La Galleria delle Arti, the multidisciplinary art space in Rome’s San Lorenzo district, will open Catarsi. Bodies in Metamorphosis, a group exhibition curated by Marta Bandini and Tommaso Zijno, bringing together the work of Arianna De Nicola, Emanuele Marchetti, Elia Novecento, and Emma Scarafiotti.
The exhibition grows out of Baccanti, a film by Emma Scarafiotti, and expands its questions into a broader dialogue between different artistic practices.
At the heart of Catarsi is a reflection on the relationship between humans and the animal world, on interspecies coexistence, and on the possibility of imagining other futures by reconsidering our relationship with the body, movement, and the spaces we share.
The exhibition takes its cue from Euripides’ The Bacchae. The Maenads — followers of Dionysus — are wild, instinctive, and subversive figures who, through dance, ecstasy, and their connection with the natural world, disrupt established roles and patriarchal hierarchies. In the contemporary imagination, they have come to embody resistance, liberation, and transformation.
Through photography, painting, sculpture, and video, the artists approach metamorphosis as both a physical and symbolic process, exploring the body from distinct yet interconnected perspectives.
The exhibition unfolds as a gradual departure from the recognisable human figure.
Emanuele Marchetti’s photographs encounter the body in its most immediate and familiar form. Elia Novecento’s paintings mark a moment of transition, where the figure begins to dissolve, hovering between recognition and abstraction. Arianna De Nicola’s sculptural installation takes this process further, moving the body into organic matter, nature, and the intimate space of the nest.
The journey culminates in the screening of Baccanti, which occupies the final room of the exhibition. In Scarafiotti’s film, the tensions and questions explored through the different artistic languages converge in a single dancing body — a body that is no longer defined by fixed boundaries, but exists in relation to other bodies, species, and environments.
What emerges is a reflection on coexistence, mutual care, and the interdependence of all forms of life. Here, the body becomes a site of transformation: a place from which to reconsider self-knowledge, memory, emancipation, and our relationship with the natural world.