Across her painterly and sculptural practice, Viola Leddi is often engaged in navigating the socio-political formations that shape feminine identities and behaviours through the lens of the so-called Western canon of art history. She does so not without a sense of estrangement from the factors behind the lasting presence of certain images and the parlous fascination they exert, but also with a belief in the possibility of reusing them to make space for what has been repressed, specifically through their reproduction. After all, that very canon, like any other process of retrospective legitimization of an origin story, is inseparable from the society which created it (in this case, a Eurocentric, patriarchal society) and Leddi has a specific interest in the works of male painters during the Fascist regime in Italy.

The setting of Leddi’s “Post Show” series (2025) is a nondescript exhibition space in the aftermath of an unspecified exhibition. White plinths are disseminated in and before all three paintings, which are seen from above in a quasi-forensic, aerial point of view. Even if they are empty, the plinths bear the traces of their function, i.e., the support of an artist’s work and its institutional accrual of value, in the form of bits of dry tape or exhausted nails left above them. Marks on the linoleum floor tell of heavy bodies that have been dragged across it – an innuendo of violence reinforced by the disembodied limbs at work there, either holding an intangible veil or putting their weight, with weightless grace, on a small cube. Both cite portions of Felice Casorati’s painting Il concerto [The Concert, 1924], where the representation of a group of naked women looks like a ruse to stage a dramatic sculpting of forms and light rather than the intention of telling a story, let alone their story. As if to say, carelessly, their bodies function as props as much as the plinths do. Fragments of torn paper stipple the floor, sometimes coalescing in piles of impossibly transparent sheets where one may or may not recognise a drawing of a floor sculpture by Carl Andre and of a body silhouette by Ana Mendieta, or perhaps a drawing of a 3D model of a face… or is it a metaphysical mannequin? Among them, the presence of a drawing by Vera Molnár, where she deconstructed the lines of Albrecht Dürer’s signature logo and recombined them into her own, is indicative of Leddi’s allegorical approach to the canon, one that substitutes the original meaning with a reframing that shifts forms and implications. 

Since the 1970s, feminist art historians have pointed to the structures and discourses at play in the phallocentric history of Western art. For example, Lynda Nead has argued that the (always female) nude has been transformed into a shorthand for “Art,” where “natural matter” (the unruly and unformed characteristics of women and paint) is tamed into a cultural form (a sealed, pleasant whole to the gaze). Griselda Pollock and Rozsika Parker have written about the central role that “a negated femininity” has had in the confirmation of the male creative genius together with the idea that art is the expression of an ungendered individual with only formal intentions. The aforementioned painting by Casorati shows well the purpose of this critique: there, a sovereign subject, insofar as female, can be differentiated into an object of languid contemplation at the hands of the male painter, who is both producer of the image and its consumer. Similarly, Lucy R. Lippard has noted how media such as embroidery or quilting have been relegated to craft-making unless a male artist such as Claes Oldenburg employed it, even if the sewing was done by his then wife Patty Muschinski, an artist and poet. 

Leddi’s poetics operates at a symbolic level in the linearity of the canon by sliding a multitude fragments into an ideal wholeness, herstories into History, the creativity of the collective into that of the individual, what has been called “women’s hobby” into “fine art.” In fact, the composite imagery in Leddi’s works is drawn mainly from personal memories of her friends, pictures chosen and painted together (each in her own brushstrokes) with artists Kelechi Amaka Madumere and Melissa Steenman, who are collaborators in Leddi’s Geneva studio, beauty accessories, and tools for hobby crafts. In this process of remaking, notions of value and authorship are put to the test in reciprocal loops of reification and distribution, always in the name of their ideological deconstruction. It is a process where Leddi openly embodies her role as director and spectator of her meditative vistas.

Close to the Pictures Generation, her collagist practice brings together materials that are copied on the canvas: never the real “thing” but its mediated mediation. This is made possible via the postmodernist use of many techniques in intricate layers: drawing, photography, digital manipulation, 3D modelling, painting, that all build up in strata of manual and mechanical means of reproduction, of the painterly and the projected-photographic, of the free gestures and the use of masks and stencils. The hazy atmosphere is conferred in the final step, the airbrush, a tool introduced in the late 19th century to retouch photographs. In Leddi’s hands, it becomes a way of painting at a distance, like a hovering ghost, a shadow that briefly darkens the scene, time deposited as dust particles. The result is an artificially homogenized space obtained through an almost cinematic edit, via sprayed modulations of light and shadow. Under such a canopy, the photographic realism of the scenes, where objects and images are not scaled up but only transferred onto the canvas via puffs of paint, is belied by the multiple dimensional planes occupied by the objects, as if to say: everything around you has fallen apart.

