A MELODY FROM THE OUTSIDE
Solo show
Simóndi Gallery, Turin
14th May – 18th June 2026
The first solo exhibition by Roberto Casti at the Simóndi gallery in Turin is an attempt—through a dialogue between works from recent years and new productions—to bring to life a haunted space, inhabited by objects, sounds, and invisible presences that reveal an interpenetration between the private sphere and the external world.
Ph. by Lorenzo Gastaldi
Two works, NOI [Us] (2024) and 4 settimane, 1 giorno [4 weeks, 1 day] (2026), open the exhibition, establishing the inextricable connection between artistic practice and the surrounding environment.
A microphone, pointed outside the building, captures and amplifies the sounds of the city, which are reproduced through a speaker placed inside a hanging coat, accompanied by a pair of shoes. These garments, belonging to the artist, are personal objects and symbolic bridges between inside and outside. They serve to protect but, at the same time, retain traces of the outside world, bringing them into the domestic sphere.
The sound transmitted by the speaker is altered through a series of effects, each of which has been renamed with reference to people who contributed to the development of the exhibition in the preceding months. The work is a kind of self-portrait, but also a statement of a practice that highlights a symbiosis between the artistic act and the surrounding environment.
4 settimane, 1 giorno is part of the Green drawings, a series of works through which the artist highlights the artistic process itself, reflecting on drawing as a cyclical act of production and regeneration.
The image originates from the folds of a worn sheet of paper, which would normally be discarded due to its imperfections. The artist thus conducts an analysis of the cracks on the surface, from which branches, leaves, and flowers emerge, as if retracing a natural process of growth. All the remnants of the pencils used for the drawing are preserved and incorporated into the work’s frame. The title refers to the time taken to complete the piece, indicating the extent to which the artistic act is subject to production time.
In the second room, a section of the series Aleph (Milan–Berlin–Lisbon–Milan) is presented, consisting of fragments from a 10-meter-long paper scroll containing a transcription of a list of questions written by the public between 2023 and 2025, generated through interaction with the work Aleph (Milan–Berlin–Lisbon–Milan–Putignano–Turin), which is also included in the exhibition.
While in the latter the questions accumulate, aiming to move beyond the domestic sphere and embrace a global complexity, in the case of the framed fragments the questions return to life within a closed space, appearing as parts of a larger reflection that needs to be reassembled in order to become collective again.
In the last room we find From the Depths of the Earth, a new sound and environmental installation that transforms a domestic room, with its objects, into a haunted space. Here, the outside invades the inside, exposing the home to the fears of a world with unstable balances.
The objects that make up the work function as resonating chambers for a single musical composition created by recording various marginal sounds coming from elements or connecting devices (pipes, electrical and heating systems, routers) that link an interior (domestic) to an exterior (global). The track—which floods the third room of the gallery, lit by a green and alienating light—highlights this connection by transforming “invisible” sounds into dark and unsettling presences, references to states of alert and danger.
The exhibition concludes with Suggestion (Graça District, Lisbon).
This new photographic work continues a strand of the artist’s research focused on architectural and urban imperfections, aiming to reflect on human control within domestic spaces and on capitalist power in defining the boundaries between public and private space.
In this case, the photograph depicts a wall separating a public street in Lisbon’s Graça district from the grounds of a former monastery that is to be converted into a five-star hotel.
Through the use of light, the presence of a crack is highlighted, becoming the focal point and a possible physical and cognitive breach, a stimulus for rethinking the interpenetration between two seemingly separate spheres: the inside and the outside.
Roberto Casti 