Curated by Francesca Lazzarini
Exhibition opening: Saturday, 20. 6. 2026, 19:00 (Viewing of the exhibition with the curator and the artist)
EXHIBITION PROGRAMME:
20. 6. at 19.00: Viewing of the exhibition with the curator and the artist – in English.
20. 7. at 19:30: A Very Alive Protocol – participatory performance
Glitch Is Anti-Body
If to be recognized as a body that deserves to live we must perform a certain self—look a certain way, live a certain way, care for one another in a certain way—we strike against the body altogether. We will hold mirrors up for one another, hold and care for the reflections seen. We will see one another and the selves we become, recognizing those selves as real, loved, and so very alive. (Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto, Verso Books, London, New York, 2020, p. 73)
Very alive more-than-human presences animate Silvia Bigi’s exhibition: women who lived and died across different times and dimensions; gendered bodies whose voices – silenced by institutional and intimate violence – are here experiencing new agency thanks to insubordinate techno-somatic assemblages.
“And so very alive” are, in the first place, the digital iterations of queer subjects resisting the body as a coercive social and cultural structure, searching for multiple and liberated selves: the very iterations theorised by Legacy Russell in Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto, from which the exhibition takes its title.
Wayward and rebellious entities inhabit the spaces of Škuc Gallery.
Visitors first encounter Francesca Alinovi, the Italian art critic and lecturer murdered in Italy in 1983 at the age of thirty-five, in the form of a chatbot, in what would today be recognised as feminicide. Her sharp and radical thinking – spanning topics such as the dematerialisation of the artwork, the speculative potential of photography and writing as an artistic gesture – reverberates through an AI-driven dialogue system developed using Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG). Trained on Alinovi’s writings gathered from archives, libraries and online sources, the chatbot inhabits the exhibition’s central space within an intimate installation surrounded by works generated through Bigi’s interaction with the critic’s texts and her digital double.
The word Sola (“alone”) (2026), which appears as a neon work and lends its title to the piece, comes from Alinovi’s private journal, where it was handwritten seventy-seven times across a single page. Here, it resonates both as a personal cry and as the expression of a collective historical condition. Sentences generated through the machinic elaboration of Alinovi’s writings – such as “The work that does not hurt is decoration” or “I’m stubborn, the history of art must be rewritten every morning” are materialised by Bigi on linen and risograph prints on packing paper.
Although access to the chatbot remains exclusive to the artist, this intimate dialogue unfolds into a series of public activations. Curated by the chatbot itself, these performances are based on sets of instructions enacted by Bigi and her collaborators, one of which will take place at ŠKUC during the exhibition finissage.
As Russell suggests, digital technologies are shaped by the same structures of violence permeating the social world, yet they may also become sites of resistance. Central to her thought is the notion of the glitch: in digital culture, a malfunction or system error; in social terms, all that deviates from the dominant norms – Black, female, queer, disabled, ill or otherwise marginalised bodies. Precisely for this reason, the glitch carries the potential for refusal and transformation: “The glitch creates a fissure within which new possibilities of being and becoming manifest.”[1]
This is the space Bigi explores in Are You Nobody, Too? (2022). The project originated with the discovery of a portrait in the artist’s family album depicting a woman she had never heard of. After overcoming her family’s resistance, Bigi learned that the woman, Irma, was her father’s aunt, whose existence had been concealed because of her mental illness. The image became a threshold through which a collective trauma resurfaced: that of a society that marginalises whatever does not conform to imposed standards. Through a text-to-speech application, and a deep fake app animating the photograph, Bigi gives voice to Irma using words drawn from 20th-century women writers and poets diagnosed with bipolar disorder, depression, schizophrenia or suicidal ideation – diagnoses often weaponised to domesticate women’s dissent. Texts by figures including Sylvia Plath, Alda Merini and Alejandra Pizarnik, amongst others, merge to turn Irma’s body into the space of a multiplicity. Irma’s collective voice is amplified through other pieces: it is engraved on mirrors, on which viewers can encounter their own reflection, and embroidered on dresses, tailored for a series of live performances.
In accordance with Russell’s notion of the anti-body, the absence of Alinovi’s and Irma’s physical bodies does not operate as erasure but as abstraction: a mirroring of reflections that expands and multiplies the subject, subtracting it from fixed identity and normative capture.
