18.06 – 16.08.2026
MUŻA – The National Community Art Museum, Valletta
Identities Beyond Borders, an exhibition project promoted by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation on the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Farnesina Collection, offers a wide-ranging reflection on the concept of identity in a present marked by ecological crises, migration, geopolitical instability and cultural fractures.
Conceived as an itinerant project in three venues and developed in collaboration with the Italian Cultural Institutes, the exhibition has gradually moved beyond its initial framework, driven by the strength and urgency of the themes it addresses. After Paris, the exhibition now enters the historic spaces of the Auberge d’Italie in Valletta, currently the seat of MUŻA – The National Community Art Museum. Here, the project enters into dialogue with the island of Malta: a territory deeply shaped by the memory of the Mediterranean, by histories of arrival, passage and cultural stratification.
In this context, the exhibition becomes a space for reflecting on the ways in which individual and collective identities are constructed, transformed and redefined over time, within a geography that has always brought different cultures, languages and visions into relation. The dialogue between generations and heterogeneous artistic languages activates new forms of critical imagination and historical reinterpretation, questioning the present through the relationship between memory, belonging and transformation.
Mario Merz opens the exhibition path with the celebrated Fibonacci sequence, a metaphor for an organic and non-hierarchical form of knowledge that expands through connections and ramifications. Around this central nucleus, the exhibition unfolds through three thematic sections: Roots of Resistance, Geographies of Detachment and Unstable Ecologies, each addressing the tensions of the contemporary world from plural perspectives.
In Roots of Resistance, body and language become instruments of emancipation. The works of Letizia Battaglia, Tomaso Binga, Carla Accardi, Ketty La Rocca, Maria Lai and Elisa Montessori, key figures of the Italian female avant-garde, enter into dialogue with those of Elena Bellantoni, Silvia Giambrone, Marinella Senatore and Loredana Di Lillo, generating a network of critical genealogies in which subversion emerges as a living practice and as the rewriting of new alphabets of disobedience.
In Geographies of Detachment, the works of Gea Casolaro, Agnese Purgatorio and Sarah Ciracì reflect on the social and environmental fractures of our time, while the works of Rä di Martino, Marta Roberti and Paola Gandolfi present bodies and automatons suspended between the human and the non-human, as metaphors for an identity constant in transformation.
In Unstable Ecologies, landscape is no longer a mere backdrop, but a vulnerable organism in constant transformation. The photographs of Silvia Camporesi, Martina della Valle, Elena Mazzi and Laura Pugno, together with the work of Iginio De Luca, approach nature as a site of crisis but also of possible regeneration, inviting us to rethink the relationship between human beings and the environment.
For the Maltese venue, the exhibition is enriched by a selection of works by Gea Casolaro and Laura Pugno. Pugno reflects on nature’s regenerative and resistant capacity through the image of a plant able to consolidate fragile and shifting territories, while Casolaro activates a reflection on the construction of meaning and the dynamics of inclusion. Also on view is Rima di mari by Tomaso Binga, selected specifically for this exhibition: a work that reflects on the sea and takes on particular intensity here, questioning the Mediterranean not only as a physical geography, but as a place of transit and continuous redefinition of identity.
Within this interweaving of bodies, languages and landscapes, identity emerges as a mobile territory, where art imagines new relationships.
Dialogue between humans and nature in the artworks of Farnesina Collection
curated by Benedetta Carpi De Resmini
The project is promoted by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, in collaboration with Cities Art Projects and the Italian Cultural Institute in Malta, and supported by the Embassy of Italy in Malta
Cover image: artworks by Carla Accardi and Laura Pugno