Carl Jung and my overall practice
Carl Jung’s thought has been an important reference in my work, not as a fixed system to
illustrate, but as an intellectual and poetic structure through which to think about identity,
fragmentation, trauma, and transformation. What has been most meaningful to me is not the
creation of literal Jungian imagery, but the idea that the self is not singular, transparent, or
stable. It is layered, often contradictory, partially hidden, and continuously shaped through
encounters with memory, repression, projection, and individuation.
I have been particularly drawn to Jung’s understanding of the unconscious as something
active and formative rather than passive or buried. His reflections on archetypes, the
shadow, the persona, and the process of individuation resonate strongly with my sculptural
language. I am interested in how a person is built through stratification: through what is
shown, what is hidden, what is inherited, what is wounded, and what is transformed over
time. In this sense, sculpture becomes for me a way of constructing an inner architecture
rather than representing a body in a descriptive way.
I am also deeply influenced by writers and thinkers who understand identity as something
formed across time, inheritance, and countless visible and invisible passages. In this sense,
Ángel González has been particularly important to me. In Para que yo me llame Ángel
González, the self is not presented as an isolated essence but as the result of immense
accumulations of time, bodies, histories and survival. That understanding is close to my own:
identity is never singular or immediate, but sedimented, carried, eroded and rebuilt. This also
resonates with Etty Hillesum’s diaries, where interior life is not treated as escape, but as a
disciplined and ethical space of confrontation with suffering, lucidity and presence. For this
reason, I do not understand the self as a closed image, but as a stratified condition of time
and memory, something closer to a slow becoming than to a fixed identity.
Jung’s ideas also intersect with my interest in ritual, burial, revelation, and the invisible
structures that shape subjectivity. I often think of the sculptural process as a kind of
archaeology of the self, where layers are removed, stitched, covered, reopened, or exposed.
The work does not seek psychological resolution in a simplistic sense; rather, it gives form to
the fragile and often unresolved coexistence of trauma, memory, resilience, and becoming.
Jungian concepts and developmental stages in my work
There are certainly analogies between Jungian ideas and the stages of my artistic
development, although I would not say that my practice follows Jung in an illustrative or
didactic way. Rather, some of his concepts have helped me to understand the deeper
structure of what I was already pursuing materially and intuitively.
In an earlier phase of my work, the body appeared more directly, often through organic and
symbolic forms. At that stage, I was concerned with emotional and psychological states, but
these concerns were expressed more through material atmosphere and bodily suggestion
than through architecture or spatial construction. One could perhaps relate this to a first
confrontation with inner material: with vulnerability, psychic density, and the body as a site of
tension.
In a second phase, the body began to fragment and to become more structured. Geometry
entered the work more forcefully. Cubes, cuts, voids, sharp lines and stratified forms
emerged as devices through which to articulate social pressure, inner restriction, and the
frameworks imposed on identity. This corresponds, in some respects, to an increasingawareness of the tension between inner life and external structure, between the self and the systems that shape or compress it. Here, the dialogue between persona and shadow, surface and depth, became more explicit in the formal language.
In the more recent work, especially in projects such as Hidden and White Wombs, there is a
stronger movement toward concealment, inner space, and revelation through absence.
Figures are no longer simply present as bodies to be seen. They are partially hidden,
filtered, enclosed, glimpsed through slits, light, writing, or shadows. This stage is more
architectural and more ritualistic. It is less about presenting identity and more about creating
the conditions through which it may be sensed, questioned, or encountered indirectly. If one
wanted to connect this to Jung, one might think of individuation not as self-expression, but
as a difficult process of approaching what is buried, fractured, or unassimilated.
In terms of portrayal, light and shadow, and spatial relations, this evolution has been
fundamental. The figure has moved from being more directly embodied to becoming almost
spatially dispersed or psychically embedded within the sculpture. Light now plays a more
active role as a revelatory force. Shadow is no longer merely optical; it becomes a carrier of
what cannot be fully seen or named. Space is no longer a neutral setting for the work, but an
extension of its psychological and symbolic structure.
My interpretation of the soul
I do not think of the soul in a purely religious, decorative or sentimental sense. For me, the
soul is not an abstract essence detached from matter. It is something that becomes
perceptible through fragility, contradiction, memory, and transformation. It is what resists
reduction. It is what remains when surfaces fail to explain us fully.
