A collective is using art to restore dignity to abandoned architecture. An upcoming exhibition explores their work

Nude is a project of visual ecology that identifies what is worn, wounded, and scarred within an urban context saturated with artificial signs, making it the focus of its inquiry. Rather than transforming or restoring, its goal is to coexist with these fractures, listening to them and collaborating with them to highlight the truth of places without mystifying or hiding it. In this sense, the involved artists intervene in diverse spaces—former nightclubs, marginal architecture, abandoned buildings—adding a further layer of interpretation to the skeletons and strata of those environments. Following a phase of observation and dialogue with the space, painting and other artistic practices are conceived not as an imposition on surfaces or simple decoration, but as forms of cohabitation.

Today this vision takes the form of an exhibition. At the Galleria Comunale di Barga, a Tuscan village in the Media Valle del Serchio marked by peripheral architectures and spaces suspended between abandonment and memory, "Nude," curated by Claudia Gobbi, builds a sort of manifesto of this collective, artistic and political activity, displaying the work of artists 108, Felipe Van Laar, Deconstructie, CT, Zero and Taleggio who, working as archaeologists of the present, transform abandoned architectures into places still capable of producing memory and meaning.

Each artist's practice deploys different signs and tools to show that there is really no such thing as "shoddy" or "expired" in architecture, and to reveal instead how each building retains its own dignity, which often emerges precisely in the cracks, worn surfaces, and traces left by time.

Murals, paintings, spatial devices and installations thus give up the logic of spectacle to become tools for listening and relating to space. The project is told through the photographic work of Guido Borso, who documents not only the finished works, but also the very process of their emergence, following the way these architectures slowly return to being looked at.

Opening image: Artist 108 photographed by Guido Borso