Interestingly enough, another series of Leddi’s paintings suggests they are set in the aftermath of some event. However, what remains here is mostly an eerie feeling. Indeed, the scenes are constructed around a void, around an absence instead of a presence, around the moment before a frightening question. Patterns of Translation and Patterns of Recognition (all works, 2024) are views of her wooden-floored room in Geneva, again seen from a foreshortened aerial point of view, with the dramatic vignetting suggesting that the scenes have been briefly illuminated by a flashlight. Here the artist has portrayed herself for the first time, as a pair of legs reflected in a free-standing mirror or as a half-bust shadow stretching across the floor. There, the marks seem less incidental and more deliberate, with one of them resembling an eye, the other resembling an optics diagram. Pieces of torn paper feature conceptual works by Hanne Darboven, scribbles of butterflies and fairies, Toyen’s painting Le Reste de la Nuit (1934), cutting dies for hobby craft, but also little acts of rebellion such as a graffitied rat-king. Here and elsewhere, personal objects such as a hair clip or decorative elements such as an empty heart-shaped photo holder are brought together. The suspended and alienated ambience coalesces the dreamy sweetness of Magic Realism with the disquieting crunch of digital surveillance.

It is tempting to try and collect all the pieces, to try and recompose the identity of the subjects of Leddi’s paintings, but this effort would be pointless. Because in her mostly blue compositions, both in colour and in emotional tone, Leddi gathers as much as she disperses, reveals as much as she complicates, represents as much as she destroys. Her works seem engaged in a laborious reckoning with the past and its long shadow on the present, in acknowledging the violence that accompanies being sculpted by a culture and sculpting oneself.

margaretha jüngling’s artistic practice invites us to pay attention to the many meanings and stories that every food carries within it; or to how a story can be told through food. Her work investigates symbols and aesthetics connected to unprocessed ingredients, recipes, and culinary traditions, observing how cultural and social codifications, as well as relations of power that regulate our shared lives, are reflected and revealed in eating habits.

margaretha’s creative and intellectual process often unfolds through accumulation, combining numerous references and different layers of reflection during the research phase. Her gaze tends to linger on zones of ambiguity or contradiction, intervals of space where different narratives and interpretations overlap and confront one another. During a conversation we had while I was preparing this text, margaretha pointed out to me the paradox that defines the very act of eating: an activity we spontaneously associate with conviviality and sharing, which nevertheless remains, in its fulfilment, an inescapably individual experience. Eating is an intimate process, internal and opaque to the gaze of others, and yet one that opens us to a radical relationship with everything surrounding us. As margaretha explained, when we eat we swallow pieces of the world and at the same time become the world: digestion reveals itself, in this sense, as an energy of physical transformation that connects us to reality, linking micro and macro scales, bacteria and humans. It is a perspective close to the post-humanist and neo-materialist approaches of certain contemporary feminist thinkers, such as Donna Haraway or Anna Tsing, who recognize and describe the subject as a relational, composite, multispecies, and “contaminated” entity.

When I first met margaretha, I was reading Zami, the autobiographical novel in which the poet Audre Lorde recounts her coming-of-age journey from childhood to early adulthood. Speaking with margaretha helped me focus on the central role food plays in Lorde’s book, in the narration of the process of exploring and defining her identity. In Zami, food is an erotic and political stimulus connecting memory, cultural inheritance, and the carnal dimension of the body. These three different planes also intertwine in margaretha’s artistic practice: in her works, our bodies taste, smell, touch, and through these perceptual stimuli enter into relation with traces of memories, habits, and imaginaries that speak of the inheritances, stories, and values of the contexts in which the artist intervenes.

Food acts as a device of evocation, but also at times of disorientation, for example through the activation of a contrast between visual element and gustatory experience. I am thinking of the braided strands of fermented beetroot in red curtain (2026), hung from butcher hooks and dripping onto a white tablecloth like red filaments of raw flesh. In this work, margaretha reactivated the memory of the original use of the building housing the Quartier Général Centre d’art contemporain in La Chaux-de-Fonds, formerly a slaughterhouse. The audience was invited to cut and eat the braids, staining themselves and marking the linen cloth spread across the table with red. Beetroot is a food historically associated with contexts of poverty, later integrated into systems of intensive farming and eventually reabsorbed into the diets of wealthier classes; margaretha used its history and blood-like consistency to propose a reflection on meat consumption and the aesthetics of the grotesque. red curtain triggered a sense of disturbance in viewers, whose reactions ranged from attraction to repulsion. I believe that one of the fundamental questions accompanying margaretha’s research concerns precisely what happens when we come into contact with experiences that lead us beyond the boundary defining what is “decorous” and therefore visible, when they bring us closer to the invisible territories of disgust and repulsion. How do we fill the new spaces of meaning opened before us? What purpose does that line of demarcation serve?

