In Catania, contemporary art has a clear and precise imprint with the well-known Brodbeck Foundation, an incubator of images and knowledge of the visual arts from our time since 2007. The non-profit institution, established by Paolo Brodbeck, is distributed over an area of about six thousand square meters within a post-industrial complex, used in the 19th century for the production of licorice and the processing of dried fruit. In these exhibition spaces, the solo show by Barbara Cammarata “An Interspecies Journey” was recently inaugurated, a project curated by Cesare Biasini Selvaggi and Patrizia Monterosso. The exhibition, which can be visited until June 8, 2025 is divided into two monumental pavilions that present over sixty paintings and some installations, created by the artist between 2018 and 2025.

Barbara Cammarata, “An Interspecies Journey”, installation view at Fondazione Brodbeck, Catania, ph Alfio Garozzo, courtesy Fondazione Brodbeck
In the first pavilion, the spatial dimension and the arrangement of the paintings on tall, slender metal profiles stand out, dividing the space in a light way, with a geometric and vertical installation, designed by the architectural studio Analogique and created by Paolo Fontana. This minimalist structure offers visitors the possibility of feeling inside an open labyrinth, which creates linear forms without walls and without panels of any kind. The idea is, therefore, that of a labyrinthine gallery that geometrically cuts the dust of the establishment, hosting the pictorial portraits of living beings with human bodies and animal heads, from which lush vegetation emerges, not belonging to the dimension of reality but rather projections of fantastic worlds, places of threshold and intrapsychic. In fact, for over a decade, anthropocentrism, speciesism and themes related to the posthuman have been central to the artistic research of Cammarata, born in 1977, a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Catania. «The world shaped in Cammarata’s painting is one where the “similar” and the “different” are present together in a symbiotic dimension of vitality and growth; where sharing means ethical, moral, philosophical, religious transformation, capable of generating a new order of hope», say the curators Cesare Biasini Selvaggi and Patrizia Monterosso.

Barbara Cammarata, “An Interspecies Journey”, installation view at Fondazione Brodbeck, Catania, ph Andrea Valisano, courtesy Fondazione Brodbeck
«The human being who for a long time, too long, has attributed a central and superior position to other species, today finds himself discussing his position with respect to everything else» declared Cammarata, who conceived her exhibition as an “event” in the dimension of the hic et nunc. In fact, the absence of walls is evidence of a spatial continuity but also an exploration of a metaphorical interspecies dialogue between the animal and plant kingdoms, human beings and the technological world. A symbolic comparison with religious and philosophical references emerges, above all, from her colorful canvases in which these hybrid creatures do not roar, do not emit their sounds anymore and their communication with the human species is a subtle, atavistic, forgotten syncretism, lulled by the noise of the times. Yet, the silence in the exhibition space is enormous, where the six textile sculptures, Microorganism (2025), present in the first pavilion, stand out, made with the clothes of her daughter Frida, shaped but intact, which represent interior metamorphoses and also the opportunity to look at the surrounding reality with different eyes.

Barbara Cammarata, “An Interspecies Journey”, installation view at Fondazione Brodbeck, Catania, ph Andrea Valisano, courtesy Fondazione Brodbeck
The second pavilion, instead, bears witness to some specific philosophical and existential choices of the artist, who has approached Japanese Buddhism and believes in a circular vision of life. It is no coincidence, in fact, that she has focused part of her research on color and light in Sicily, starting in 2012, the year of her return to Catania from England. In this pavilion, the idea of conceiving the exhibited installation, Feel What I Feel, 2016, as a bed entirely made of pins, made up of some elements of her trousseau to reflect on the themes of femininity and motherhood, is strong and suggestive. Those pins are needles but also passages of symbolic threads that bind and tear like an umbilical cord. Thus this tall and suspended work leads the observer to a reflection on the female body, on the historical identity of women and on the domestic-family dimension not free from conflicts, tension and anguish. Barbara Cammarata’s is an invitation to review and rethink our world, the idea of the feminine, of the maternal in a continuous invisible exchange in front of hybrid creatures that can sharpen, in those who observe them, the sentient and empathetic capacity to remember that everything is connected in the universe and every living creature is part of the Whole, of a cyclical design without traditional walls.
Info:
Barbara Cammarata. An Interspecies Journey
curated by Cesare Biasini Selvaggi and Patrizia Monterosso
Exhibition design project: ANALOGIQUE
Fondazione Brodbeck
via Gramignani 93, Catania
25/01 – 8/06/2025
Winter opening to the public: Friday, Saturday and Sunday, from 4:30 pm to 8:00 pm (last admission at 7:30 pm)
Free admission
www.fondazionebrodbeck.it

Through art she feels the need to get closer to nature, deciding to create an artistic residence on Etna as a “refuge for contemporary art” for artists and scholars. Thus was born Nake artistic residence. She won the Responsible Etna Award 2015. In 2017, she was invited to the Sala Zuccari, Senate of the Republic, as an art critic. She writes for Italian and foreign artists. Curator of the first Museum of Contemporary Art of Etna and of the “Contemporary Etna” project.
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