Multiplying abstractions are also the bodies in the series No Title (The Women in My Family Were Almost Never Alone) (2015). The artist created these drawings by tracing, on translucent paper, the outline of female relatives in family photographs. The pencil marks reveal an invisible social structure that relegates women to marginal positions: never central subjects, always presences among others.
The last figures encountered in the show are those of the Camille project, which intertwines two timelines: the five fictional generations of Camille, monarch butterfly symbionts imagined by Donna Haraway[2] and five real women named Camille, who were executed for witchcraft by the Inquisition between the 16th and 17th centuries. Their presence is conveyed through five medicinal herbs, linked both to the Inquisitorial trials – since thousands of healers, midwives and herbalists were persecuted for their knowledge – and to the climate crisis addressed by Haraway in her speculative science fiction – as these species survive in urban contexts where, not matching landscape aesthetic ideals, they are subject to systematic eradication.
Plantago major, Hedera helix, Urtica dioica, Malva sylvestris and Parietaria officinalis appear in three works: the olfactory essence Camille (2025), dispersed throughout the space by sculptural diffusors, is composed of herbal infusions, isolated molecules and synthetic compounds, giving life to a hybrid between perfumery and herbalism. The video GIF Conosco certe erbe (I Know Certain Herbs) (2024) features algorithmically shifting images sourced from ancient herbaria. Pattern #1–6 (2025) consists of textile transpositions of AI-generated botanical patterns that recall how gender oppression and violence have been continuously reproduced within domestic spaces over the centuries.
In dialogue once more with Russell, Silvia Bigi’s practice eschews the mere representation of gendered violence. Rather, her works enact a performative reconfiguration of matter, bodies, words and technologies, enabling new wayward and alive entanglements.
[1] Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto, Verso Books, London, New York, 2020, p. 12.
[2] Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Duke University Press, Durham, 2016.
Biographies:
Silvia Bigi (Ravenna, 1985) is an artist, researcher and lecturer. She holds a degree in Visual Arts from the University of Bologna and works across multiple mediums, including photography, installation, sculpture, sound, video and drawing. Her practice explores images as thresholds –liminal spaces where reflections on power, human and non-human coexistence, and the glitches in Western history unfold.
Bigi’s interdisciplinary, research-driven approach questions philosophical, cultural and political issues, with a particular focus on the silenced voices of women, both through visible and invisible acts of violence. Her work, featured in public and private collections, has been awarded and exhibited in national and international venues such as museums, foundations and galleries. Notable recognitions include the Italian Council 2023, the Premio Francesco Fabbri 2022, the Talent Prize 2021, and the Lucie Award-winning exhibition “Engaged, Active, Aware: Women’s Perspective Now” in 2018. Bigi’s works have been published in prominent magazines like Artribune, Der Greif, IO Donna, Atpdiary, Forme Uniche, Yet Magazine, Artslife and the British Journal of Photography.
Francesca Lazzarini is a visual arts curator, researcher and lecturer. Her PhD in Advanced Practices at Goldsmiths, University of London, examines the post-photographic as a dynamic space to rethink forms of togetherness with and through images.
After working at Fondazione Fotografia Modena (2007–2013), she curated independent projects based on research, collaboration and experimentation, hosted, among others, by: Camera Austria, Graz; SixtyEight Art Institute, Copenhagen; FMAV, Modena; Kunsthaus, Graz; ŠKUC Gallery, Ljubljana; IC-CD, Rome; Kortil Gallery, Rijeka; Fondazione Francesco Fabbri, Treviso; Trieste Contemporanea and MLZ Art Dep, Trieste. She taught at LABA, Brescia and at the School of Fondazione Fotografia, Modena. She is co-initiator of POIUYT (2017–), part of the Absent Audience collective (2021–), and director of the residency programme AiR Trieste (2016–).
Translation from English to Slovenian: Iva Jevtić
English proofreading: Arven Šakti Kralj
Slovene proofreading: Inge Pangos
Design: Lea Jelenko
The Exhibition is kindly supported by the The Italian Institute of Culture (Istituto Italiano di Cultura) in Slovenia.
The Škuc Gallery programme is supported by the Ministry of Culture and the Municipality of Ljubljana.
