The best site-specific art does not decorate a space — it enters into a relationship with it. Two linked exhibitions in Florence made that idea their whole subject.
Two artists, two spaces
Connected and Playing were a pair of double-personal shows by J. Isabelle Cornière and Meri Iacchi, on view in Florence through the end of June. Curated by Silvia Petronici — a specialist in site-specific work — the project set the two artists loose in two charged environments: the greenhouse of the Botanical Garden of Florence, and the Primo Conti Foundation in Fiesole, the former home, now a museum, of one of the protagonists of early twentieth-century Florentine, Italian and European painting. Both artists begin from the same premise — a reflection on relationships — but speak in opposite registers: Cornière in a rigorous, formal language, Iacchi in something looser and less predictable.
Cornière: the pond and the hidden girl
Cornière fitted herself into the greenhouse with Lo stagno (The Pond) — a large watercolour laid directly on the ground, portraying the concentric, circling swim of a group of goldfish. She recorded the sound of the garden's outdoor fountain and played it back inside the greenhouse, opening a quiet game between inside and outside, image and source. Elsewhere a delicate plaster statue of a girl holding a turtle hides among the plants, surrounded by flowers painted on watercolour paper. The work has a light touch and a happy hand; it asks to be discovered rather than displayed.
Iacchi: the family as organism
Iacchi pursues research that always involves her own family. In the series La Sacra Famiglia (The Holy Family) she draws connections between nature and human beings and studies family relations as if they were organisms to be analysed. She also maps her territory literally — photographing and cataloguing the organisms, buildings and situations she passes on the walk from her studio to the exhibition space, so the city itself becomes part of the work. Where Cornière distils, Iacchi accumulates; between them the show holds two complete theories of what a relationship is.
Reading it again in 2026
The title has only grown truer. As art increasingly competes with screens for attention, the work that lasts is the work that asks something of you — that completes itself only in the encounter, in the relationship between piece, place and person. It is the same conviction that runs through Bugo's vanishing street works, Sandrine Pelletier's dissolving horses, and the wider return of the visible hand. Art is a relationship. The two Florentine shows simply made the relationship the medium.