The Black Swan Diaries

The title draws inspiration from Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s famous essay The Black Swan, reinterpreting its meaning. While the “black swan” represents an unpredictable event capable of radically altering the course of history, the “diaries” become the space where this unpredictability is recorded, layered, and transformed into visual memory. Wars, migration, violence, destruction, control, and a sense of dislocation—events that until a few years ago seemed confined to history books—have returned to define our present.
More than a political reflection, The Black Swan Diaries offers an anthropological inquiry into contemporary humanity. Martinez examines our daily exposure to images of violence, our progressive desensitization to collective suffering, and the emotional suspension that threatens to turn powerlessness into a form of coexistence with horror.
Curated by Cristina Gilda Artese, the exhibition is structured around three thematic pillars— Stratifications (or Morphology of Memory), Invisibility, and Conquests—conceived as chapters of a single narrative.
The first section presents Bulldozing, a series of large-scale textile works created almost entirely from reclaimed materials: discarded fabrics, fragments, and scraps are layered, stitched, and transformed into surfaces rich with memory. Earth tones, burnt oranges, and browns evoke a landscape constantly being demolished and rebuilt—a metaphor for a destruction that affects not only physical spaces but also social relationships, identities, and collective memory. Each work takes the form of a tactile diary, where the surfaces preserve traces of what time and the news cycle tend to quickly erase.
The second space houses a powerful installation inspired by a phrase—”Define me as a child”—uttered during a televised debate on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and which quickly went viral. The artist adopts this question—originally posed in an attempt to challenge the notion of victim innocence in armed conflicts—as a symbol of the ethical disorientation of our times. Childlike figures trapped within knotted structures, bowls evoking hunger, ceramic ravens, and references to systems of control and power dynamics create an immersive environment; it addresses the theme of vulnerability without resorting to rhetoric, conveying to the viewer the full complexity of a tragedy that concerns all of humanity.
The exhibition concludes with the Palazzi di cristallo (“Crystal Palaces”) series—works that appear bright and decorative at first glance but, upon closer inspection, reveal narratives of migration, displacement, families on the move, and suspended destinies. This lightness is merely apparent, inviting the viewer to look beyond the image’s surface to grasp its symbolic depth.
Created entirely through the medium of fiber art, this exhibition highlights one of the most significant directions of the artist’s work.