There are certain foods with particularly dense and layered symbolic meanings that tend to recur throughout margaretha’s installations and performances, such as the egg, the apple, or bread. Bread itself – a sweet bun, the maritozzo – lies at the centre of the research project margaretha developed during her residency at Villa Maraini. Following her habitual methodological approach, margaretha gathered a vast amount of data, stories, and recipes, getting to know the city of Rome through the history of this pastry, originally tied to Carnival rites of reversal but also to the performance of gender roles within heterosexual marriage (One of the narratives explaining the origin of the maritozzo (the name derives from marito, husband, with the suffix -ozzo, which has a playful effect somewhat analogous to calling a husband a “hubby”) refers to a tradition whereby, on the first Friday of March, fiancés ready to pop the question would hide an engagement ring or another gold object inside this sweet bread as a mechanism for proposing.); born as a popular snack and now transformed into a gourmet product. Reconstructing the intertwining of religious, popular, and class-related aspects surrounding narratives of the maritozzo, margaretha’s reflection interrogates the ways in which food contributes to shaping regional and national identities; but it also observes the involvement of culinary traditions within the dynamics of contemporary consumption. This perspective seems particularly significant to me in a context such as Italy, where processes of commercializing an “Italian-ness” to be consumed are redefining tourism economies and the image of cities such as Rome, Naples, or Bologna.

In March 2026, on the occasion of the first public sharing of her maritozzo research at the independent space Lateral Roma, margaretha cooked fermented red beetroot buns, proposing a savoury reinterpretation of the recipe. Arranged on a small white cloth spread on the floor, the buns were presented together with an almond cream contained in a bowl suspended from the ceiling in a crocheted basket, recalling a liturgical censer in both shape and display. The audience intervened by breaking the bread, dipping it, mixing the red of the beetroot with the white cream, eating and staining. This ritual of consumption expanded the process of transformation of forms, ingredients, and gestures of tradition underlying the work into a symbolic and collective reshuffling of meanings.

As at Lateral Roma or at the Centre d’art contemporain in La Chaux-de-Fonds, the participatory activation of margaretha’s installations is often introduced by readings of poetic texts that offer keys to approaching the works. In margaretha’s practice, writing does not serve a descriptive function, nor does it provide explanations; rather, it constitutes a parallel and complementary space of creative elaboration, where more intimate and personal narrative elements often find a place. The relationship in margaretha’s work between writing and cooking, between food and verbal language, makes me think of the mouth as a cavity for chewing both words and dishes: of food as language, but also of writing as food, by which margaretha nourishes herself. Her theoretical and literary references range from Sara Ahmed to Georges Bataille, from bell hooks to Simone Weil, from adrienne maree brown to Ursula K. Le Guin. I also found Audre Lorde in margaretha’s library.

In 1980, Lorde founded, together with Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith, and Cherríe Moraga, the Kitchen Table Press, a publishing house active for more than a decade and created with the aim of publishing texts by racialized, lesbian, and otherwise marginalized women writers excluded from the white publishing market (including feminist publishing). The name Kitchen Table Press speaks precisely of books as nourishment, but above all underlines the importance of social and shared structures such as the kitchen table for the circulation of forms of knowledge situated outside the boundaries of hegemonic culture. margaretha’s approach shares with this experience the value attributed to exchange, to commoning, to the questioning of knowledge, and a sensibility that brings cultural production back into direct contact with everyday life as a form of claim and affirmation. In her artist statement we read: “it is always still food, deeply embedded in the everyday.”

margaretha’s work belongs to a broad and ramified genealogy of artistic practices oriented toward sharing and community, developed from at least the 1960s to the present. I am thinking of experiences and methodologies that have questioned the boundaries of art, both in an interdisciplinary sense and as a form of social engagement. The political value of margaretha’s trajectory begins with the very choice to use and resignify gestures, materials, and codes of cooking – an activity of care, part of the cycle of social reproduction, central to feminist claims and struggles and to the experiences of other subjects marginalized by dominant politics. Like many practices within this large family, her approach is also grounded in dynamics of participation that radically shift the centre of art from object to process, from linguistic-formal research to the opening of spaces of experience. What is particularly significant in her specific case, however, is the role occupied by the body within this context. margaretha’s work expresses and fulfils itself in the activation of relational conditions, but above all in the sensory and sensual involvement of the body through food – good food! As if to say that we do not have to renounce a practice of pleasure even while thinking critically and politically. Following the path indicated by the author and activist adrienne maree brown, perhaps we can think of margaretha’s works as collective exercises helping us learn to align our pleasure with our values.

