The project is developed within a path of continuity that relates two distinct but interconnected moments of the museum’s programming under the direction of Lorenzo Giusti: Thinking Like a Mountain, the two-year program that between 2024 and 2025 opened a space for shared reflection on issues of sustainability and the collective dimension of artistic experience, and Pedagogy of Hope, which takes up its legacy and in 2026 will focus attention toward the educational dimension and the role of art as a practice of knowledge, relationship, and transformation.
Inspired by the thought of Brazilian pedagogue Paulo Freire, who conceives of education as a practice of freedom, the program is the result of constant co-design between Sara Tonelli and Rachele Bellini of the Education Department and the curatorial team composed of Sara Fumagalli, Valentina Gervasoni, and Irene Guandalini.
Through an articulated calendar of activities-from a permanent laboratory of pedagogical experimentation in the Palazzo della Ragione headquarters to exhibition projects in Spazio Zero, from talks and workshops with international guests to the new season of Radio GAMeC-over the course of the year Pedagogy of Hope will actively engage diverse audiences, strengthening the institution’s role as a space for dialogue, participation and collective responsibility.
The exhibition conceived by Ana Silva for GAMeC’s Spazio Zero was created in collaboration with a network of local embroiderers, invited by the artist to intervene on some of her textile works, and develops in continuity with her research by addressing one of the most serious crises of our time: access to water.
For the production of her works, Silva first entrusts the subjects she conceives and designs to Angolan embroiderers-only men, in fact, are allowed to use the sewing machine in Angola-and then finishes 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 the shortage of water and makes visible a reality in which it represents not a right but a privilege. Each stitch silently testifies to a denied basic need, emphasizing the contrast between the delicate gesture of embroidery and the dramatic nature of the theme.
Ana Silva’s artistic practice develops between memory, materiality and sociocultural critique, in dialogue with the effects of globalization, consumption and transcontinental flows. Her work takes shape from a simple and radical gesture: the recovery of feminine textiles, practices and knowledge long relegated to private space, now assumed as a contemporary artistic language.
The industrial textiles used by the artist in the production of her works are bearers of a lived experience: mass-produced in or for Africa, and once central to daily life, they now end up accumulating, being forgotten, replaced, transformed into waste in a global system of accelerated production and consumption. Ana Silva inserts herself into this cycle, recovering and resemantizing her chosen materials; through the practice of embroidery, she slows down industrial time and introduces a manual, repetitive and corporeal temporality.
The artist lives and works between Portugal, Brazil and Angola, moving between a diversity of territories, experiences and cultures that is reflected in her works, particularly in the way she portrays female figures: fragile, incomplete presences embedded in geometric patterns that recall mass production, global markets and colonial legacies still in place.
By intervening on these patterns through embroidery, the artist introduces an interruption, a breath. The manual gesture reinscribes the industrial fabric into a larger ecosystem in which sustainability is not only an environmental issue, but also a cultural and social one. Sustaining means caring, patching, extending the life of what seemed destined for discard. Moreover, the free drawing, exposed threads and absence of a finish help reinforce the rejection of a fixed identity or single narrative: the figures are bodies under construction.
The exhibition will also present to the public a body of Silva’s previous work that traces the evolution of his artistic research: the series O Fardo / Vestir Memórias, composed of works made from plastic bags and raffia used to transport clothes from Europe to Africa, destined for second-hand markets, which reconfigures these objects as artistic media and tools for critical reflection.
These sacks, filled with clothes but also linked to invisible stories and paths, are taken away from their original function and reconfigured as narrative surfaces: again, the artist intervenes through embroidery and stitching, incorporating human figures, scenes of everyday life, and symbolic motifs that refer to social life, childhood, care, and the transmission of memory.
The choice of medium is not neutral: the material, originally associated with waste, highlights economic asymmetries, interrogates circuits of consumption, and exposes the environmental and social consequences of the excess generated by the production and consumption systems of the global North and poured into countries of the South. At the same time, the works propose a sensitive and poetic reappropriation of the residue, transformed into a matter of resistance, affirmation and reconstruction.
The works presented in the exhibition address ecology understood as the relationship between bodies, materials, stories, and systems of production. Silva asks what stories can be told from what has been forgotten or discarded. Textile practice, social research and environmental concern are thus intertwined in the exhibition space in a critical reinterpretation of the everyday.
