NeveR Alone
Casa Testori, Milan
Curated by Giacomo Pigliapoco
2025
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Conceived as a layered exhibition journey, NEVEr Alone inhabits both the ground floor and the first floor of Casa Testori.
Two exhibitions, articulated through different exhibition designs and two project rooms, shape a fragmented yet continuous narrative, inviting visitors to move across spaces, voices, and forms of experience.
In January 1985, Milan and Italy were struck by an extraordinary snowfall that brought the city to a standstill for several days. It was an exceptional event to which Giovanni Testori (1923 – 1993) dedicated an editorial on Corriere della Seraon January 17th, titled Benedetta tu, sorella neve (Blessed are you, sister snow). For Testori, snow should not be perceived as a bothersome obstacle to the flow of urban life, but rather as a unique opportunity to stop, reconnect with oneself and with others, and rediscover the value of shared living and of time. Forty years later, as Milan once again takes center stage in winter thanks to the Milan Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games, Casa Testori presents NEVEr Alone, a multidisciplinary project curated by Davide Dall’Ombra with scientific coordination by Vittoria Caprotti, in which snow plays the leading role. Through art, literature, cinema, photography, and science, snow is explored in all its facets: from its poetic nostalgia to its optical whiteness, to the urgency of the issues related to climate change.
The group exhibition NEVEr Alone curated by Giacomo Pigliapoco begins with a poetic and ambiguous image: snow as it falls, settles, crystallizes, and finally melts. An ephemeral presence, a silent layering, snow is an act of covering that, paradoxically, reveals. It erases the familiar contours of the world, suspends ordinary time, and compels a new way of looking. Within the spaces of Casa Testori, snow frees itself from its purely atmospheric and meteorological dimension to become a transformative presence. NEVEr alone therefore invites us to perceive snow in this dual nature: not only as an element that isolates, cools, and freezes, but also as a force that, in its very silence, brings things closer together. The interventions of the artists on display thus rise to the level of a choral voice, formulating an invitation to recognize, even in fragility and suspension, a dense web of relationships. The sculptures by Sara Cortesi, Orecchino da parete and Vetrata, translate icy matter into the language of glass and agar agar. Fragile, translucent membranes crystallize throughout the rooms of Casa Testori, modulating the light like snowflakes and bodies of ice. Stefano De Paolis explores warmth and its absence in a topography of interiority. Stufa Ideale reinterprets domestic fire as a mute, white, granitic architecture; Verso il regno presents a meditative self-portrait, absorbed in reading, which slowly emerges from a milky, veiled, suspended glow. Arianna Marcolin fixes on her canvases the soft light of a snow-covered twilight and a luminous imprint: the shadow of a snowflake, or perhaps of a star. In Like Velvety Scars, Luca Campestri investigates ephemeral and fleeting presences through images impressed by sublimation onto velvet: animal traces and tactile residues appear and vanish like a specter. Bianca Schröder triggers a kaleidoscopic loop of colors in motion: a painting that is not merely looked at, but activated, giving rise to a luminous spectrum in glacial tones. Martina Rota, through a site-specific installation, addresses the presence of evil and its dissolution. Through a wall engraving, a butterfly, and Testori’s voice, snow becomes an echo of redemption. Nicola Ghirardelli, with Il Limite della Neve, evokes totemic and fragile figures, eroded and crystallized by frost, like stalagmites born from a slow sedimentation of debris. Sofie Tobiášová depicts everyday scenes suspended between intimacy and the absurd, where snow becomes the backdrop for distorted gestures and a reality bent by the light weight of imagination, while Silvia Capuzzo transforms painting into an act of care and resistance: bucolic figures attempt to protect a dying heap of ice from its rapid melting, guardians of a precious element and of an elusive time. Gaia Ginevra Giorgi weaves a sonic carpet that transforms space into an auditory landscape. Starting from a collective breath of voices and environmental sounds, No archive will restore us constructs an invisible architecture that stretches through the rooms of the house, generating a space of embodied imagination and a vibrant synesthetic organism. Chiara Gambirasio captures cosmic silence in Cosmo in vaso (Nivio). The vessel does not contain, but welcomes: it is a plaster and velvet nest for silences, an observatory of ephemeral phenomena. In her Ammiraggio series, a circular rainbow appears and disappears cyclically within snow and rock. Finally, LeiLei Wu moves through the industrial landscapes between Novate Milanese and Milan North, redefining their habitats and populating them with synthetic and aquatic bodies. Photography and 3D modeling do not document but deconstruct, blending into a cold luminescence and reformulating a perceptual glitch of reality. NEVEr alone thus reveals itself as a blanket that binds, because snow, in its slow melting, reminds us that melancholy is not definitive, inviting us to recognize that no one is ever truly alone.
