111 rooms
by Giulia Casartellifrom 25.07 to 02.08.2026
where
Church of San Giovanni Evangelista (Old Church), piazza Don Gnocchi, 23851 Galbiate (Lc)
when
the exhibition will be open from 26.07 to 02.08.2026
hours
7.30am – 12.00pm and 03.00pm – 07.00pm
Giulia will be present every day (except 29.07) at the Old Church to welcome visitors and answer their questions
when
the exhibition will be open from 26.07 to 02.08.2026
hours
7.30am – 12.00pm and 03.00pm – 07.00pm
Giulia will be present every day (except 29.07) at the Old Church to welcome visitors and answer their questions
info
opening: 25.07.2026
05.00pm – 07.00pm: exhibition opening at the Old Church
07.30pm – until late: party with food and drinks at Circolo ARCI Libertà, Largo Indipendenza 16, 23851 Galbiate (Lc)
05.00pm – 07.00pm: exhibition opening at the Old Church
07.30pm – until late: party with food and drinks at Circolo ARCI Libertà, Largo Indipendenza 16, 23851 Galbiate (Lc)
- conversation between Giulia Casartelli, Giovanni Nova of Vibes SSD, and journalist Silvia Golfari
- presentation of the Giardino del Tempo, the new green space of the Circolo, with Marco Bottaro, project coordinator of “Le Radici con le Ali” at Cooperativa Girasole
- pizzoccheri by reservation (further details to follow)
The exhibition “111 rooms” features 111 watercolors painted in 2021 by Giulia Casartelli and exhibited for the first time in Venice the following year, at the Armenian Culture Studies and Documentation Center, under the curatorship of art historian Camilla Pietrabissa.
The show completed the mail art project Studiolo, which began on April 28, 2020 and ended on September 3, 2021: over the course of 17 months, coinciding with 15 events of significance to her, the artist painted 111 postcard-sized watercolors and sent them to various addresses in India, Italy, Greece and Turkey. These are places where Giulia has lived and where people important to her journey reside: friends, mentors, individuals met on a single occasion and never seen again, but by no means forgotten.
The show completed the mail art project Studiolo, which began on April 28, 2020 and ended on September 3, 2021: over the course of 17 months, coinciding with 15 events of significance to her, the artist painted 111 postcard-sized watercolors and sent them to various addresses in India, Italy, Greece and Turkey. These are places where Giulia has lived and where people important to her journey reside: friends, mentors, individuals met on a single occasion and never seen again, but by no means forgotten.
Each postcard was first squared by hand, using pencil and set squares, and then colored with fragments (phrases, words, sometimes a single letter) from the autobiographical short story Clementina Butterfingers (edizioni postali tigre, 2022), written by the artist between 2014 and 2020. Giulia has entrusted a piece of her story to others.
The entire series of postcards sent is archived here. Each work bears the name of the recipient, the place and the date of creation in its title, embodying space and time. The historian Elena Rizzi, in the exhibition catalogue/archive, wrote the following about this work:
The entire series of postcards sent is archived here. Each work bears the name of the recipient, the place and the date of creation in its title, embodying space and time. The historian Elena Rizzi, in the exhibition catalogue/archive, wrote the following about this work:
The watercolor postcards are painted fragments of a personal story that reaches friends and strangers as a gift. They are moments of life given away to others. The recipients are thus invited to hold onto this fragment in their elsewhere, in a different space, to welcome it, to (maybe) understand it. The watercolor postcards, though far apart and scattered through different places, echo each other. […] They create relationships among individual cards, they forge secret conversations between the recipients, and form ties that do not yet exist, latent or awaited.
With the mailing complete on September 3, 2021, Giulia set out on a journey to visit the “elsewheres” where the postcards had been sent and, in many instances, retained. The artist photographed the intimate spaces where the postcards had been placed; if they were not visible, she documented in words their whereabouts (cellars, boxes, storage rooms). In some cases, she did not contact the recipients, feeling it would be inappropriate to pry into their private spaces and preferring instead to transform them into gold leaves. The exhibition “111 rooms” brings together the results of this relational exercise, reproduced in watercolor on the usual grids, building a new “human society”. Elena Rizzi observes:
Giulia’s work is, of course, autobiographical. This constant exercise of making links goes beyond the purely autobiographical realm, however. As Simone Weil suggests in one of the brief thoughts from her Notebooks: “Object of art: make space and time sensible to us. Contrive for us a human space and time, made by man, which nevertheless are time itself, space itself.” (Simone Weil, The Notebooks of Simone Weil, trans. Arthur Wills, New York: Routledge, 2004, p. 4. Simone Weil (1909-1943) was a philosopher, mystic, and political activist).
That’s how I like to think of these watercolor postcards and watercolor snapshots. These fragments of color are inscribed in very specific spaces and times that are different from each other. Yet these fragments and moments are also similar, and show a shared approach to inhabiting space itself and time itself, to inhabiting the world. They suggest a possible way of forming a human society. […] They invite us to rethink our relationships and alter their quality. They make us more conscious of how we stand apart from the world, from other men and women who inhabit this same world. This consciousness can help us see the urgency of experiencing relationships differently, reducing distances, without ever taking the place of someone else; lifting our gaze and showing ourselves to be inhabitants of the same world, the same living society.
That’s how I like to think of these watercolor postcards and watercolor snapshots. These fragments of color are inscribed in very specific spaces and times that are different from each other. Yet these fragments and moments are also similar, and show a shared approach to inhabiting space itself and time itself, to inhabiting the world. They suggest a possible way of forming a human society. […] They invite us to rethink our relationships and alter their quality. They make us more conscious of how we stand apart from the world, from other men and women who inhabit this same world. This consciousness can help us see the urgency of experiencing relationships differently, reducing distances, without ever taking the place of someone else; lifting our gaze and showing ourselves to be inhabitants of the same world, the same living society.
Download Elena Rizzi's full text here: