Invocations. My Mortality Should Move You. 

Curated by Benedetta Casini and BIENALSUR

Opening: Wednesday, November 12, 2025

from November 12, 2025 to 22 January 23, 2026

Embajada de España en Italia

Rome, Italy

“Perhaps the clearest metaphor for the project of subjectivizing the object is a sculpture. What the shaman does is more or less this: sculpting subjects into stones, conceptually sculpting a human form, that is, removing from the stone everything that previously prevented us from seeing the ‘human’ form contained within it.”

— Eduardo Viveiros de Castro

The exhibition project at the new headquarters of the Embassy of Spain in Rome brings together a selection of artists who engage with the materiality of stone. The exhibition’s title, My Mortality Should Move You, is taken from the poem “Conversation with a Stone” by Wisława Szymborska, in which the Polish poet imagines entering into dialogue with the lithic subject. Throughout the conversation, the inevitable distances between the two bodies—the human body of the poet and the mineral body of the stone—emerge, along with their respective temporalities.

Used since antiquity to faithfully reproduce the human figure and project it through time beyond the life of the subject portrayed, stone is configured, on the one hand, as an anthropomorphic element shaped by humans in their own image, onto which fantasies of animation and life are projected. On the other hand, its temporality expresses the magnificence of a nature that exceeds all human measure, embodying a millennial perspective.

The need to relate to the mineral element is expressed through imaginary conversations and corporeal hybridizations that redefine the boundaries between subject and object, between biological and non-biological matter. On the occasion of the exhibition, the windows of the venue overlooking the Fontana del Moro in Piazza Navona become permeable platforms for thought, where reflections on the desire to transcend one's own time enter into dialogue with one of the most representative settings of the Roman Baroque.