Tutti giù per terra

The exhibition Tutti giù per terra (Everyone Down on the Ground) by Francesco Simeti presents a journey that intertwines personal memory, popular culture, and reflections on the relationship between humans and landscape, revealing an autobiographical dimension in his practice. The works appear to originate from memories linked to the artist’s childhood and visual formation in the Sicilian countryside, where reclaimed materials, metal fragments, and carved stones were assembled into hybrid objects, halfway between agricultural tools and sculptural presences.

This ambiguity runs throughout the entire project: the sculptures oscillate between machine and creature, between industrial wreckage and anthropomorphic figure, evoking an imaginary that ranges from twentieth-century sculpture to pop culture, from handmade toys to fairy-tale narratives. References to childhood culture and an imaginative ecology contribute to building a universe in which nature appears alive, fragile, and deeply connected to the affective dimension.

A central role is given to materials, often tied to the artist’s biography and working environments: wood and elements sourced from productive contexts become part of a process that keeps its construction visible, giving the works a provisional, “assembled” quality. Drawings, watercolours, and plaster paintings accompany this journey as transitional moments, in which images take shape through layering before becoming sculpture or installation.

The sound environment amplifies this tension between the natural and the artificial, mixing the noises of forestry machines and insect sounds until they become indistinguishable. The exhibition, developed from research into natural resource extraction technologies, stages machines that take on almost bodily qualities, suspended between gestures of care and acts of destruction.

Overall, the project constructs an emotional and ambiguous landscape in which ecology, memory, and imagination intertwine. The violence of the productive world coexists with the attempt to imagine new forms of relationship between humans and nature, through images that do not illustrate the crisis but transform it into a sensory experience.