My works for Talisman 2025 are a homage to Italo Calvino and his Invisible Cities—in particular Diomira, Isidora, Zaira, and Zora—cities that oppose the omnipotence of reality and take shape as an ode to possibility, imagination, and the multiplicity of perspectives.
Speaking of talismans, Calvino himself, in one of his last writings, suggested three to help us face the future—three keys for finding our way through the complexity of the contemporary world. Two of them, in particular, have guided my research: the first is the invitation to memorize many poems, so that they may keep us company and come back to life within us whenever we need them. The second is the defense of concreteness, as an antidote to abstraction and precariousness, rooted in the awareness that everything can be taken away suddenly, and that for this very reason every single thing deserves to be fully lived.
My talismans are therefore interwoven with language and words: not magical objects, but narrative forms capable of resisting, evoking, accompanying.