One day, while speaking with the artist Eva Zornio (Arlesheim, 1987), she told me about a period in which she experienced hypnagogic states – moments of paralysis in which her body, suspended between sleep and wakefulness, refused to respond. It was then, she said, that she understood she was afraid of dying: “a fear that seemed to lie somewhere deep within the body.”

To cope with it, she began taking long nocturnal walks along the shores of Lake Geneva near her home, stopping to observe the water. Not to dispel the fear, but to remain before it, before that opaque and shifting surface, allowing her gaze to adapt to the darkness, letting her body register subtle variations in light, distance, and temperature. Remaining there meant accepting that one cannot see everything, that what stands before us cannot be controlled. That gesture – exposing herself without dominating – hints at the stance that informs her practice. It is from this position that her work unfolds, situated at a point of tension where the body becomes both an object of knowledge and, at the same time, a site of experience.

Since the beginning, her work has investigated the conditions that make affects observable and measurable, organizing and translating emotions and perceptions into forms. Her field of inquiry is not simply the body, but the regime of visibility that permeates it.

Starting from a reflection on embodied knowledge, affect, and interaction, the Swiss artist conceives the body as a relational node: not an isolated entity, but a point of intersection between gazes, devices, narratives, and material forces, both exposed to the effects of the world and capable of producing them. The works act within structures, moving through them, placing them in tension, and recomposing them on the sensory level.

Initially trained in biology and neuroscience before seeking expression through visual art, Zornio has direct experience of how scientific knowledge is constructed and legitimized. In her work, science does not appear as a neutral territory, but as a historical and cultural apparatus made of specific protocols, instruments, and images. This background is not merely a biographical anecdote: it constitutes the epistemic matrix of her practice.

Through a multidisciplinary approach that interweaves performance, installation, video, sculpture, sound, and text, the artist translates research environments and institutional structures into spatial and experiential configurations. Her aim is not to illustrate life sciences but to reactivate them as form and operational structure. In doing so, Zornio brings out the tensions between some of the foundational dualisms of the Western tradition: objectivity and subjectivity, body and mind, observer and observed.

The first phase of her research took form between 2019 and 2023 in a series of device-like works that simulate environments for affective assessment. With the projects Reception Space (2019, Fondation Ricard, Paris) and The Aesthetic Emotions Scale (2020, Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève), Zornio implemented her invented “Affective Evaluation” survey, adopting corporate aesthetics and pseudo-scientific protocols to render visible the logics of quantification and data collection that traverse cultural institutions and neoliberal practices of emotion management. This work resonates with what theorist Gregory Sholette has described as “mock institutions” – speculative institutional forms that operate through mimicry in order to reveal, inhabit, and reconfigure the epistemic and political frameworks of contemporary art institutions (Sholette, Gregory. 2011. Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture. London: Pluto Press.). Rather than mere parody, these formations function as operative fictions: they expose institutional mechanisms, challenge their authority, and open up alternative modes of knowledge production.

With the solo exhibition Life Lives in Gaps (2021, EAC – Les Halles), this logic expands into space: graphs without legends on transparent panels, an operator leaving traces on surfaces during the opening, an audio signal, and a video mounted on wheels with a performer exploring the para-linguistic capabilities of her face. Production, maintenance, and representation overlap within a deliberately suspended atmosphere; evaluation is no longer a direct interaction but becomes an exhibition structure.

This phase culminated in Who are you performing today? (2023, Löwenbräukunst, Zurich), where the artist and another performer, acting as Affective Evaluation researchers, welcomed visitors and invited them to participate in a brief protocol combining sensory activation of the hands with questions about the emotions perceived in the space. The responses produced both an affective self-portrait and an experiential mapping of the institution.

Something began to shift in 2022. Without abandoning the question of affectivity, Zornio’s practice gradually moved toward a more marked materiality and a more complex spatial construction. This transition was already evident in Pleure-moi une rivière (2022), a solo exhibition at Soul2Soul/RU in Geneva. Here, the exhibition environment – an installation composed of small coloured glass forms resembling embryonic bodies of water distributed on the walls, a video work in which a woman practices somatic exercises, two-way mirrors, and a soundtrack recalling the song of sirens – takes the form of a capsule suspended between technology and an almost mythical dimension. Reflective and transparent surfaces multiply points of view; the visitor merges into the visual device, simultaneously observer and part of the image. Glass ceases to function merely as a substrate and becomes a device that shapes perception and relations: not merely a support, but a membrane, threshold, and perceptual filter.

