Cerco l'estate tutto l'anno

2026

"According to Ralph W. Emerson, “Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and as we pass through them they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue.” With Cerco l’estate tutto l’anno [Searching for summer all year long], Aurora Biancardi unstrings the beads from the thread to observe the latter in its essential linearity, turning it in her hands, confident that she can still find within it the filters and hues that the American philosopher placed in the succession of beads. This desire for simplicity, this longing for the heart of things, intertwines the melancholy of discarded matter with the joy of discovery, holding together objects deeply imbued with their Mediterranean atmosphere—the colorful bracelets sold to tourists in summer or mosquito mat refills—and sensations that transcend geographic boundaries, carrying that melancholy and joy towards Germany, where Biancardi lives."

Vedrai, Vedrai, 2025
Rug made with 2400 bracelets and
bracelet scraps collected in the courtyard
of the Castello Sforzesco in Milan.
dimensions variable, performance

"The idea of the stripped thread takes material form in the exhibition through the work Vedrai, Vedrai [You’ll see, You’ll see]: created on a loom like a carpet, it consists of a weave of those aforementioned colorful bracelets sold to tourists in summer on beaches or in big cities (which in Italy are never truly big, but rather medium-sized). Love, peace, money, luck, hope, and freedom are the matters symbolized by the colors of the bracelets; in symbolizing them, they attempt to reassemble life’s chaotic unity—there is a bit of everything in that collection of bracelets, an all-encompassing disorder. The artist’s intervention in this state of happy chaos is ordering in nature, yet an order equally happy and non-restrictive. The weaving and fusion of the bracelets follow a precise symmetry: starting from the outer edges, the colors to the right and left of the carpet’s center are mirror-like overlayerings. But Biancardi reorganizes chaos not to immobilize it or drain it of vitality: as in a Rubik’s Cube, achieving order serves only to dismantle it once again, playfully. Thus, the artist asks the audience to destroy her work, to unstring one by one the bracelets she has woven and to wear them. Sharing becomes a keystone that allows one to search for—and perhaps find—meaning in entrusting to another that search for love, peace, money, luck, hope, and freedom."

De-sidera, 2026
Book in four volumes, digital print on paper,
rubber stamps, ink, pen
24 x 17 cm each

"De-sidera is the collective title of the four publications accompanying Vedrai, vedrai. They are books yet to be written: as with the carpet to which they are an appendix, Biancardi studied and produced the graphic and physical design of the object, but the execution of the work’s meaning is left to whoever, taking one of the bracelets for themselves, leaves a message on the blank pages." Rug and volumes converse like the two parts composing an hourglass. The physical traces of the rug disperse. Day after day, exhibition after exhibition, the rug as we see it today will gradually disappear, manifesting in a different form around the visitors’ wrists. Meanwhile, the pages of the four volumes will fill up.

Vedrai, vedrai (de-sidera), 2026
Collage, glass engraving,
cotton bracelets, cardboard,
colored paper
36 x 29 cm

"Symptomatically connected to this first work is Vedrai, Vedrai (de-sidera), with a title that—consistently with the musical backdrop accompanying all the titles—acts as a sort of reprise. After unstringing the colored bead-lenses from the threads; after holding those threads in her hands; after giving them away to visitors, Biancardi continues her search for essentiality by looking into the shadow zone of the bracelets. We see the reverse side of the cardboard holding them together: as in the scaffold structure of the Cross in the Greccio Nativity scene painted by Giotto in Assisi, we already know what lies on the other side, there is no need to see it. At the same time, it is the back—the shadow zone, where we usually do not look—that tells us something more, making explicit the artist’s de-sidera."

Nel blu dipinto di blu #1, 2024
Nel blu dipinto di blu #2, 2024
Nel blu dipinto di blu #3, 2024
Nel blu dipinto di blu #4, 2024
Collage, 280 mosquito repellent mats
22.5 x 24.5 cm each

"280 mosquito mat refills compose the strange sky of Nel blu dipinto di blu [In the blue painted blue]. Among the shades of delicate light blue, the memory of the insect’s relentless buzzing, the annoying itch of its bites, and the artificial repellent compound loading the mats necessarily slip in." The work tells the story of the passing of time and evokes the flight of insects denied access to a sky painted blue, made of mosquito repellent tablets. The tablets were used over the course of three hot Italian summers, losing their blue color after being 'activated' for hours with an electric diffuser. The tablets are colored blue: as the color changes, their effectiveness decreases. The shape of the work maps the course of summer days and redefines a horizon, a sky, a color.

Ma sei nato in italì, 2026
Collage, 15 chewing gum wrappers, glass engraving
29.7 x 42 cm

"In the chaotic world to which Biancardi attempts to give order, things—the sky, topographics distances like the one between Italy and Germany—are decomposable and recomposable through minimal gestures. But Ma si nato in italì achieves the greatest possible recomposition within Italian geography, the one between mainland Italy and Sicily, translating the image of the Brooklyn Bridge from the chewing gums of the same name onto the Strait of Messina. To the monumentality of the endeavor corresponds the modesty of the gesture and the simplicity of the material: a few scraps of paper are enough to bridge the distance between Scylla and Charybdis. In Biancardi’s world, the fragility of the infrastructure is the only thing preventing it from collapsing."

"The constant gazing between light and shadow, dream and enactment, chaos and symmetry, thought and action, individual quest and desire for the other, melancholy of the scrap and joy of discovery—all pairs to be understood not as opposing and exclusive poles, but as unities—is what informs Cerco l’estate tutto l’anno. Having unstrung Emerson’s rigid beads, the soft thread that remains is not bare matter, but the place where apparent contradictions can intertwine: not as lenses through which to view the world, but as weaves with which to hold all its pieces together and inhabit them."

"Cerco l'estate tutto l'anno"
NEON, Bologna
19.09–19.10.2026

Text by: Vittoria Caprotti
Funded by: Akademieverein München
Foto 5,7,8-11 by: Claudia Gentile
Thanks to: Birgit Wagner, Gino Gianuizzi

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