From February 5 to 15, 2026, on the occasion of ART CITY Bologna and Arte Fiera, the exhibition Corpo Tessuto presents a new and significant selection of works by Simone Miccichè, Bolognese artist whose pictorial research focuses on fabric as symbolic, linguistic and corporeal place. The exhibition, curated by Federica Fiumelli and Francesco Liggieri, places fabric at the center of the exhibition project. An element that, however, is never a simple represented subject, but becomes metaphor of painting itself: sensitive surface, skin of the world, archive of cultural and political memories. Miccichè’s works are born from a slow and analytical observation of textures, folds, patterns that traverse fabrics coming from different geographical and symbolic contexts – from the Middle East to North Africa, from Latin America to the industrial West. To learn more we met with Federica Fiumelli and Francesco Liggieri.
Simone Miccichè, “Corpo Tessuto” series, 2024-2025, oil on canvas, courtesy of the artist
Sara Papini: How was the bond born between the artist Simone Miccichè and you curators?
Federica Fiumelli: Simone and I grew up in the same town, Castiglione dei Pepoli near Bologna, we then became friends thanks to the cultural association Officina15, which Simone had founded with other friends. There we gave life to the ArtOff project, which proposed contemporary art exhibitions in the Apennines together with talks and educational workshops with artists, from 2016 to 2022. In parallel to this project I had the opportunity to follow Simone’s artistic work in his studio, where I saw various works being born, including the paintings of the Corpo Tessuto series.
Francesco Liggieri: With Simone it happened like with certain people you meet without appointment: at the beginning you don’t know well why, but you immediately understand that you’re looking in the same direction. His work had inside something that didn’t ask for explanations, but time. We never thought of an exhibition as a project to fit piece by piece: rather as running alongside, with short breath and the same speed. Simone is someone who listens, and in this profession it’s not obvious. From there everything was born.
How was relating to the place (event hall of extraBO) where the exhibition took form?
Federica Fiumelli: For four years I’ve been working in the communication and data team of Fondazione Bologna Welcome and I was able to follow, up close, many activities of eXtraBO which deals with the promotion, three hundred sixty degrees, of Bologna’s metropolitan territory. It seemed natural to me, therefore, to propose within the event hall of the point located in Piazza del Nettuno, the research of one of the artists from the Apennine territory, Simone, in fact, despite various residencies and prizes, continues to have his studio in Castiglione dei Pepoli.
Francesco Liggieri: extraBO is not one of those spaces that puts you on alert. It’s a place traversed, lived, with people who enter and exit. And we immediately liked this thing. The exhibition didn’t have to ask permission, but find its place so we worked letting the space do its thing, without domesticating it too much. In the end what we hoped happened: the works didn’t occupy the space, they slightly moved it. By a few centimeters, but just enough to make you notice that something has changed.
Simone Miccichè, “Corpo Tessuto” series, 2024-2025, oil on canvas, courtesy of the artist
Fabric is the true star of the exhibition, would you like to tell us about this marvelous world that Simone has decided to narrate with his art?
Federica Fiumelli: Simone has a true talent for painting, he’s an artist who has much technique, but who with the passing of time, has known how to make available to a more conceptual vision of painting. Fabric, in this series, becomes metaphor of the pictorial act itself: it conceals and unveils, hides and tells, just as a device of vision and imagination should do. In this series the formal, structural, compositional research of the pattern has been fundamental and precise, almost anatomical. Each decoration has its own tradition, its own history, its own body. Fabric moreover is an object that in art history has found various declinations, from Flemish painting to sacred Neapolitan sculpture, as I recount in the critical text that accompanies the exhibition citing Cornelis Norbertus Gijsbrechts, Domenico Gnoli, Giuseppe Sanmartino, Nicolas Poussin.
Francesco Liggieri: Fabric, for Simone, is never only fabric. It’s skin, it’s memory, it’s work done with hands when the head goes somewhere else. It’s a material that absorbs everything: time, errors, stories. In the exhibition it becomes a kind of mute diary, that doesn’t tell you everything but doesn’t hide anything from you. It’s not nostalgia, it’s not romantic craftsmanship. It’s matter that has seen things and continues to keep them on itself.
Fabric as object, fabric as art but also fabric as world, geographic. How much political emerges from this touching path?
Federica Fiumelli: Fabric, precisely as emerges from the title of the series, is a body, and the body is always political. The fabrics that Simone has chosen to bring to light come from different parts of the world: Nigeria, Egypt, Palestine, Mexico, all places that today’s history shows us, to be territories either of border, or of conflict, often pawns for superior expansionist projects: colonialism and capitalism. The series of fabric bodies shows us in a certain sense, human fragility, and something that forever escapes our comprehension, in addition to the complexity of culture, to the richness of difference, and to the imaginative stratification of history.
Francesco Liggieri: The political arrives without knocking and stays in the gesture, in the material, in the invisible maps that each fabric carries with itself. It stays in work, in exploitation, in borders badly sewn. There’s no slogan, there’s no flag. And precisely for this it works. It’s a political that doesn’t raise its voice, but it remains and follows you even when you exit the exhibition, and maybe comes back to mind later, when you least expect it.
Info:
Simone Miccichè. Corpo Tessuto
5 – 15/02/2026
eXtraBO
Piazza Nettuno, 1/AB – Bologna
www.extrabo.com
She was born in Genoa but currently lives in Bologna, the city where she graduated from CITEM with a thesis on video art. She works in the world of events in the production sector and is an assistant professor of Visual Studies at UNIBO.
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