Complete documentation on the exhibition conceived by Michael E. Smith for the underground spaces of Palazzo Bentivoglio in Bologna.
This catalogue accompanies "C C", Michael E. Smith's exhibition in the underground spaces of Palazzo Bentivoglio, Bologna (30 January – 26 April, 2026), curated by Simone Menegoi and Tommaso Pasquali.
Conceived for the undercroft of the palazzo, the project treats architecture, light, and objects as a single, unstable field. Rather than using the space as a neutral container, Smith works with its darkness, irregularity, and infrastructural presence, producing a sequence of thresholds, pauses, and zones of partial visibility.
Across the exhibition, found and worn objects – clothing, containers, toys, furniture, sports equipment, and lighting devices – are arranged into sparse yet charged constellations. Through substitution, distortion, and cartoon-like figuration, they evoke the human body without representing it directly, generating presences that oscillate between the comic and the uncanny. Sound, light, and spatial rhythm function as compositional elements, giving the installation the character of a slow, improvised score. "C C" does not stage the crisis as an image but assumes it as a condition. The works appear as residues of everyday life held between use and abandonment, intimacy and estrangement.
The catalogue brings together texts by
Romeo Castellucci, Simone Menegoi, and Tommaso Pasquali with extensive photographic documentation and a substantial body of sketches produced by Smith specifically for the book. These drawings, treated by the artist as a parallel form of thinking and composing, make the volume not only a record of the exhibition but an autonomous extension of the project.
Michael E. Smith (born 1977 in Detroit) makes sculptures out of cast-offs, waste and other residues of our consumer society. He assembles and manipulates this found material in an unusual way. He isolates objects, makes changes to their form and seeks out the limits of their imaginative power. His presentations are characterized by an intense yet sparse choreography of the exhibition space. Accordingly, they manifest themselves as site-responsive artworks exploiting all of the museum's infrastructure. Smith's work seems to avoid any form of sublimation. His predilection for the absurd and for an indefinable tension ensue from a broader critical view of the ecological, economic and social challenges facing our society.