In my work, the soul could be understood as the invisible intensity held within matter and
within form. It is not something I attempt to represent literally. Rather, I try to create
conditions in which it may be sensed: through concealment, through slowness, through
traces, through openings, through the tension between what is revealed and what remains
inaccessible.
The significance of the soul in my work lies in this capacity to hold complexity without
resolving it. I am interested in forms that seem to contain an inner life, not because they are
animated in a theatrical sense, but because they suggest an interiority that exceeds
appearance. A slit in marble, a partially visible figure, a text that cannot be fully deciphered,
a surface that bears wounds or inscriptions: all of these are ways of giving presence to
something that is both intimate and elusive.
How I convey or infuse the soul into the work
I would not say that I “infuse” the soul into the work as if it were added from outside. Rather, I
try to work in such a way that the sculpture can hold a sense of interiority. This happens
through both process and form.
Material is central to this. When I speak about matter, I do not speak only in formal or
technical terms. I think here also of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, especially The Mass on the
World, where matter is not inert but charged, evolutionary, and spiritually active. This is very
close to how I experience sculpture: not as the imposition of form onto dead substance, but
as an encounter with a material that already carries duration, pressure, memory and
transformation within itself.
Marble, for example, is not neutral in my practice. It is geological, historical, vulnerable, and
symbolically charged. It carries time within it. Marble, for me, is especially powerful becauseit is never just stone in the ordinary sense. Chemically and geologically, it holds within itself
immense durations of life and transformation. Marble emerges through the metamorphosis
of limestone; limestone itself is formed largely through calcium carbonate deposits linked to
shells, marine organisms and biological sediments accumulated over immense spans of
time. In that sense, even a small block of marble carries millions of years of compression,
death, survival and reconfiguration. This is one reason I experience marble as a material of
memory rather than merely of monumentality.
This is also why I often choose salvaged marble, fragments, discarded pieces and offcuts. I
am interested in working with what has already been cut away, neglected or considered
secondary. These remnants already contain a history of extraction, selection and refusal.
Reusing them is not simply an ecological gesture, although that matters to me; it is also a
conceptual and ethical one. The offcut becomes a body that has survived exclusion and is
brought back into visibility through care, pressure, inscription and form.
The same can be said for stitching, engraving, cyanotype, and the use of hidden writing.
These are not decorative gestures; they are methods of inscription, concealment, repair and
delayed revelation.
The soul enters the work through this tension between control and vulnerability, precision
and erosion, architecture and intimacy. It also enters through time. Many of my works are not
immediately legible; they ask the viewer to move, wait, look again, come closer, or accept
that something will remain unresolved. That space of incompleteness is important to me. It
allows the work to breathe psychologically rather than becoming overdetermined.
Light and shadow: metaphorical and physical functions
Light and shadow are fundamental to my work both materially and conceptually. Physically,
they shape visibility. They activate surfaces, openings, depth, texture, inscriptions and
internal spaces. They determine what can be perceived, when, and from which angle. In
many of my sculptures, especially the more recent ones, light is not an external aid to
display the work; it is an active component of the work’s meaning.
Metaphorically, light is linked to revelation, consciousness, emergence and exposure, while
shadow relates to concealment, interiority, trauma, latency and psychic depth. But I am not
interested in a simplistic opposition between good light and negative darkness. Shadow, in
my work, is often protective. It can hold what is too fragile, too painful, or too early to fully
appear. Likewise, light is not always comforting; it can expose, destabilise, or force visibility
upon what was hidden.
In past works such as Layers, voids and openings functioned as portals through which
absence became visible. Light passed through these spaces and transformed emptiness into
a kind of active presence. In Cocoon to Alda Merini, concealment and layering produce a
dynamic of inner and outer skins, where what is protected is also what longs to emerge.
When I think of Cocoon to Alda Merini, I also think of Alda Merini’s L’albatros, especially the
image of the wounded yet still singing creature. That poem has always felt profoundly close
to me because it transforms injury into voice without romanticising suffering. Merini’s
language carries a mystical softness and, at the same time, an unbearable wound. That
duality is central to Cocoon: protection and exposure, burial and song, enclosure and inner
survival.
In White Wombs and Hidden, light becomes even more central: it passes through slits,
reveals hidden text, activates internal shadows, and creates a relationship between the
visible exterior and the secret interior. It is almost a ritual agent of disclosure.
