On Saturday 10 October 2026, as part of the Twenty-Second Giornata del Contemporaneo, Kepos hosts Domestic Aesthetics, an exhibition-event curated by Daniela Beltrani. The exhibition explores the relationship between people, the objects they choose to surround themselves with, and the aesthetic sensibility that shapes their daily lives.
The exhibition stems from the question: What aesthetic sensibility guides what we choose to have around us and see every day?
Home is the place where we live surrounded by the things we have chosen. Artworks, objects, objets d’art, images, furniture, photographs — some enter our lives by chance, while others do so because we sought them out, desired them, or recognised something in them. Over time, they become part of our everyday environment and our way of seeing.
For Domestic Aesthetics, individuals from the curator’s network in Bassa Sabina were invited to select an object from their personal collections. It did not have to be the most important, the most valuable, or the one that best represents a collection, Rather, it had to be an object with which they share a distinctive aesthetic and personal connection — an object they chose to keep close.
For one day only, these objects leave their homes and are brought together in the exhibition space, a renovated cellar under an old house in Fara. It is a temporary shift from the private to the public realm.
What is shared, however, is not merely the object itself, but the relationship each person has with it: the pleasure of looking at it, the memory it carries, the attachment, the familiarity, the surprise, the meaning, or even simply the joy of having it nearby.
The exhibition thus becomes a collection of personal choices and, at the same time, an opportunity for visitors to reflect on their own.
Indeed, Domestic Aesthetics does not ask visitors whether they like or dislike something. Instead, it invites them to look, listen, and reflect; to recognise, perhaps, something of their own taste; to consider their own choices, and to think about the way the objects surrounding them contribute to shaping their everyday environment.
And perhaps, upon returning home, to look more consciously at something they see every day.
