Not all forms of invisibility coincide with absence. Some, more insidious, are produced by a paradoxical excess of exposure. These are bodies continually inscribed within a discursive and material matrix that hierarchically classifies them, bends them to a function, and thus deprives them of the possibility of appearing as singularities. In this sense, the invisible is not what is lacking to the gaze, but that which the gaze cannot sustain without reducing it to an administrable figure, to a functional presence, to governable matter within the historical order. It is, rather, an in(di)visible structurally implicated in the order that produces it. The invisibility addressed by Pamela Diamante has nothing to do with disappearance; it concerns, rather, a form of slow erosion, one that is consummated in the daily repetition of gestures and discourses, in the collective habituation to hierarchies, in the naturalization of an order that renders certain bodies constitutively available to labor, exploitation, silence, and symbolic irrelevance.
Pamela Diamante, “The Invisibles. Radical Existences”, 2026. Environmental installation, ceramic and iron, 395 x 500 x 360 cm. Acquired by the Pinacoteca Metropolitana “Corrado Giaquinto” in Bari with the support of PAC2025 – Plan for Contemporary Art, promoted by the Directorate General for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture. Photo: Michele Alberto Sereni, courtesy of Magonza
It is from this critical threshold that Le invisibili. Esistenze radicali (The Invisibles. Radical Existences) can be read: Pamela Diamante’s exhibition-project, installed at the Pinacoteca Metropolitana “Corrado Giaquinto” in Bari, curated by Roberto Lacarbonara, and promoted and coordinated by Città Metropolitana di Bari within the framework of PAC2025 – Piano per l’Arte Contemporanea, promoted by Direzione Generale Creatività Contemporanea del Ministero della Cultura. Here, visibility reveals itself in its structural valence, as a matrix that organizes and hierarchizes appearance, the sayable, and political relevance. Diamante’s work, however, does not merely claim visibility for historically marginalized subjects, but moves further still, to the point at which the threshold of recognizability is determined. At the center of the research stands a specific figure from Southern Italy: that of the female agricultural laborers, and in particular migrant women seasonally employed in fruit harvesting and processing, subject to violations of fundamental rights, wage disparities, and persistent forms of structural inequality. Yet in this work South is not merely a territorial context; it emerges instead as a historical and discursive construction, as a space internally differentiated by modernity through processes of inferiorization, the hierarchization of labor, and the production of marginality. From this perspective, southern rurality does not appear as a simple geographic fact, but as the effect of a broader colonial distribution of value, bodies, and functions.
Pamela Diamante, “The Invisibles. Radical Existences”, 2026. Environmental installation, ceramic and iron, 395 x 500 x 360 cm. Acquired by the Pinacoteca Metropolitana “Corrado Giaquinto” in Bari with the support of PAC2025 – Plan for Contemporary Art, promoted by the Directorate General for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture. Photo: Michele Alberto Sereni, courtesy of Magonza
Pamela Diamante lucidly intercepts the symbolic matrix that binds together environmental context, exploitation, and social hierarchy, showing how certain labels associated with agricultural labor and the South are not mere linguistic residues, but active instruments of marginalization, capable of naturalizing backwardness and fixing a subordination that is at once territorial, social, and gendered. A body that works, a body that endures, a body that gathers, a body that suffers. In this installation, the body is not image, nor is it metaphor. It is historical matter, that is, the site where ancient hierarchies, extractive economies, territorial and sexual divisions are sedimented, but also where that differential classification of the human long rendered operative by the colonial matrix within labor regimes continues to reside. To interpret the work as a simple denunciation of exploitation would not be enough to restore its political density. Diamante does not merely show a condition; she attempts to alter the perceptual regime that renders it “normal”, or worse, inevitable. It is here that the work acquires its political thickness, not only in its content, but in its capacity to undo the habit of the gaze.
