Critical text by Dalila Rosa Miceli & Beatrice Buratti

The installation Donkey's Tail comprises two works that create an intimate, enveloping environment within the Rooftop Viafarini space. This chamber of secrets transforms the hosting structure into a small wooden treasure chest embedded in the terrace, offering greenery and color to the neighborhood. Subtle voices echo against the living softness of the solid walls, narrating memories, ancient affections, and gentle presences.

A festoon of cut braids, bows, and ribbons dialogues with a latex curtain that simultaneously covers and reveals fragments of everyday life, self-care practices, and emotional sensitivity. Viafarini—historically a home for many artists—is thematized by the exhibition choices: the dialogue between the two works extends to the environment itself. Through their uniqueness, these works shape the space as a dwelling. The intimacy and private gestures within the works exist at the threshold—barely visible from outside yet experienceable by visitors who, aware of their position, sense a small intrusion following an initial invitation that captivates them.

The braids in Donkey's tail (2025) come from the artist's own cut hair—a recurring formal element in her poetics. Even when not directly performative, her work remains intimately linked to strong, decisive gestures that precede and shape the mediated aesthetic outcome. The hair, rich with magical and ritualistic meaning, becomes a transfiguration of a donkey's tail. This work springs from a personal interpretation of Charles Perrault's fairy tale "Donkey Skin"

(Peau d'Âne, 1694), where a princess disguises herself as an animal's skin to escape marrying her father. In the story, a donkey magically produces precious jewels, becoming a source of wealth for the entire kingdom. By killing this creature, the princess saves herself and mends her destiny. However, in fairy tales, killing represents metamorphosis—and in this artistic interpretation, even a common element like a braid reconfigures our understanding of this animal. The work explores fairy-tale tradition, creating tension between matter and narrative, imagination and reality, while presenting traces of this relationship.

If you open me, you find the substance (2025) features a latex curtain hanging at the corner between walls. Two thin films replace fabric, suggesting a semi-transparent skin membrane. As they part, they reveal a time-suspended corner concealing heart-shaped intertwined locks of hair and heaps of cosmetic powder. On the wall, an ID photo shows a little girl dancing, seen from behind—free. While this work appears to reference socially relevant discourses, its material specificity and original execution transform these discussions into muffled voices relegated to the outside, to the night enveloping a fairy tale's telling. These external voices cannot affect the singular lived experience or the free gesture of reappropriation and creation that becomes increasingly apparent through patient observation. The skin-curtain, with its ambiguous transparency incorporating opacity, does more than open or close a space of individual truth—it unveils the work itself. While open to others' perception and society, it simultaneously displays its closure—not hermetic but hermeneutic—making its regionality experienceable in the "universal" dimension. Through dialogue with the other work, this piece establishes an almost impossible communication between personal and communal space by presenting the duality of truth's manifestation, affirmed by the necessary concealment implicit in every act of revealing, which, when respected, can be truly free.

The installation, in its complexity, expresses the unspeakable through distant echoes of imaginary and everyday stories, woven with references to ritual, eroticism, freedom, and redemption. This crafted environment becomes an intimate vessel for both imagined and concrete memories. It exists as a threshold dwelling—at once a dollhouse and a witch's abode. Suspended between magic and everyday life, childhood and maturity, it reveals a domestic and ritual dimension that conceals an archaeology of the quotidian: a layering of recollections, memories, experiences, and traces in temporary presence.