Utopia Rendering
…this morning, walking through the streets of the neighborhood” Living the utopia – Living in a rendering
Utopia rendering, Mirko Smerdel
Saturday, January 31, 2026, 1 p.m.
Shared Fiction
Shared Fiction, a collaboration between GAZE-OFF and Espai Souvenir, brings together a set of works, actions, and performances that operate through displacements, translations, and situated gestures. The exhibition does not propose a single narrative, but rather a network of relationships in which each practice introduces a distinct way of producing meaning.
The works by Gaia Renis, Jean-Marie Reynier, Javier Peñafiel, Prisca Groh, Al Fadhil, Mirko Smerdel, Nuno Cera, and Fabrizio Contarino emerge from diverse operations—personal archive, manual repetition, translation of landscape, intervention in language, performative action—yet share a common attention to what usually remains out of focus: traces, paths, ambiguous materials, images that do not impose themselves but allow themselves to be traversed.In Cosmic Debris, Nuno Cera constructs an improbable encounter between object and landscape, situating the image within an uncertain temporality in which the artificial and the natural become indistinguishable. In Close Reading, Fabrizio Contarino shifts screen printing from the realm of reproduction to that of gesture: the image is built by drawing dot by dot onto the screen, making visible the time and concentration required for something to appear.In Bucce, Gaia Renis directs attention toward everyday surfaces and residues, activating them as clues of a memory in process, without hierarchy or spectacle. Jean-Marie Reynier, in the series Santa Margherita,2025 presents traversed spaces as affective deposits: images that function as rooms of a fragmented memory rather than as documents of a place.Giorni senza pioggia by Mirko Smerdel approaches the suburban landscape through found images, consumer objects, and textual fragments. The work does not describe the environment, but instead reduces and reorganizes it, placing the analytical coldness of technical drawing in tension with the evocative charge of color and advertising language.Other practices introduce the body, action, and speech more directly. In Diaspora Slides and in the activation Noomi Basra, Al Fadhil works with objects, images, and terms laden with cultural and ideological histories, where everyday gestures become vehicles for reflecting on displacement and the persistence of certain imaginaries. In Il riposo nel giardino del poeta, Prisca Groh proposes works based on the arrangement and reorganization of poetic fragments, introducing an open, reversible, and ritual temporality.The exhibition is completed by Egolactante en enigma by Javier Peñafiel, a garment made of recycled technical fabric by Teresa Terren, connected to the project Egolactante, active since 1997 and developed through different formats. The piece will be activated on February 7 with a performance during the finissage, establishing a direct relationship with the space and the audience.
The spatial arrangement does not follow a fixed order. Throughout the exhibition period, the works shift, are activated, or reconfigured, altering the relationships between the pieces and the experience of each visit.
Curatorial text: Fabrizio Contarino
The project will be activated through a series of scheduled performances:
“Diaspora slides and Noora Basra” by Al Fadhil on January 15 at 7:00 p.m;
“Il riposo nel giardino del poeta” by Prisca Groh, on January 15 at 7:00 p.m;
“Utopia Rendering” by Mirko Smerdel on Saturday, January 31 at 1:00 p.m.;
“¿Qué condiciona tus ficciones?” by Javier Peñafiel on Saturday, February 7 at 1:00 p.m. on the day of the finissage.