Pamela Diamante, “The Invisibles. Radical Existences”, 2026. Environmental installation, ceramic and iron, 395 x 500 x 360 cm. Acquired by the Pinacoteca Metropolitana “Corrado Giaquinto” in Bari with the support of PAC2025 – Plan for Contemporary Art, promoted by the Directorate General for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture. Photo: Michele Alberto Sereni, courtesy of Magonza
The work takes the form of a large environmental installation, presented in the Sala del Colonnato of Palazzo della Città Metropolitana di Bari, and emerges from a process of listening and exchange with migrant women workers, activated also through the collaboration with the Sweetnet project of ActionAid International Italia E.T.S. and Fondazione CDP. The work does not speak in place of the women workers involved; rather, it opens a space of listening and reciprocal exposure, within which the voice no longer coincides with the register of authorized speech, but configures itself as a relational trace and as the possibility of a shared utterance. The installation structure insists on a verticality that has nothing celebratory about it. It is not the monument of heroism, but an upright presence that retains the memory of fatigue and, together with it, the possibility of insubordination. Sixteen vertical iron rods support metal discs and ceramic hoes, evoking agricultural machines and everyday tools. In this way, the work reintroduces friction into the efficiency of the system. At the same time, this formal mechanic never closes into a compact order. The stelae, corresponding in number to the women workers involved, reach a height double that of their actual bodies, producing a reversal of perspective that restores centrality to subjects historically looked down upon or relegated to the margins. The components are arranged according to a hexagonal geometry that, without closing into a compact form, suggests a principle of aggregation, a relational weave in which the collective appears as process rather than completed totality. This is a crucial choice, because it withdraws the collective from every conciliatory imaginary. Here, the common is neither fusion nor sentimentally understood solidarity; it is material proximity, reciprocal exposure, the possibility that from a contiguity imposed by conditions of exploitation there may emerge a form of collective agency. Among the project’s most significant outcomes there is precisely this displacement: redemption ceases to take shape as an individual outcome and instead becomes a collective dynamic, the emergence of a common force capable of transforming the shared experience of subordination into the possibility of action and reappropriation.
Pamela Diamante, “The Invisibles. Radical Existences”, 2026. Environmental installation, ceramic and iron, 395 x 500 x 360 cm. Acquired by the Pinacoteca Metropolitana “Corrado Giaquinto” in Bari with the support of PAC2025 – Plan for Contemporary Art, promoted by the Directorate General for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture. Photo: Michele Alberto Sereni, courtesy of Magonza
The placement of the work is equally decisive. To insert this constellation of laboring bodies into a state room marked by institutional monumentality and Fascist-era architecture is to produce a sharp friction between the historical rhetoric of labor and land and the material reality of women workers exposed to exploitation and coercive dependence. The confrontation with the Pinacoteca’s collection further intensifies this tension. Where tradition has often returned agricultural labor as a scene of belonging and dignity, Diamante introduces its reverse, made of anonymous fatigue, structural vulnerability, and resistance. It is in this gap that the project reveals one of its strongest cores, since the problem is not to make the invisible visible, but to interrupt the form of visibility that produces subordination. Some bodies, in fact, are already fully visible within the system that wears them down, but only insofar as they are legible as labor power, quantity, function. Le invisibili. Esistenze radicali offers no iconic resolution to subordination, nor does it stage a symbolic redemption. Rather, it holds open a fracture, one in which bodies long reduced to margin, to available matter, cease to coincide entirely with the place assigned to them. It is on this unstable threshold that Pamela Diamante situates her operation, showing how radicality lies not in the emphasis of the gesture, but in the possibility of subtracting the visible from its dominant grammar.
Info:
Pamela Diamante. The Invisibles. Radical Existences
Curated by Roberto Lacarbonara
February 21, 2026 – May 10, 2026
Colonnato Hall of the Metropolitan City Palace
Corrado Giacquinto Metropolitan Art Gallery
Via Spalato 19 / Lungomare Nazario Sauro 27, Bari
pinacoteca@cittametropolitana.ba.it
Opening Hours: Tuesday to Saturday
9:00 AM – 7:00 PM (last admission 6:30 PM)
Sunday 9:00 AM – 1:00 PM (last admission 12:30 PM)
Closed Mondays
Art historian, teacher, critic and curator, her activity is developed between research, teaching and cultural planning, with a focus on contemporary art in its intersections with feminist theories and visual culture. Her doctoral research at the Universidad de Alcalá (Spain) explores contemporary artistic practices through an interdisciplinary perspective, with particular attention to the dynamics of rewriting feminist thought in art. Author of essays and articles for national and international magazines, she regularly participates in conferences and exhibition projects. She is part of the Mexicanistas, Académicos & Investigadores network, promoted by the Mexican Embassy in Italy.
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