How light functions in the small room works
In the small room works for the exhibition, light functions both as atmosphere and as
threshold. These room-like sculptures are not simply miniature spaces; they are structures of psychic tension. Light does not merely illuminate them from outside. It participates in
creating the feeling that something is present within, even when it cannot be fully seen.
Because of the marble’s thinness, openings, translucency, and internal spatial logic, light can
operate in a very subtle way. It can suggest interior presence without fully revealing it. It can
transform slits into psychological apertures. It can create a suspended state between
invitation and refusal. This is important because I want the viewer to feel that these works
contain something more than they declare. They are not illustrations of interiority; they are
conditions in which interiority becomes spatially tangible.
The room works depend on this instability. They hover between shelter and exposure,
chamber and body, architecture and memory. Light helps produce that ambiguity. It gives the
works an ethereal and shifting atmosphere, while also intensifying their sense of emotional
concentration.
Text: inscription, identity, discovery, and narrative
Text in my work operates as trace, inscription, wound, memory, and invitation. It is never
merely explanatory. Whether etched into marble, written in pencil, engraved, or printed
through cyanotype, text functions as something embedded in the body of the sculpture
rather than placed upon it as commentary.
I am interested in writing as a material act. To write onto marble is already to create a
tension between permanence and disappearance. A pencil line may fade. An engraving may
emerge more strongly over time. A cyanotype inscription may depend on light, process,
washing, and partial revelation. This temporal instability is very important to me. It reflects
the instability of identity itself, and the way memory survives through fragments rather than
full narratives.
Text can certainly be read as a way of etching identity, but not in a fixed or declarative sense.
It is more accurate to say that it creates a field of psychological resonance. Sometimes the
words may feel like messages left behind, or intimate fragments not fully offered to the
viewer. Sometimes they function as traces of thought, states of mind, prayers, confessions,
or residues of buried experience. At other times, they are deliberately semi-decipherable,
allowing the viewer to project memories, emotions, or narratives into the work. In that sense,
yes, they invite discovery, deciphering, and confabulation, but without ever becoming
completely transparent.
I am interested in language as something that can both reveal and withhold. A text can be
intimate while remaining inaccessible. It can be deeply personal while creating collective
resonance. It can also function ritually, especially in relation to the idea that words are not
passive but transformative. This is one reason I am drawn to inscription as a sculptural act.
Do transcription methods coincide with stages in my work?
Yes, to an extent they do. Different forms of textual inscription correspond to different
moments in my artistic development and to different conceptual needs.
In some works, writing appears more directly and more vulnerably, for example in pencil or
pen, where its fragility and impermanence become part of its meaning. In other works,
engraving introduces a stronger relation to time, resistance and delayed visibility. It suggeststhat language may be hidden within matter and only gradually emerge. More recently, through cyanotype and light-sensitive processes, writing has become even more bound to revelation, disappearance, and the action of light itself. The word is no longer only inscribed;it is developed, resisted, washed away, or left as an absence.
So yes, the mode of transcription often reflects the stage of the work, both materially and
psychologically. As the work has become more concerned with concealment, layering,
rituality and invisibility, the writing has also become less direct and more contingent, more
dependent on process, time and viewer encounter.
Digital process: the role of 3D modelling
3D modelling plays an important role in my artistic process, especially in relation to form,
structure, scale, and spatial testing. I do not use digital tools to distance the work from
materiality. On the contrary, I use them to deepen my engagement with matter.
Digital modelling allows me to think sculpturally in a dynamic and architectural way. It helps
me study proportions, voids, cuts, internal tensions, and spatial rhythm before moving into
stone. In works involving marble, where every intervention carries risk, the ability to test
forms digitally is extremely valuable. It allows me to explore relationships between thickness
and fragility, between interior and exterior, between hidden and visible structures.
It also adds a different kind of precision. I am interested in the dialogue between the
controlled language of digital construction and the unpredictable density of natural material.
When these two dimensions meet, something important happens. The marble retains its
geological and symbolic presence, but the digital process allows me to conceive forms that
are more exacting, more layered, and more architecturally refined.
In practical terms, I often work through a combination of drawing, digital modelling, and
physical making. 3D tools help me visualise and test the work, especially where internal
spaces, slits, alignments, and hidden volumes are concerned. They also allow me to
collaborate with technological processes such as CNC or robotic roughing, which I
intentionally integrate into the work. I am not interested in erasing the trace of the machine
completely. Sometimes those marks become part of the language of the sculpture, because
they register another layer of time, labour, and intervention.
