planet are escalating at an unprecedented pace. High temperatures bring severe water stress, wildfires, floods, and heavy rains. Melting ice and water bombs alternate with extreme drought, windstorms, landslides and exceptional hailstorms. The environmental fallout of these climate anomalies is becoming sharper, more intense and unpredictable, increasingly putting human life itself at risk.

The exhibition project ORO – Gold – is situated within an artistic research and cultural awareness journey that SIlvia Canton pursues, investigating the natural and ecosystemic upheavals caused by the ongoing climate crisis. Since 2021, Canton has developed a stimulating dialogue with academic institutions and experts in the environmental and forestry sector, involving institutional branches, craft workshops and manufacturing facilities from the Veneto region. 

In 2018, the Vaia storm, that hit the eastern side of the Alps subverting its natural equilibrium forever, has triggered the invasive epidemic of the European spruce bark beetle which was once a cooperating component of the mountain ecosystem. Such a sequence of repercussions had a catalytic effect on the poetics of the artist, who forever oriented her attention and her work towards the awakening of the collective conscience to the severe threats looming over our mountains and far beyond.

Her practice serves no didactic purpose, leaving that to the numerous researchers, her travel companions. Conscious of art’s Gestalt dynamic, where analyzing the individual components of a message can undermine its overall enchantment, Canton shares a vision filtered entirely through her own lens. 

With this exhibition she gives back the gold of her work: a pictorial-sculptural research firstly based on the recovery of wood from the trees knocked down by Vaia, and now on the barks attacked by the Spruce beetle, personally collected from the woods in the Bellunese and in the Trentino, or recovered from loads of infested spruce trees in the sawmill. Fragile and impure barks, subjected to a careful disinfestation, cleansing and consolidation treatment. A work of great patience that is carried out in numerous phases. The material is cleansed and resinated to then be treated with a gold, silver or copper imitation leaf, to commemorate the precious uniqueness of the mountain heritage.

Gold, then, is the material with which Canton acts on the barks attacked by the Spruce bark beetle in order to create a testimony and give it strength, protecting it with materials – resin and gold – for it to be durable over time and space.

With the thinnest bristles of my brush, I enter the galleries excavated by the Spruce bark beetle, following its path and leaving behind,

with a slow and precise gesture, the “missione”, the special glue to which, once dry, the thin imitation gold leaf will

be brushed with delicate bristles highlighting the intricate inlays of the galleries.
 

Gold, as the traditional manufacturing that, since ancient times, has enriched and ennobled each artefact and that exactly in Venice has found fertile ground for the development of one of the most sophisticated gilding practices ever documented.

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Gold, as the universal symbol of the relics. Far from what is nowadays known as the process of the Japanese kintsugi, because there is nothing to be rebuilt. Reversing the process of deterioration is impossible. We can only try to document what is left, preserving the memory and the awareness of what has manifested. Since the dawn of civilization, it has been human practice to collect what Nature offers and try to translate it into a language that we understand, assimilating it into values indispensable to us, amalgamating it into a sensitive experience that we can comprehend. This is the ultimate sense Art creates since humanity exists. The contradiction of destroying is simply more recent and terribly more efficient.

04.07 - 26.07.2026 | supported by Gabrielli SpA, K studio design and Studio Roncato Ingegneria Civile e Ambientale