Arcipèlago presents a new exhibition built around the playful and unpredictable theme of collage. Artists Giona Maiarelli and Vanda Gemino have been invited to share a selection of their most recent works. Cheerful, irreverent, or essential, these collages invite us to explore the cracks of everyday life and the fascinating power of the random and disparate. They open a passage between reality and wonder, here and elsewhere, past and present, the identifiable and the bizarre—new visual territories waiting to be deciphered.

On January 1st, 2016, Giona Maiarelli began creating a collage every evening using pages from The New York Times. It became a way to witness a year that would soon prove tumultuous. Working with limited material challenged him to look with fresh eyes and an open mind. Twenty‑one collages from the New York Times Art Project immerse us in recent history through a visual kaleidoscope, revealing the deep connection between this body of work and Giona’s graphic design practice.

Also included in the exhibition is Maiarelli’s new series, Survey of the American West. These collages draw from photographic images commissioned by the U.S. government to photographers such as Ansel Adams between the late 19th and mid‑20th centuries. Hand‑painted geometric paper shapes enter into dialogue with black‑and‑white photographs of a severe, solemn landscape.

Vanda Gemino creates brooches using newspapers, vintage magazines, photographs, and postcards from the 1940s to the 1960s. Her collage practice has led her to work on a very small scale. Each brooch becomes a window into her poetic imagination, where fragments of memory, traces of past eras, and her romantic creativity assemble into an intriguing and sensitive puzzle..


download the press kit