Unfinishablinging. Di siffatte movenze era pieno il mondo
Curated by Estelle Nabeyrat

The invented term unfinishablinging refers to a principle that runs through all the works in the exhibition: the end of something that, by definition, cannot be finished. It embodies the paradox of a gerund that indefinitely postpones completion, extending a process that is inherently unfinishable. The forms, objects, and situations that emerge from this process appear complete, yet only superficially so. Their dimensions, material qualities, and spatial presence may seem finite, but the process that generates them is not. It remains ongoing, and the gerund functions as a temporal extension of this condition, keeping each work in a state of latent performativity, an endless game in which only pauses are possible.

From this continuous experimentation arise “plastic entities” temporarily arrested in time, occupying the gallery space as visible residues of suspended actions. The second part of the title, Di siffatte movenze era pieno il mondo, deliberately adopts an archaic literary tone. The words siffatte (“such”) and movenze (“movements”) evoke a moment when movement, not yet over-technologized or emptied of meaning, demanded to be observed, theorized, and rediscovered even in stillness, where it persists for those who know how to perceive it.

The exhibition may be read as the space of a life shaped by experiments, in the sense articulated by Georges Perec in Species of Spaces: a space that is discontinuous, heterogeneous, and marked by breaks, frictions, and reconnections. Within the studio, and later within the gallery, Enrico Gaido tests speculative hypotheses by bringing objects, materials, and physical principles into relation. His practice, rooted in an engineering background and extended through experiences across visual and performing arts, has long revolved around the notion of “occurrence”: a plastic event in which process, material resistance, and sensory perception are inseparable.

Upon entering the gallery, works such as Wooden Beam Plastic Movement, Net, and Sling introduce a fundamental concern: volume is not conceived as a given form, but as the trace of a movement. The volume of a static body becomes the visual representation of a transformation, or the residue of a performative act. Gaido imagines an abstract, two-dimensional surface without thickness that moves through space and, in doing so, captures a portion of it. This fragment of space solidifies into mass, not as a body in space, but as an effect on space. Plaster, a structural and transitory material, is deliberately chosen as a medium that anticipates form rather than fixes it.

This line of thought is disrupted by Demystifying a Stone, suspended within the elevator shaft. A metal structure connects fragments of a stone cast arranged as a geometric “exploded view,” as if following an impact or an internal rupture. The energy released by this symbolic explosion appears to condense into a vortex of water trapped inside a flask, delicately balanced above. Below, almost concealed, the original stone rests near the ground, returned to its material origin and stripped of mystification, while the movement it generates unfolds vertically through the gallery space.

Before descending to the lower floor, More Pressure More Release offers an intimate pause. A length of fabric slowly rolls and unrolls, driven by a motor that alternates effort and surrender. The motion is cyclical, gentle, and fragile, giving the fabric a sculptural presence without ever allowing it to settle. At each cycle, its end brushes against the plate of a precision scale designed to measure a weight that cannot be named.

Downstairs, Fake Flowers At The Entrance plays with perceptual ambiguity. Thin fragments of glass, arranged with meticulous precision, seem to dissolve into their own shadows, while a steel rod evokes a needle probing a volume that does not exist. Here, materiality paradoxically reveals itself through near-disappearance, as if magnified under a microscope.

In the dim light, Expansion Tank presents the silhouette of a glass vessel that appears to expand and contract as it rotates around its axis. Its form seems to breathe, modulated by speed and by the reflected light filtering down from the upper floor. This rhythmic motion acts as a prelude to the darkest space of the gallery, where Dancing Affordance directly addresses the mechanisms of perception. Two-dimensional profiles of a tree branch, when rotated at high speed, generate alternative objects, multiple possible interpretations of a single reality, revealing that affordance belongs neither to the object nor to the observer, but to the relationship between the two.

The exhibition concludes with Moon Bubbles and Mirrors Landscape, a minimal and hypnotic installation. A rotating mirror projects an ever-changing eclipse onto the wall, while air bubbles disturb the still surface of a colored pool of water. Through the alternation of these two moments, almost abrupt in their succession, and accompanied by mechanical vibration and bubbling sound, the work condenses the exhibition’s underlying tension: a poetic celebration of the complexity of the world achieved through devices of disarming simplicity.

Ultimately, Unfinishablinging. Di siffatte movenze era pieno il mondo invests “unusable objects” with an infinite poetic potential. By transgressing the laws of physics not to deny them but to frictionally engage the senses, the exhibition proposes another way of inhabiting movement, time, and space.