Ilenia

If life has a base that it stands upon, if it is a bowl that one fills and fills and fills—then my bowl without a doubt stands upon this memory.

-Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being

Inspired by the writings of Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being brings together works by Isabella Costabile, Anastasia Pavlou, Carol Rama, and Margherita Raso.

What Woolf described as “moments of being” are instants in which awareness gathers through a glance, a gesture, a patch of colour, a fragment of language. The exhibition explores how perception, memory, and identity take shape in fleeting yet charged instants. Working with painting, textiles, and assemblage, the artists approach these instants through material and temporal layering.

Isabella Costabile, working with found and second-hand objects, assembles fragments that carry the imprint of lived experience. These displaced, reconfigured materials become carriers of memory and cultural meaning, proposing identity as something shaped through accumulation, loss, and reimagining. Objects measure time not linearly, but through presence, absence, and transformation.

The paintings of Anastasia Pavlou unfold like inner scripts or landscapes of language, where marks hover between writing and abstraction. Her paintings, often composed of oil, water, and gesso, hold traces of duration: gestures and surfaces that suggest time as something accumulated yet never fully accessible.

Margherita Raso’s textile work, silk woven on a Jacquard loom, draws on organic remnants observed under magnification. Translating microscopic imagery into silk, she creates surfaces that oscillate between painting and sculpture, abstraction and figuration, inviting a haptic mode of looking in which vision is slowed, textured, and made aware of its own material conditions.

Carol Rama’s practice offers an earlier and radical articulation of these concerns through her language of bricolage. Incorporating unconventional materials such as rubber, fabric, and industrial remnants, her works assemble tactile fragments into charged surfaces that resist fixed meaning. These elements, often bearing intimate and bodily associations, are neither fully symbolic nor purely formal; instead, they operate as sensorial traces. In their recombination, past and present, personal and cultural memory, are held in tension, suggesting identity as something unstable, constructed, and continuously reworked.

Across the exhibition, found and archival materials are not preserved as fixed records but reactivated. In this, the works echo Woolf’s own return to the past: not as a continuous narrative, but as a constellation of impressions, where memory is fragmentary, sensory, and alive.

Motifs of light, surface, texture, and time echo throughout the exhibited works, inviting slow looking and attention to subtle shifts. Moments of Being proposes that meaning does not accumulate steadily, but emerges in instants: brief, luminous encounters where past and present meet and are momentarily held.