There is something profoundly unsettling and, at the same time, generative in the exhibition that Gabriele Silli presents at Fondazione D’ARC in Rome. Already in its title, Immense Submarine Spermatozoon, the exhibition imposes itself as an impossible image: a biological and cosmic oxymoron, an infinitely small organism that becomes immense, a principle of life transformed into an abyssal creature, a germ re-emerging from the depths of matter and the subconscious.
Curated by Giuliana Benassi, the exhibition brings together the artist’s most recent research through two large site-specific installations and a group of sculptural works scattered throughout the Foundation’s spaces like a kind of silent punctuation, capable of insinuating themselves among the works of the permanent collection and altering their perception. More than an exhibition, Immense Submarine Spermatozoon appears as a mental environment, a topography of the unconscious, a system of images that questions the relationship between origin and dissolution, between form and formlessness, between the biological and the phantasmatic.
The title of the exhibition unmistakably alludes to the origin of life, yet overturns its philosophical and biological dramaturgy. Silli’s imagined spermatozoon is not the linear symbol of fertilization and birth; it is a grotesque and immense creature, a kind of submarine emerging while carrying algae, debris, residues and remains from an abyssal world. Throughout the exhibition path, everything seems to resurface from an unidentifiable elsewhere, from an intermediate region in which the underwater dimension and that of the subconscious intertwine until they become indistinguishable.
The choice of the spermatozoon as a central figure is profoundly ambivalent. It is certainly a symbol of origin, movement, and generative possibility; it represents the promise of a new life. Yet at the same time it is a fragile, incomplete figure, dependent on an encounter: it cannot generate by itself.
The spermatozoon is therefore a potentiality that carries within itself a possibility, but which cannot fulfill itself autonomously.
Silli’s “immense spermatozoon” does not appear, then, as a triumphant principle, but as a creature suspended in uncertainty, immersed in an environment that precedes and contains it. The term “submarine” introduces a second symbolic dimension: the sea, the abyss, the dark womb of matter.
Origin is not an individual act.
It is an encounter.
The work seems to suggest that every form of life is inevitably relational, that no power can generate itself alone, and that every birth takes place within a web of dependencies, contaminations and sedimentations.
The exhibition begins with Rivolo secco (Le miserie), an imposing sculpture more than thirty-five meters long, created over a period of five years and extending along the nave of the Foundation. The work presents itself as a fleshy and blackened flow that crosses the space through folds, stagnant areas and sudden ripples, evoking a watercourse close to exhaustion, an exhausted river, a current that survives itself.
The aridity evoked by the title is anything but descriptive: it is an existential condition.
Here nihilism seems to manifest itself as a slow consumption of form, a fatigue of the living. Yet matter never appears definitively dead. On the contrary, it stubbornly continues to persist.
If Silli’s work can be defined as nihilistic, it is perhaps that active nihilism described by Nietzsche: passing through dissolution not in order to celebrate nothingness, but to release new possibilities of existence. Ruin is not the end. It is the place from which something can still emerge.
The second major installation, Io sono il plumbeo amo, l’intartarato, la corrente sottomarina…, defined by the artist as a “psychological residential installation”, probably constitutes the conceptual core of the exhibition. A gigantic fish trap, a cage for fish that replicates the architecture of the Foundation’s Sala M, is transformed into a mental device, a parody of consciousness understood as a trap.
Inside it coexist larval apparitions, liquid fetishes, inner images, animal shadows, cells and fishing nets. The work seems to suggest that the mind itself is a system of captures, a place where desires, memories and impulses continuously become entangled.
Matter becomes psyche.
Psyche becomes landscape.
The installation is also crossed by a sound composition made of epiphanies recorded on tape between 1999 and 2000 and manipulated by the artist himself, who assumes the role of an enigmatic orchestra conductor. The visitor is forced to scrutinize the interior of the great trap through nets and openings, as if access to the unconscious were necessarily partial, intermittent, always deferred.
In the works Lingua disumana dell’attore Charlie, cammello and Il guardiano (che è sempre un becchino), Silli addresses one of the great themes of contemporary philosophy: the boundary between human and animal.
