Herbarium

On the occasion of the 22nd Giornata del Contemporaneo, promoted by AMACI and dedicated in 2026 to the theme Geographies of the Contemporary, ExtrArtis presents “Herbarium. Feminine Metamorphoses”, a group exhibition featuring works from the ExtrArtis Collection by Marta Luna Valpiano, Elisa Zadi, and Iria Cortizo. The exhibition will open on 10 October 2026 and will remain on view until 30 November 2026.
The project brings together three artistic practices united by a shared focus on the relational geography between nature, memory, body, and transformation. The selected works create a path in which the feminine is not understood as a single, fixed category, but as a plural and generative condition capable of moving through matter, landscape, and the imaginary.
In Marta Luna Valpiano’s practice, botany, myth, and femininity intertwine in images suspended between dream and biology, where vegetal and aquatic figures progressively dissolve the boundary between body and nature. Elisa Zadi, by contrast, transforms the pictorial surface into living matter, traversed by botanical symbolism, desire, spirituality, and rebirth, turning colour and fabric into a kind of sensitive skin. Iria Cortizo constructs poetic microcosms through found objects, fragments, and recovered images, in which nature and memory are preserved and transformed into small, intimate architectures.
Herabrium. Feminine Metamorphoses thus emerges from the encounter between three different ways of engaging with reality: preserving, transforming, regenerating. Nature becomes an archive, the body becomes landscape, and matter becomes memory. The works reveal an inner geography in a continuous state of becoming, where fragility and transformation are not opposing conditions, but parts of the same generative process.
Within the context of the 2026 Giornata del Contemporaneo, the exhibition interprets the theme of “Geographies of the Contemporary” through an intimate and sensitive dimension: territories that are not only physical, but also corporeal, affective, and memorial, continuously redefined through the relationships between human beings, nature, and identity.