Opening on February 25, 2026, GAMeC presents Eau, the first solo exhibition in an Italian institution by Angolan–Portuguese artist Ana Silva (Calulo, 1979).
The project unfolds within a framework that brings into dialogue two distinct yet interconnected moments in the museum’s programming, under the direction of Lorenzo Giusti: Thinking Like a Mountain, the biennial program developed between 2024 and 2025, which opened a shared space for reflection on sustainability and the collective dimension of artistic experience; and Pedagogy of Hope, which takes up this legacy and, in 2026, shifts the focus towards the educational dimension and the role of art as a practice of knowledge, relation, and transformation.
Inspired by the thinking of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, who conceives education as a practice of freedom, the program is the result of an ongoing co-design process between Sara Tonelli and Rachele Bellini from the Education Department and the curatorial team, compresine Sara Fumagalli, Valentina Gervasoni, and Irene Guandalini.
Through a rich and articulated calendar of activities—from a permanent laboratory of pedagogical experimentation at Palazzo della Ragione to exhibition projects in Spazio Zero, from talks and workshops with international guests to the new season of Radio GAMeC—Pedagogy of Hope will actively engage diverse audiences throughout the year, strengthening the institution’s role as a space for dialogue, participation, and collective responsibility.
Conceived for GAMeC’s Spazio Zero, Ana Silva’s exhibition is developed in collaboration with a network of local female embroiderers, invited by the artist to intervene on her textile works, addressing one of the most urgent crises of our time: access to water.
In the production of her works, Silva initially entrusts the subjects she conceives and designs to Angolan male embroiderers—for in Angola, only men are permitted to use sewing machines—before completing the works herself, adding decorations, glitter, and sequins by hand. Through the language of embroidery—traditionally associated with care, memory, and resistance—the artist denounces water scarcity, and reveals a reality in which water is considered a privilege rather than a right. Each stitch silently bears witness to a fundamental need which is denied, highlighting the tension between the delicacy of the gesture and the seriousness of the reality.
Ana Silva’s artistic practice unfolds at the intersection of memory, materiality, and sociocultural critique, engaging with the effects of globalization, consumption, and transcontinental flows. Her work takes shape through a gesture that is both simple and radical: the recovery of textiles, practices, and forms of female knowledge long relegated to the private sphere, now adopted as part of the contemporary artistic language.
The industrial fabrics used by the artist bear the marks of history experienced firsthand: mass-produced in Africa or for Africa, and once central to everyday life, they now accumulate, having been replaced or forgotten, and ultimately become waste in a global system of accelerated production and consumption. Silva intervenes in this cycle by recovering and re-semanticizing these materials. Through the use of embroidery, she slows down the industrial rhythms and adds a manual, repetitive, and bodily sense of time.
The artist lives and works between Portugal, Brazil, and Angola, navigating a plurality of territories, experiences, and cultures that resonate throughout her work—particularly in her representation of female subjects. These figures appear fragile and incomplete, embedded within geometric patterns that evoke serial production, global markets, and colonial legacies that remain unsolved.
By operating on these patterns through embroidery, the artist introduces an interruption—a pause, a breath. The manual gesture reinscribes industrial fabric within a broader ecosystem where sustainability is understood not only as an environmental issue, but also as a cultural and social one. Sustaining means caring for, mending, extending the life of what seemed destined for the landfill. The freehand drawing, visible threads, and absence of a finished surface further reinforce her rejection of fixed identities or singular narratives: these figures are bodies in the making.
The exhibition also presents a body of Silva’s earlier works, tracing the evolution of her artistic research: the O Fardo / Vestir Memórias series. It consists of works made from plastic and raffia sacks used to transport clothing from Europe to Africa for second-hand markets, reconfiguring these objects as artistic supports and tools for critical reflection. Filled with garments yet also bound up in invisible histories and trajectories, these sacks are removed from their original function and transformed into narrative surfaces. Here too, the artist intervenes through embroidery and stitching, incorporating human figures, scenes of everyday life, and symbolic motifs that evoke social relations, childhood, care, and the transmission of memory.
The choice of support here is not neutral: materials originally associated with waste expose economic asymmetries, question circuits of consumption, and reveal the environmental and social consequences of the excess generated by systems of production and consumption in the Global North and then dumped onto the countries of the Global South. At the same time, the works propose a sensitive and poetic reappropriation of residue, transformed into a material of resistance, affirmation, and reconstruction.
The works presented in the exhibition engage with ecology as a relational field connecting bodies, materials, histories, and production systems. Silva ponders which stories may be told on the basis of what has been forgotten or discarded. Textile practice, social research, and environmental awareness thus intertwine within the exhibition space, offering a critical reinterpretation of everyday life.