CasermArcheologica presents Community Threads, a site-specific installation by internationally recognised artist Lucy Orta drawing from a residency and community engagement in 2025. Curated by Simonetta Carbonaro, the project will be presented in a press preview on Friday, 27 February 2026 at 11:30 am at Palazzo Muglioni, a historic building in Sansepolcro, in the Valtiberina valley. Since 2013, the palace has played a key role in a culture-led regeneration process conducted by the CasermArcheologica Association and is today one of Italy’s most dynamic cultural production centers.
The residency and exhibition programme are supported by Fondazione CR Firenze, with the institutional backing of the Municipality of Sansepolcro, the Municipality of Anghiari, and the Madonna del Parto Civic Museums.
Lucy Orta’s installation will be open to the public from Saturday, 28 February at 5:30 pm until 15 July 2026.
Community Threads was born from the collaboration between CasermArcheologica, the Lucy + Jorge Orta studio, and the curatorial consultancy of Simonetta Carbonaro.
The project, launched in July 2025 during Lucy Orta’s artistic residency at CasermArcheologica and in the Valtiberina Tuscan region, is the result of a participatory art process. During her residency, the artist explored the territory and met thirty-three people—craftspeople, artists, teachers, entrepreneurs, activists and citizens of different ages. These encounters created moments of listening in which testimonies linked to personal experience and local identity began to emerge, starting from the question: “What connects you to this land, and what pushes you away from it?”
From this collective narrative, Lucy Orta distilled an essential idea, transforming it into an original installation conceived and realized specifically for this site, the community and its audience: an encampment of five tent-like sculptures, woven from linen and hemp cultivated in Tuscan soil—both a symbolic and a real space of encounter and resistance.
According to the artist, Community Threads begins with a primary and universal gesture: the act of gathering. The reference is ancient: the Ohel (Hebrew for “tent”) is the archetype of a sacred and protective space where the human and the sacred meet—the tent of the Madonna del Parto or the mantle of the Madonna della Misericordia by Piero della Francesca —but it is also a place of assembly, storytelling and transmission. A fragile and fluid architecture suspended between journey and temporary dwelling, offering the necessary shelter during every transition.
To give form to such a powerful archetype, Lucy Orta has created an equally powerful installation, the result of an extensive and meticulous work. The artist embroidered the portrait of each of the thirty-three people she encountered onto thirty-three cloth panels that come together to form five tent-like sculptures, creating a kind of encampment that gathers the individual profiles of communal life. The linen and hemp fabrics, made from old hand-woven sheets, evoke the material and moral memory of the territory and the bond between body, community, and environment. Among the suspended threads of each embroidered portrait emerge pearls, small golden tongues, silent guardians of the spoken word.
Ninety-nine small, hand-modelled terracotta artefacts hang from the cloths, evoking the plants, animals, and minerals that the inhabitants of the valley associate with their land. They suggest the fragile yet living architecture of a community that continues to endure. “These amulet-like forms act as weights,” Lucy Orta explains. “They anchor the textiles to the ground, like the whorls of ancient looms creating lines of tension that vibrate in resonance with the oral testimonies embedded in the embroidery.”
The installation becomes a place of gathering, shelter, and dialogue, where the uniqueness of each individual is woven into a collective cloth. Here, personal memories are transformed into shared consciousness, and every voice can resonate within the wider chorus of the community, inviting an experience of presence, listening, and active participation.
“With this installation, Lucy Orta does not merely represent a community: she calls it into being,” explains Simonetta Carbonaro. A community-building process will accompany the exhibition throughout its duration. Additional residents of the valley will be invited to actively engage in a shared journey that begins with a reflection on what it means to belong to a place, a community, and a shared history — understood not as a fixed condition, but as an ongoing act of construction and reconstruction. The process will then explore the imagination of those “possible utopias” which — as stated in CasermArcheologica’s motto — are the driving force that continues to weave the threads of our communities as they strive toward the construction of desirable futures.