The three stages of my artistic development
If I were to summarise the three main stages of my artistic development, I would describe
them as follows.
The first stage was more organic and corporeal. In this phase, I was strongly focused on
emotional states, bodily transformation, and symbolic materiality. Forms were often more
fluid, visceral, and directly linked to the body as a site of vulnerability and becoming. Material
itself already carried conceptual weight, but architecture had not yet fully entered as a
structuring device.
The second stage introduced fragmentation, geometry and stratification more explicitly.
Here, I began to use sharper formal structures, cubes, cuts, layered systems and more
tension between organic and architectural languages. This phase was crucial because it
allowed me to articulate social and psychological pressures more clearly. The body became
less literal and more constructed, more coded through structure and rupture.
The third stage, which continues in my current work, is more spatial, ritual and interior. It is
characterised by concealment, hidden writing, light-sensitive surfaces, slit-like openings,stitched elements, reliquary forms, and the creation of sculptures that behave almost like psychological chambers. In this phase, the work is less about the body as a visible figure and more about the body as an absent centre, an internal architecture, or a threshold
between material and psychic space. This is the phase in which projects such as Hidden and
White Wombs become especially significant.
These stages are not neatly separated, and elements of one often remain active in another.
But overall, there has been a movement from bodily symbol to structural language, and then
toward a more complex fusion of sculpture, inscription, light, and inner space.
My formation within the community in Sicily was also decisive. It gave me not only a cultural
and spiritual framework, but a lived experience of collective making, ritual space and large
architectural or environmental gestures. Being able to grow in that context, and to imagine
and realise works on a larger scale, shaped my understanding of sculpture as something
that can exceed the object and become a spatial condition. That experience remains deeply
connected to my desire to develop White Wombs at a larger scale: not as enlargement for its
own sake, but because the project already contains an architectural, communal and
immersive logic that asks to be inhabited more fully.
Pina Bausch and Martha Graham
Pina Bausch and Martha Graham have both been important influences on the performative
dimension of my practice, though in different ways.
From Martha Graham, I take a strong sense of psychological embodiment. Her
choreography is never only formal movement; it is emotional architecture. The body
contracts, opens, resists, reveals, remembers. This has had a profound impact on how I
think about sculptural form. Even when my works are still, I want them to hold an inner
movement, a sense of tension, compression, release, or withheld gesture.
From Pina Bausch, I am deeply influenced by the relationship between vulnerability,
repetition, ritual and emotional exposure. Her work creates spaces where gesture becomes
memory, where the body appears fragile but charged, and where theatricality is never
separate from truth. This has influenced how I think about repetition, enclosure, bodily trace,
and the emotional atmosphere that sculpture can generate.
Alongside Bausch and Graham, I would also place Zygmunt Bauman’s understanding of
liquid modernity in the background of my thinking, especially when I reflect on emotional
instability, collective trauma, precarity and repetition in contemporary life. Bauman describes modern life as marked by fluidity, the weakening of stable structures, and the pressures produced by instability and constant change. This is important to me because Bausch’s choreographic language often feels as though it gives body to precisely that unstable emotional condition. Repetition in her work is never merely formal repetition: it feels like the return of unresolved psychic and collective material, the persistence of feeling within unstable social structures.
In a different but related register, I also think of Gabriel García Márquez, and particularly One
Hundred Years of Solitude, where time thickens, folds back on itself and becomes almost
atmospheric. The suspended temporality of Macondo has influenced how I think about
emotional space: not as linear narrative, but as recurrence, haunting, inheritance and return.
In this sense, choreography and sculpture both become ways of shaping time materially.
Both artists have helped me think of the body not as an anatomical fact but as a site of
inscription, relation and psychic intensity. Their influence is not limited to performance in atheatrical sense; it also extends to how I construct space, rhythm, interval, presence and
absence within sculpture itself. In this sense, choreography enters my practice not only
through live action but through sculptural composition, suspension, sequence, and the way
the viewer moves in relation to the work.
Room sculptures within these stages
I see the room sculptures as a very important development within this trajectory. They bring
together many strands of my practice: architecture, inner life, light, trauma, concealment,
figure, inscription, and the experience of threshold.
They are not simply reduced models of larger works, although they may certainly open
toward future larger-scale installations. I consider them autonomous works in their own right.
Their scale is intimate, but their conceptual and psychological charge is not minor. In some
ways, their reduced scale intensifies their effect, because they require a more concentrated
mode of looking. They ask the viewer to come close, to peer, to imagine, to enter mentally
even if not physically.
