Where art dissolves boundaries

On the occasion of festivalfilosofia 2026, dedicated to the theme of Chaos, LART Universe presents Cartographies of Chaos in Modena, an exhibition curated by Beniamino Levi, in collaboration with Chiara Neri and Tomaso Neri, bringing together nine international contemporary artists around a reflection on maps, territories and humanity’s enduring need to give form to what appears unstable.

Since ancient times, drawing a map has meant searching for order. It means defining coordinates, establishing boundaries, measuring distances and transforming continuous space into something readable. Yet no cartography is ever a neutral reproduction of the world. Every map selects, interprets, includes and excludes, inevitably offering only a partial representation of reality.

It is precisely within the distance between territory and representation that Cartographies of Chaos takes shape.

The exhibition begins with cartography as a tool of orientation and transforms it into artistic matter, a space of memory, a political surface, an inner geography and a territory of imagination. Maps are crossed, painted, rewritten, distorted, reconstructed or transformed into objects and three-dimensional forms. What was created to establish order thus becomes the very place where that order is called into question.

From this perspective, chaos does not simply coincide with disorder. It is a generative force, a condition of transformation from which new configurations, new relationships and new ways of looking at the world can emerge. Art operates precisely within this unstable space: it breaks consolidated structures, alters familiar coordinates and makes visible what an ordered representation is unable to contain.

Alessandro Valeri, Alea Pinar Du Pre, Giampaolo Addari, Mariko, Yann C, Fausto De Nisco, Adriano Venturelli, Abraham Sidney Ofei Nkansah and Tommaso Romani explore this tension through different languages and perspectives. From Valeri’s map of Manhattan transformed into personal memory, to Alea Pinar Du Pre’s geographies of identity, from the historical maps painted by Addari to Mariko’s biographical and cultural coordinates, through De Nisco’s Surrealist reinterpretations, Venturelli’s chromatic cartographies, territories reclaimed by nature in the work of Abraham Sidney, and Tommaso Romani’s imagery of travel and navigation.

The result is a plural geography in which political boundaries, memory, nature, culture, identity and imagination continuously overlap.

The map therefore ceases to be merely a tool for knowing where we are. It becomes a way of questioning how we construct the world, how we move through it and which coordinates we choose in order to understand it.

Visitors are invited to move through these geographies while gradually losing their familiar points of

reference. This is not disorientation for its own sake, but an opportunity to discover that everysystem of orientation is provisional, and that new forms of knowledge can emerge precisely from the

encounter between order and instability.

Cartographies of Chaos thus constructs a map that does not claim to contain the world, but instead makes its complexity visible. An open, mutable and continuously rewritable cartography, in which art does not eliminate chaos, but gives it a possible form.

PRIVATE OPENING

18 September 2026
Private inauguration by invitation

RSVP required

PUBLIC OPENING HOURS

18 September 2026
9:00 AM to 11:00 PM

19 September 2026
9:00 AM to 11:00 PM

20 September 2026
9:00 AM to 9:00 PM

VENUE

LART Universe – Temporary Art Gallery
Via Cesare Battisti 81, Modena