What if hundreds of miles below the ground there was an atomic pile, sunk for reasons unknown? second best scenario is based on an absurd assumption: a powerful generator that shifts the balance of the world is buried in the middle of the gallery, and Ivana Bašić, Benni Bosetto, Ambra Castagnetti and Fin Simonetti, immune to its radiation, need to look after it. Theirs is a very precise role: they are the vestal virgins tending to this radioactive divinity which needs nourishment, attention and caring gestures to give energy.
An artificial landscape fed by the protagonists of the show opens up before our eyes: a futuristic beauty salon, a group of hybrid organisms that emerge from the walls, barely visible faces on gothic windows and extra-terrestrial creatures with supernatural powers.
A world teetering on the brink of collapse, or a shelter for times to come, unfolds through the works of four distinct voices in response to an unlikely inspiration. The atomic pile, a metaphorical entity representing fantasy and the desire to give shape, needs daily and constant care and sustenance, and the works on display respond to this need.

We are welcomed into a hair salon where the body, in a state of static idleness, both mental and physical, escapes from the order of reality. Benni Bosetto's mirrors (1987, IT) hanging on the walls contain a pre-logical and oneiric visual language in which human, animal, plant and manmade bodies coexist and feed themselves to create an organic lymphatic system.
Ivana Bašić's works (1986, Belgrade) depict body wounds halfway between the alien and the human. The fusion of natural and artificial materials reminds us of primordial organs undergoing a process of mutation. What may seem recognizable is immediately engulfed by an amorphous and all-encompassing presence.
Lastly, Fin Simonetti (1985, Vancouver) turns space into a domestic and sacred place with works where the austerity of an almost clerical stained glass window enters into dialogue with faded barbershop posters. Torn from shop windows, the faces portrayed are now immutable, crystallized in an eternal time.
We find Ambra Castagnetti's works (1993, IT) displayed as if around a fire in a cave. Fragmented bodies and grafts of different materials offer a fluid and intimate scenario where the fragile and the unbreakable come together in a vital and magical dance.

second best scenario is a world where reality and fiction, past present and future, merge to create infinite storylines.
Drawing on “Radiant Terminus”, the post-exotic novel by Antoine Volodine, we have invited four artists, linked by a common perception, to narrate a world that not only could become a refuge, but also spur us to imagine what lies beyond our eyes.

Giulia Gelmini