If you feel me, I am you

If you feel me, I am you is less a title than a statement. It is an invitation to empathy that directly addresses the viewer, suggesting that recognition is born from shared experience: “If you understand what I am talking about, it is because it has happened to you as well.”

In her first solo exhibition at RIBOT gallery, Simona Andrioletti presents a new body of work that continues her investigation into socio-political activism, systemic violence, and the psychological architectures we construct to survive. Gender-based violence, approached from an intersectional perspective, runs through the exhibition not as a theme, but as a condition that shapes bodies, behaviours, and the spaces we move through.

The exhibition unfolds across two levels. On the ground floor, large quilted works hang from metal structures assembled from construction-site scaffolding tubes. Made from different kinds of padded fabrics, suspended by aluminium hooks laser-cut by the artist herself, these works appear at once soft and guarded. Their padded surfaces in blue and white carry stitched drawings made with a sewing machine, depicting fragments of medieval armour such as helmets and gauntlets. They read almost like instructions for dressing, for preparing the body for battle.

On the lower level of the gallery, the visitor must enter a cage in order to see the works. Some of its bars are composed of sentences written by the artist that speak of fear, rage, and bodily memory.