In the first Project Room titled Melatonina, curated by Greta Martina, choreographer and artist Elena Francalanci transforms the space into a suspended space between sleep and wakefulness. Through installation, sound, and performance, the work explores sleep as a state of vulnerability and metamorphosis, drawing on fairy tales such as Frau Holle and The Snow Queen. Voice, gesture, and a cardboard bed–guillotine shape an intimate and unsettling environment, where sleep becomes a symbolic rite of passage marked by fragility, trust, and the fear of solitude.
La Via dei Laghi by Simone Scardino, curated by Rosita Ronzini, is the second Project Room and a participatory project inspired by the formation of new alpine lakes caused by glacial melting. Conceived as a shared laboratory, the project invites children to imagine and invent new lakes through drawings, models, and small sculptures. These contributions form an evolving environmental installation, reflecting on climate change, collective imagination, and the active role of communities in rethinking ecological narratives.
A focus on the historic snowfall of 1985 connects the two floors of the exhibition. Through works by Luca Campestri, Giovanni Testori’s editorial Benedetta tu, sorella neve, and previously unpublished photographs by Mario De Biasi, the section reflects on snow as a poetic, social, and cultural event. Archival materials, testimonies, and literary texts reveal snow as an element capable of suspending time and uniting memory, nature, and imagination.
https://www.moussemagazine.it/magazine/never-alone-casa-testori-novate-milanese-2025/
Casa Testori, Milan
Curated by Giacomo Pigliapoco
2025
Conceived as a layered exhibition journey, NEVEr Alone inhabits both the ground floor and the first floor of Casa Testori.
Two exhibitions, articulated through different exhibition designs and two project rooms, shape a fragmented yet continuous narrative, inviting visitors to move across spaces, voices, and forms of experience.
In January 1985, Milan and Italy were struck by an extraordinary snowfall that brought the city to a standstill for several days. It was an exceptional event to which Giovanni Testori (1923 – 1993) dedicated an editorial on Corriere della Seraon January 17th, titled Benedetta tu, sorella neve (Blessed are you, sister snow). For Testori, snow should not be perceived as a bothersome obstacle to the flow of urban life, but rather as a unique opportunity to stop, reconnect with oneself and with others, and rediscover the value of shared living and of time. Forty years later, as Milan once again takes center stage in winter thanks to the Milan Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games, Casa Testori presents NEVEr Alone, a multidisciplinary project curated by Davide Dall’Ombra with scientific coordination by Vittoria Caprotti, in which snow plays the leading role. Through art, literature, cinema, photography, and science, snow is explored in all its facets: from its poetic nostalgia to its optical whiteness, to the urgency of the issues related to climate change.
