Curated by MARIA ROSA SOSSAI

Artericambi Gallery is pleased to announce CUOREDORO, a solo exhibition by Donata Lazzarini that explores the relationship between humanity, nature and time through a layered and poetic narrative. The artist draws inspiration from an emblematic episode of botanical extinction, the disappearance of the female cycad Encephalartos woodii, to construct a journey through eras, imaginaries and geographies that question the limits of knowledge and memory.

The installation, conceived as a symbolic ecosystem, unfolds in a series of works that include ceramic, bronze and metal sculptures, fabric prints, texts and objects, in a continuous shift between scientific practice and ancestral mythology. The works function as artifacts or clues that trace an expanded map between history and biology.

At the entrance to the exhibition, a book, a chair and a group of ceramic sculptures invite the visitor into an alternative narrative of natural history, a History of Plants that does not follow canonical classification but is guided by fortuitous events, unpredictable encounters and relative temporalities that seem to emerge from Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World.

At the heart of the exhibition is the enigmatic apparition of CUOREDORO, a feminine form with albino plumage, cast in bronze. More than a simple subject, CUOREDORO is a presence, an inquiry, a flower and also a body. Its identity lies between the epistemic planes of the natural and the human, raising questions about time, desire and survival.

In the work C/2004 Q2. Not before the year 111348, the artist projects herself into a distant future, evoking the return of Comet Machholz through a starry sky engraved on a golden plate. Other pieces bring forth traces of human gestures and practices, such as bodies engaged in sports, mating rituals, and biotechnology notes.

Finally, in the series LOVE FROM…, the extraction of the Woodii cycad from the South African forest where it was first discovered is evoked, as well as its transfer to the Durban Botanic Garden. From gardens like this one, from the 20th century onward, travelers began to send affectionate postcards to their loved ones — sentimental fragments that become part of CUOREDORO’s identity.

Through a language that intertwines sculptural gesture with writing, scientific data with poetic imagination, Donata Lazzarini constructs a device for reflecting on disappearance and resistance. CUOREDORO asks us to consider what remains, what vanishes and what we might still choose to preserve.

Donata Lazzarini is an artist and lecturer at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan. Her work focuses on the environment and landscape through a variety of artistic practices. She recently won PAC2025 – Piano per l’Arte Contemporanea, promoted by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture, with the project Celibi. Storia di una migrazione botanica, which examines the extinction of several rare botanical species. In the exhibition ARIA, presented at GAM Verona, she showcased Xenogenesi, a project addressing the relationship between ecosystems and the adaptation of aerial botanical species within anthropized spaces.

Her study of botanical elements takes shape through sculpture and photography, as well as drawing derived from landscape observation, which has been a constant feature of her practice for many years. She has exhibited in a number of public and private institutions, including: Adiacenze Bologna, Careof Milan, GAM Verona, Galleria Artericambi Verona, Museo Civico di Castelbuono Palermo, Quadriennale di Roma, Museo della Permanente Milan, Accademia di San Luca Rome, Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa Venice, Galleria Internazionale C. Pesaro Venice, Galleria Civica di Modena, Biblioteca Braidense Milan, Galleria Nazionale Ljubljana, Premio Suzzara Mantova, Premio Fondazione Zanotto Verona, Cicognani Galerie Kohl, and Cavenaghi Arte Milan.

Together with Maria Rosa Sossai, she is co-founder and editor of fuoriregistro, a publishing project that investigates the relationship between education and contemporary art, Bo.te Edizioni, Lugano. She is the author of the short story L’ora del giorno, Leppi Lampi Labors, Turin 2021.