Without flags v.3.0. Divide et impera is not merely a retrospective of the Opiemme collective (Turin, 1998); rather, it stands as a declaration of intent, a poetics of visualized dissent that transforms artworks into scenarios of symbolic resistance. At Marignana Arte in Venice, a selection of works produced over the last fifteen years is on display. Together, they function as an artistic, poetic and social manifesto deeply human, where every gesture and every written word becomes an act of critical reading of the present. The project takes shape through the works of Davide and Laura Bonatti, Margherita Berardinelli and Stefano Campano, members of the collective united by a shared practice that intertwines language, image and political stance.
Opiemme, “Without flags v.3.0. Divide et impera”, installation view, courtesy Marignana Arte
The work that introduces this poetic-visual journey is Bandiere (2026), an installation composed of a series of open, compact books that together form a flag. As Opiemme states, “These books are indistinct flags, containers of multiple stories, cultures, reflections, and resistance. Objects of censorship, when history becomes cyclical and dystopian. They resemble constellations of peoples united and without borders. They flutter like leaves on trees in the wind, evoking a single, primordial language”. Everything participates in the work, from the rustle of air entering through the sliding door to the movement of visitors. The words on the pages recede into the background in favor of the overall form: a flag as a sign of unity that gathers multiplicity into a recognizable shape. It is the symbol of community, of a people manifesting their collective existence and the differences dictated by governments, differences that help define the tools that have continued to legitimize these powers and naturalize divisions: historical maps, charts and documents. Opiemme elevates geographical maps to pictorial supports, removing them from their original context while preserving their entire previous life: faded annotations, traces of time. Nothing is hidden or obstructed. The artistic intervention does not erase, but rather enters into dialogue with the map, which remains a map, continuing to orient, to visually describe the complexity of the world. It is within this space of tension, between what the map is and what it becomes, that the political meaning of the work takes root. Opiemme questions the meaning of borders and limits, be they geographical, social, cultural or economic. The exhibition pushes us to understand that these are not natural realities, but rather constructs created by power.
Opiemme, “Human requalification”, 2023, ink and acrylic on paper, 46 x 53.5 cm, courtesy Marignana Arte
Referring to the title Without flags v.3.0. Divide et impera, Tommaso Evangelista writes: “The core of the solo exhibition presented by Marignana is not the choice between the two expressions, but their forced coexistence, since the title proposes a contradiction: the ideal of a world without insignia coexists with a hyper-capitalist system that bases its stability on separation”. From the exhibition title, it becomes clear how the collective’s research revolves around the word, its meaning, and the power of language. Understood not as a decorative element, poetic text coexists with images in a state of continuous negotiation: images are meant to be read, words to be looked at. A deliberate short circuit that overturns the habitual hierarchies of perception. In a historical moment in which consumption has eroded critical thinking, where everyday life devours any attempt at deeper reflection, Opiemme restores poetry to its right of citizenship. Not as an elite genre, as too often happens, but as a public act and a street practice. By combining the legacy of visual poetry with poetic actions inscribed in urban space, the collective creates new modes of engaging with art, opportunities for reading that belong to anyone who has eyes to see.
Opiemme, “Free Europe”, 2026, acrylics, 1943 atlas, maps, spray and glue on canvas, 30 x 30 cm, courtesy Marignana Arte
Free Europe (2026) stems from a very specific historical urgency. Nigerian musician Seun Kuti, during a concert, stated: “I have some advice for young Europeans: I know you want to free Palestine, free Congo, free Iran, there’s a new one every week. Free Europe first! Free it from the far right, from fascism, from racism, from imperialism”. Thus, over a 1943 atlas and the 1962 Michelin Guide, one reads a clear “free europe” inside a circle of barbed wire paired with the twelve stars of the European flag. The work does not accuse from the outside, but invites self-examination, urging us to recognize how the European continent is still traversed by specters we believe buried, yet which reappear in new guises. Welcome (2016) is perhaps the most lacerating work in the exhibition. On a nautical chart, black spray paint generates the wings of a butterfly, an image of lightness, metamorphosis and hope. Yet the phrase accompanying the image says: “Welcome to Italy, where there is no future”. The contradiction is intentional. That butterfly does not fly toward salvation, but rather toward emptiness. The welcome promised by the title reveals itself as a trap, a mirror of a present in which migrations, the movement of bodies through space, are transformed from an act of freedom into a desperate pilgrimage.
Opiemme, “History is migrant”, 2016, spray and collage of period newspapers, 133 x 133 cm, courtesy Marignana Arte
As Jonathan Molinari writes in one of the texts accompanying the exhibition, this is art as resistance. Here, the political gesture and the poetic gesture are not separate, but coexist in a single action. Art does not represent conflict, it activates it. It deconstructs from within the languages of power, those codes we have internalized to the point of believing them natural. And when these languages crumble, new complexity and strength are restored to our gaze. The aim is not to provide simple, immediate answers to the viewer, but to recover the ability to dwell on things, to return, or begin, to ask deeper, more concrete, more genuine questions. Opiemme has recognized in art unprecedented communicative potential, more direct and inclusive, given that the masses increasingly see, look less and read even less. When something beautiful, alienating, or unsettling appears in everyday life, on a wall, behind glass, on the page of an exhibition catalogue, it creates a fracture. In that fracture, the possibility of critical thought takes root: our individual thought.
Opiemme, “The dark we were”, 2018, watercolor and spray on school map, 105 x 139 cm, courtesy Marignana Arte
The exhibition ends where it began, with questions left open: what are the borders that still separate us? What are the flags under which we march without even noticing? Opiemme leaves it to the viewer to find the answers, within their own contradictions, privileges, and blind certainties. For this reason, Without flags v.3.0. Divide et impera is a necessary exhibition. Not because it offers consolation, but because it gently and forcefully deprives us of the possibility of not seeing
Info:
Opiemme. Without flags v.3.0. Divide et impera
31/01/2026 – 18/04/2026
Marignana Arte
Dorsoduro 141 – Venezia
www.marignanaarte.it
Elena Barison is a contemporary art historian specializing in the relationships between art, ecology and gender studies. She explored the verbal-visual practices of the neo-avant-garde with a thesis on Tomaso Binga, whose archive she now curates in Rome. She collaborates with Fondazione Querini Stampalia in Venice and with various independent organizations and magazines.
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