From this perspective, Community Threads also questions the roles of the artist, the audience and the institution: Who has the right to speak? Who decides what is visible and what has an impact on reality? Which bodies and which stories are legitimized as artistic—and therefore political—discourse? Here, answers are not provided but generated through the invitation to be together: to meet, think, speak and not lose the thread of this fabric, through which Lucy Orta invites us to weave new community ties and new folds of desirable futures.
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Lucy Orta is one of the most internationally recognized artists for her ability to merge visual art with social commitment. With the studio, founded with Jorge Orta in 1991, Lucy addresses issues such as migration, environmental protection, human rights and community-building. Her works have been exhibited at prestigious institutions including the Barbican Gallery in London, the Biennale in Venice, MAXXI in Rome, and Pirelli Hangar Bicocca in Milan, offering powerful examples of how art can act as a catalyst for social transformation. Orta’s practice is also distinguished by her sustained engagement with participatory art. For over thirty years the studio of Lucy + Jorge Orta have actively involved local communities—through workshops, performances and collective installations—in the creative processes. Art thus becomes a tool for dialogue, transformation and the construction of shared meaning, capable of generating new forms of relationship between individuals, territories and identities.
CasermArcheologica is an urban regeneration project that has and redeveloped and repurposed the former Carabinieri barracks of Sansepolcro, located within Palazzo Muglioni, a historic building in the town centre. Thanks to an extraordinary movement involving students, professionals, entrepreneurs, institutions and foundations, and the local community, the CasermArcheologica Association has reopened two floors of the palace—abandoned and unused since the 1990s—now once again accessible as a cultural production centre open daily. Dedicated to contemporary arts, education and research, it provides a working space for professionals from Italy and abroad. CasermArcheologica is an architecture of community, a public asset grounded in all those who care for it. Since 2013, CasermArcheologica has transformed Palazzo Muglioni into a place where the rooms of an abandoned building rich in histories have become opportunities to bring artistic research, professional pathways, local networks and international perspectives into daily dialogue.
Simonetta Carbonaro is an expert in consumer culture. Her research focuses on the ethos of contemporary societies, from which she derives interpretations of the transformation of human needs and socio-cultural dynamics. She has taught at the postgraduate design school Domus Academy in Milan and has been a Visiting Professor at the London College of Fashion. In 2004, she was awarded the title of Professor in Design Management and Humanistic Marketing by the University of Borås (Sweden), where she directed The Design of Prosperity, a think tank exploring how design culture can generate new models of prosperity integrating economic, environmental, cultural and social dimensions. In 1997, together with Christian Votava, she co-founded the consultancy REALISE in Germany, where she leads projects in sustainable innovation management and communication for major international brands. Her current challenge is supporting participatory art as a tool capable of stimulating the necessary cultural transformation of societies, promoting new lifestyles and ways of thinking.
Press Preview Friday, 27 February 2026, 11:30 am
Kindly RSVP to: info@amaliadilanno.com
TECHNICAL DETAILS
TITLE: Trame di Comunità (Community Threads)
ARTIST: Lucy Orta
CURATED BY: Simonetta Carbonaro
VENUE: CasermArcheologica, Palazzo Muglioni, Via Niccolò Aggiunti, 55, 52037 Sansepolcro (AR), Italy
DATES: 28 February – 15 July 2026
PRESS PREVIEW: Friday, 27 February 2026, 11:30 am
OPENING: Saturday, 28 February 2026, 5:30 pm, free admission
OPENING HOURS: Monday–Friday 10:00 am – 6:00 pm Saturday and Sunday 3:00 pm – 7:00 pm
INFO: CasermArcheologica www.casermarcheologica.it – info@casermarcheologica.it
T. +39 349 865 0250 – +39 349 644 2920
PRESS OFFICE: Amalia Di Lanno Mobile - info@amaliadilanno.com
A project by CasermArcheologica
with the contribution of Fondazione CR Firenze
in collaboration with REALISE and Lucy + Jorge ORTA
with the institutional support of the Municipality of Sansepolcro, the Municipality of Anghiari and the Madonna del Parto Civic Museums and with the support of Busatti, Tecnothermo, Ilvio Gallo, Zotti & Coulon, FondazioneProgetto Valtiberina, Sintagmi