The bronze tongue of a camel actor becomes a singular anatomical trophy, an ironic counterpoint to the two major installations, evoking language as that which distinguishes human beings from animals and, at the same time, that which can never fully emancipate itself from its biological origin.
The same tongue is then transformed into a stick, an anthropomorphic figure, an oblique and mocking guardian. Surveillance, control and order are stripped of all solemnity. Even authority, in Silli’s world, seems destined to bend towards matter, towards the body, towards decomposition.
One of the most fertile philosophical references for interpreting Silli’s work is certainly Baruch Spinoza. In his philosophy, everything that exists belongs to a single infinite substance: Nature.
Silli’s works seem to share this intuition. Matter is not a passive support for the artist’s idea, but a reality endowed with its own energy, its own memory and its own generative capacity.
Every fragment seems to contain a previous history and a future possibility.
Matter does not represent something.
It is thought itself.
This interpretation overlaps with that of Gilles Deleuze. Silli’s works are never completed forms, but processes of becoming, intermediate states between composition and decomposition, between birth and putrefaction.
We do not know whether we are observing a nascent organism, an archaeological wreck or a fossil coming from a post-human future.
Indeterminacy is their truth.
It is impossible not to evoke Georges Bataille as well. Silli’s entire research seems to restore dignity to the formless, to that which escapes classification, to that which exceeds order and measure. His works attract and repel because they recall a truth often removed by Western culture: life is inseparable from loss, erosion and decomposition.
There is no birth that does not already contain its own end.
And there is no ruin that does not still preserve a possibility.
From this perspective, the nihilism evoked by the artist does not coincide with surrender before nothingness, but with the ability to move through the collapse of forms in order to open new possibilities of existence. His matter is profoundly Nietzschean: it knows putrefaction, yet continues to produce life; it inhabits ruin, yet never stops generating.
This is why Immense Submarine Spermatozoon is not, ultimately, an exhibition about birth.
It is an exhibition about the conditions that make birth possible.
About the moment in which matter, after having passed through deterioration, sedimentation and the loss of form, returns to produce images, organisms and thoughts.
Silli’s immense spermatozoon thus becomes an ontological figure: fragile and powerful, incomplete and infinite, ridiculous and cosmic.
A metaphor of matter itself.
Before man.
And perhaps beyond man.
Within the context of the exhibition, Fondazione D’ARC also hosted MARRANA. Quando cantano le cornacchie, a “cinexperiential” performance conceived by Trash Secco (Francesco Pividori), with Romano Talevi and Gabriele Silli himself. Created inside the large fish trap of Io sono il plumbeo amo, l’intartarato, la corrente sottomarina…, the performance established a surprising bridge between the language of contemporary art and that of cinema.
The presence of Pividori, director of Bassifondi, a powerful elegy of invisible people and marginal existences, is not accidental. Once again, the work returns to the abyss, to what lives beneath the surface, to the residues of the human.
Silli’s and Trash Secco’s poetics meet in a shared territory: that of submerged forms of life, of images resurfacing from an inner world reduced to its essential elements.
The question that remains upon leaving Fondazione D’ARC is therefore not where we come from, but which hidden power of matter continues, even today, to generate what we may become.
14 June – 27 September 2026
Fondazione D’ARC
Via dei Cluniacensi 128-130
00159 Rome, Italy
Via dei Cluniacensi 128-130
00159 Rome, Italy
Opening hours
Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday
3:30 pm – 7:30 pm
3:30 pm – 7:30 pm
Tickets
Full price: €10
Reduced price: €7
(over 65, university students, groups, FAI card holders, accompanying persons of visitors with disabilities)
(over 65, university students, groups, FAI card holders, accompanying persons of visitors with disabilities)
Free admission for:
- visitors under 18;
- students and lecturers of Art Academies and Art Institutes;
- students and lecturers of university courses in Art History and Cultural Heritage;
- visitors with disabilities;
- licensed tourist guides;
- accredited journalists.
Online ticket office
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Information
Fondazione D’ARC
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Instagram: @fondazionedarc
How to get there
Metro B – Tiburtina station
Bus lines: 163, 211, 309, 448
Large internal parking area available.