These room sculptures are crucial because they crystallise a shift in my work from sculpture
as object to sculpture as psychic architecture. They are spaces one cannot literally inhabit,
yet they are structured around the possibility of inward inhabitation. They function as mental
rooms, emotional chambers, or fragments of internal architecture.
How many I would like to exhibit
At this stage, I would ideally like to exhibit a group to create a real spatial dialogue, rather
than presenting them as isolated pieces. A cluster of works would allow the viewer to move
from one psychological atmosphere to another, and would help establish the sense that the
exhibition itself is a field of passage and resonance.
My view of the figure within the rooms
The figure within the rooms is never simply a person placed in a setting. It is more like a
concentrated psychic presence. Sometimes it appears protected, trapped, remembered, or
half-emergent. Sometimes it is almost a residue rather than a full body. I am interested in the
figure as something that both inhabits and generates the space around it.
The relation between figure and room is therefore not theatrical in a conventional sense. The
room is not a backdrop. It is an extension of the figure’s inner condition, and the figure is in
turn an intensification of the room’s emotional and symbolic charge. They form a single field.
W hat the figures signify
The figures can signify many things simultaneously: vulnerability, interiority, trauma, survival, latency, memory, witness, concealment, or becoming. I do not want them to be reduced to a single symbolic key. Their ambiguity is essential. They are not characters in a narrative; they are presences through which a psychic or existential condition becomes perceptible.
What the room spaces convey
These spaces convey enclosure, suspension, intimacy, tension, and a kind of fragile
threshold between protection and exposure. They may evoke shelters, cells, chapels,
reliquaries, internal chambers, or fragments of remembered architecture. I am interested inthe room as both body and mind, as something one could inhabit emotionally even when
one cannot inhabit it physically.
The room, in my work, is not just a built space. It is a condition of being. It may hold longing,
isolation, incubation, fear, care, or revelation. Its architecture is never purely formal; it is
always psychically charged.
The atmosphere I hope to create in the gallery
I would like the gallery to feel like a space of suspended passage: quiet but intense, intimate
yet charged, almost ritual in its pacing. I am interested in an atmosphere that encourages
slow looking and heightened perception. The sculptures should not shout; they should draw
the viewer into a state of attention.
Ideally, the relationship between the works would create a subtle sense of movement
through different emotional chambers. The gallery would become less a neutral exhibition
space and more a temporary architecture of states of mind: longing, concealment,
vulnerability, emergence, memory, and perhaps a fragile form of hope.
For this exhibition, I have been imagining not only the presence of the newer White Wombs
works, but a more immersive installation logic. I would like some of the sculptures to be
suspended, so that they appear less anchored and more like fragile presences held in a
state between apparition and descent. Beneath them, I imagine a black plexiglass base
incorporating a very shallow and controlled layer of water, so that reflection becomes part of
the work’s language.
The reflection would not simply double the sculpture, but extend its psychological space
downward, creating a sense of depth, instability and inward immersion. What interests me in
this installation is the possibility that the viewer does not remain entirely outside the work,
but approaches it physically and perceptually through a slight encounter with water. I am
interested in a condition where the body of the viewer becomes more cautious, slower, more
aware of balance, surface and reflection. In this way, the encounter with the sculpture would become more ritualised and embodied. The water would function not only visually, but
psychologically: as threshold, mirror, memory and subtle disturbance.
Naturally, this would need to be resolved with great care in relation to safety, conservation
and accessibility, but conceptually I believe it could strengthen the suspended, ethereal and
introspective atmosphere of the installation.
Are these dioramas or maquettes for future full-scale installations?
I would not define them primarily as dioramas, because that term risks making them feel
illustrative or scenographic, and that is not how I understand them. Nor would I reduce them
to maquettes, even though they may open toward future larger-scale works.
They are autonomous sculptures. However, they do contain an architectural and conceptual
potential that could certainly be expanded into larger installations, both inside and outside
gallery spaces. In that sense, they are complete works that also carry a generative function.
They do not merely represent future possibilities; they embody them in concentrated form.
Final note
What interests me most in these works is the possibility of constructing a psychological and
material language in which sculpture becomes a threshold. A threshold between body and
architecture, text and silence, visibility and disappearance, trauma and transformation. I amnot interested in explaining inner life directly. I am interested in giving it form through matter, tension, light, space and time.
