Obiettivo 13, Villa Manin, Italy

It is just a piece of cloth, hanging from the ceiling.
It is a shroud, covering the body of a dying glacier.

Objective 13 is a contemporary exhibition at Villa Manin addressing the ecological, social, and ethical challenges of climate change. Inspired by the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal 13 (“Climate Action”), the show brings together artistic perspectives that make global environmental issues visible and tangible from multiple viewpoints. The historic spaces of Villa Manin become a resonant environment where art, science, and social responsibility converge—not as instruction, but as an invitation to reflect on our scope for action in a changing world.

Sudario – Shroud

Not a single body, but an entire landscape we claim to preserve even as we destroy it.

Sudario explores imagery beyond representation. The work is based on a textile whose surface has been shaped by direct contact with snow, ice, meltwater, and the atmospheric influences of a retreating glacier. What becomes visible is not a depiction, but a trace - an indexical imprint of physical touch. The glacier appears not as a motif but as the imprint of its own dissolution.

Within the historic architecture of Villa Manin, the draped fabric creates a spatial situation reminiscent of a grotto. This setting activates a cross-cultural semantics of enveloping - associated with dignity, protection, and farewell. Sudario transfers this gesture to a non-human body, shifting the boundary of what can be mourned. The textile becomes a covering for a dying glacier, marking a final act of care for a natural phenomenon already slipping beyond preservation.

Curatorially, the work redefines the material’s status: originally used as a technical means to slow melting, the geotextile here becomes a symbolic form. Its draping refers simultaneously to religious imagery, art-historical representations of death and mourning, and contemporary rituals of loss. As an acheiro-poetic image—one not made but left behind—Sudario formulates a visual politics of absence, making the glaciers’ disappearance palpably present.

The work offers no solutions. It captures a state of being.
Sudario invites us to pause and ask what we believe we are saving - and what price we are willing to pay.