Cabinet des Merveilles - written by Domenico Iaracà

After a long gestation, Silvia Granata has finally created a unique, personal and intimate Cabinet de merveilles for Argillà Italia 2026, this year’s edition of Faenza’s International Ceramics Festival. Her complex installation is not an attempt at philological reconstruction, though it displays undoubted echoes of the museological practice of the Wunderkammer – i.e. the scenographic accumulation of objects which were meant to hold the visitor’s attention in these “cabinets of wonders”. Here the kinds of mirabilia making up classical Wunderkammern are just hinted at: there is certainly a reference to naturalia – unusual natural objects; to artificialia created by the genius and mastery of accomplished artists; while scientific elements are conspicuous by their absence and there is only a suggestion, towards the end, of elements which may recall the category of exotica – objects belonging to fabulous unknown cultures. But this is above all – one is almost tempted to say, exclusively – a collection of objects capable of producing amazement in the eye of the beholder. It is not the kind of wonderment stimulated by the sight of bizarre rarities and vestiges of fast-disappearing animal species, but the surprise felt by the eternal little child – the fanciullino imagined by Italian poet Giovanni Pascoli – when he spies an intact nest in the hedge at the end of the garden, the natural crystals preserved for decoration in a crystal bottle, the valuable artefacts in an antiquarian’s shop or a faraway land. Here are geodes which, once opened, offer a glimpse into a miniature world; or familiar objects which, be they precious or not, are inextricably and amazingly linked to each person’s life. This is a long list of examples, but it barely covers the great number of objects – and the abundance itself is an explicit reference to the Wunderkammer – which form an inexhaustible accumulation of motives for wonder.

The objets trouvés which have stimulated the artist’s work are catalysts for everybody’s memory. She intervenes on them with patient and minute additions of pigmented porcelain: sometimes it is just a small flake standing for the oxidized silver of eighteenth-century mirrors, or pieces of origami filling glass cloches. Other additions involve a Chinese lacquered sewing box and small, old-fashioned Italian working tables. In close dialogue with a space with a magnificent coffered ceiling, in the historical town centre of Faenza, the sequences of this installation dispose themselves in studied alternations of colour, technique and inspiration. All these different means are employed by the artist to invite viewers to experience the joys of mnemonic introspection and cast an ever-new, ever-ingenuous gaze upon the world.

Domenico Iaracà