The group exhibition NEVEr Alone curated by Giacomo Pigliapoco begins with a poetic and ambiguous image: snow as it falls, settles, crystallizes, and finally melts. An ephemeral presence, a silent layering, snow is an act of covering that, paradoxically, reveals. It erases the familiar contours of the world, suspends ordinary time, and compels a new way of looking. Within the spaces of Casa Testori, snow frees itself from its purely atmospheric and meteorological dimension to become a transformative presence. NEVEr alone therefore invites us to perceive snow in this dual nature: not only as an element that isolates, cools, and freezes, but also as a force that, in its very silence, brings things closer together. The interventions of the artists on display thus rise to the level of a choral voice, formulating an invitation to recognize, even in fragility and suspension, a dense web of relationships. The sculptures by Sara Cortesi, Orecchino da parete and Vetrata, translate icy matter into the language of glass and agar agar. Fragile, translucent membranes crystallize throughout the rooms of Casa Testori, modulating the light like snowflakes and bodies of ice. Stefano De Paolis explores warmth and its absence in a topography of interiority. Stufa Ideale reinterprets domestic fire as a mute, white, granitic architecture; Verso il regno presents a meditative self-portrait, absorbed in reading, which slowly emerges from a milky, veiled, suspended glow. Arianna Marcolin fixes on her canvases the soft light of a snow-covered twilight and a luminous imprint: the shadow of a snowflake, or perhaps of a star. In Like Velvety Scars, Luca Campestri investigates ephemeral and fleeting presences through images impressed by sublimation onto velvet: animal traces and tactile residues appear and vanish like a specter. Bianca Schröder triggers a kaleidoscopic loop of colors in motion: a painting that is not merely looked at, but activated, giving rise to a luminous spectrum in glacial tones. Martina Rota, through a site-specific installation, addresses the presence of evil and its dissolution. Through a wall engraving, a butterfly, and Testori’s voice, snow becomes an echo of redemption. Nicola Ghirardelli, with Il Limite della Neve, evokes totemic and fragile figures, eroded and crystallized by frost, like stalagmites born from a slow sedimentation of debris. Sofie Tobiášová depicts everyday scenes suspended between intimacy and the absurd, where snow becomes the backdrop for distorted gestures and a reality bent by the light weight of imagination, while Silvia Capuzzo transforms painting into an act of care and resistance: bucolic figures attempt to protect a dying heap of ice from its rapid melting, guardians of a precious element and of an elusive time. Gaia Ginevra Giorgi weaves a sonic carpet that transforms space into an auditory landscape. Starting from a collective breath of voices and environmental sounds, No archive will restore us constructs an invisible architecture that stretches through the rooms of the house, generating a space of embodied imagination and a vibrant synesthetic organism. Chiara Gambirasio captures cosmic silence in Cosmo in vaso (Nivio). The vessel does not contain, but welcomes: it is a plaster and velvet nest for silences, an observatory of ephemeral phenomena. In her Ammiraggio series, a circular rainbow appears and disappears cyclically within snow and rock. Finally, LeiLei Wu moves through the industrial landscapes between Novate Milanese and Milan North, redefining their habitats and populating them with synthetic and aquatic bodies. Photography and 3D modeling do not document but deconstruct, blending into a cold luminescence and reformulating a perceptual glitch of reality. NEVEr alone thus reveals itself as a blanket that binds, because snow, in its slow melting, reminds us that melancholy is not definitive, inviting us to recognize that no one is ever truly alone.
In the first Project Room titled Melatonina, curated by Greta Martina, choreographer and artist Elena Francalanci transforms the space into a suspended space between sleep and wakefulness. Through installation, sound, and performance, the work explores sleep as a state of vulnerability and metamorphosis, drawing on fairy tales such as Frau Holle and The Snow Queen. Voice, gesture, and a cardboard bed–guillotine shape an intimate and unsettling environment, where sleep becomes a symbolic rite of passage marked by fragility, trust, and the fear of solitude.
La Via dei Laghi by Simone Scardino, curated by Rosita Ronzini, is the second Project Room and a participatory project inspired by the formation of new alpine lakes caused by glacial melting. Conceived as a shared laboratory, the project invites children to imagine and invent new lakes through drawings, models, and small sculptures. These contributions form an evolving environmental installation, reflecting on climate change, collective imagination, and the active role of communities in rethinking ecological narratives.
A focus on the historic snowfall of 1985 connects the two floors of the exhibition. Through works by Luca Campestri, Giovanni Testori’s editorial Benedetta tu, sorella neve, and previously unpublished photographs by Mario De Biasi, the section reflects on snow as a poetic, social, and cultural event. Archival materials, testimonies, and literary texts reveal snow as an element capable of suspending time and uniting memory, nature, and imagination.
https://www.moussemagazine.it/magazine/never-alone-casa-testori-novate-milanese-2025/