With the gradual introduction of glass into her practice, Zornio increasingly focuses on the materiality of perception. Transparency, refraction, and fragility allow her to articulate tensions between the visible and the invisible, stability and vulnerability, and interiority and exteriority. In Redevenir poisson (2023, Espace 3353, Geneva), the symbolic reconstruction of the architecture of the Biotech Campus in Geneva – where she was a resident during the preparation of the show – generates a deliberately ambiguous environment through installations: a laboratory of affects, an abandoned open space, a perceptual aquarium.

The cycle Soma (2024–2025) takes things further in this direction. Resembling a procedural apparatus, metal structures host elements of blown, engraved, or silvered glass that react to light and the presence of bodies, producing minimal perceptual events rather than fully formed images. The work reveals itself over time, through imperceptible movements of the spectator and variations in light, configuring itself as a perceptual field rather than an object.

The most recent project, Spellate (She, skinned), carried out during her fellowship at Istituto Svizzero in Rome (2025-2026), marks a further and more radical shift. Developed from research conducted in Rome, Padua, Bologna, and Florence on the history of anatomy and representations of the female body between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the work focuses on a historical moment in which the opening of bodies became both an epistemic practice and a public spectacle.

Following Katharine Park’s research (Park, Katharine. 2006. Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection. New York: Zone Books), Zornio identifies the female body as a figure occupying a dual role in the birth of academic anatomy: not only an object of dissection but also a symbolic and cultural matrix that helped structure the ways anatomy was practiced. Between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries, post-mortem examinations linked to canonization processes, the emergence of anatomical theatres, and the production of the first illustrated treatises established a new economy of the gaze. The body – and in particular the female body – became a surface to be opened to extract “truth”.

In this context, the progressive expropriation of women’s empirical and ancestral knowledge coincided with the ascendency of male academic medicine founded on direct vision and the authority of the eye. Early anatomical plates depict female figures exposing their reproductive organs in passive or theatricalized postures, while male figures appear active, demonstrative, and almost autoptic. The interiority of the body becomes a territory of conquest, and the woman is simultaneously its threshold and its pretext, at a time in history when the opening of the body still carried an almost sacred dimension: revealing the inside means approaching the mystery of creation.

Entering Eva Zornio’s studio, I encounter fragments rather than a finished work: sketches, material tests, tentative arrangements. There are bits of blown, engraved, or sometimes silvered glass alongside wax, textiles, and reflective surfaces. A low table at once recalls an anatomical theatre and a domestic work surface. From these scattered pieces, I begin to imagine the outlines of Spellate.

Rather than reconstructing historical regimes of anatomical vision, the work seems to move through their spatial and perceptual logic, as if testing how such structures might re-emerge under different conditions. The body is not there yet and perhaps never fully will be; it is approached obliquely, through surfaces, incisions, and thresholds.

Glass recurs throughout these experiments, a material that both reveals and disrupts. What it brings into view never appears entirely stable, as if visibility itself were being subtly displaced.

From these elements, I imagine a work that unsettles the conditions under which it becomes visible. Not a scene of revelation, but a suspension of it. The viewer’s gaze, rather than being directed and stabilized, is turned back upon itself and made conscious of its own history, of the ways in which it has long positioned the body, and particularly the female body, as something to be opened, known, and possessed. What is at stake here is not simply visibility, but the conditions that produce it – what feminist and epistemological critiques have long described as the situated, constructed nature of the gaze.(See Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective”, Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 575–599; Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990); Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (New York: Vintage Books, 1994 [1963]). These authors, from different perspectives, have shown how vision is not a neutral or universal faculty, but a historically situated and culturally constructed practice, shaped by epistemic frameworks and relations of power.)

If modern anatomy rests on the premise that opening produces knowledge, Spellate seems to gesture toward another possibility – one in which exposure entails loss, and visibility does not coincide with mastery. What emerges is perhaps the outline of a different kind of attention: one that does not seek to penetrate or resolve but is ready to pause, adjust, and dwell with what resists.

A way of seeing that – as in the image evoked at the beginning – lingers before a dark expanse, allowing the gaze itself to be transformed. Not to grasp an object of perception but to be there with it.