The Shape of What Remains: Six gestures of repair across broken geographies

Arte, Design, Arti Performative, Architettura, Fotografia

Fondamenta de la Tana, 2111, 30122 Venezia VE, Fondamenta de la Tana, 2111, 30122 Venezia VE, Venezia, Venezia, 30122, Italia

22/10/2025 - 02/11/2025

Aea: Culture Initiative is a transdisciplinary laboratory for émigré creatives, centered on the female perspective. It has been selected to participate in the 5th edition of the Venice Design Biennale as a Collateral Project, where it will present its first offline project. The Shape of What Remains: Six gestures of repair across broken geographies is an exhibition that explores how we live when the world is ruptured.
The show, named after American poet and writer Lisa C. Taylor’s novel on the slow return to life after tragic loss, consists of six compartments shaped by the lived experiences of women from the Aea community. Each is a response to fracture, and together they form a non-linear atlas of survival. These women — from Italy, Georgia, Ukraine, Iran, and beyond — have not only crossed borders, but found themselves navigating the aftermath of crisis: political, ecological, cultural, personal.

From fragments of ceramics to planted seeds, from improvised music to gardens and
tapestries, the artists’ works trace gestures of care, attention, and persistence in the face of loss.These are not stories of restoration, but of living inside the break — with disorientation, grief, and uncertainty, yet with hope.

The exhibition does not tell stories of restoration. It presents stories of living inside the break — with disorientation, grief, and uncertainty, yet with hope. It reflects the choice to stay with what is broken rather than look away, shaping meaning from the rubble. In a world that seems to be fraying at every edge, the project offers not solutions, but ways of continuing when continuing is no longer a given.