How matter comes to matter

Artists: Yassine Ben Abdallah, Tin Ayala, Vera van der Burg, Arjun Das, Katarzyna Perlak, and Ginevra Petrozzi. Soundtrack: Erik Campanini and Alessio Bruno. Scenography & Graphic Design: Paskamer. Curation: Cecilia Casabona.

We write this in a time of war—a time when grief, trauma, and fear move through us collectively, when the fragility of life is not a philosophical abstraction but a daily, bodily reality. It is in this weight that the question of how we survive together becomes most urgent and most tender.

How matter comes to matter explores precarity as a shared condition of life and a generative ground for collaborative survival—among human and nonhuman beings, living and non-living creatures. It approaches survival not as an individual achievement but as a collective practice shaped by vulnerability, interdependence, and uncertainty.

The exhibition brings together artistic practices that articulate survival through material kinship: relationships constituted through shared processes, dependencies, and what philosopher Karen Barad calls “intra-actions.” Here, knowing becomes a form of becoming kin: to know something is to be entangled with it. Matter carries ancestral traces, memory, continuity, and transformation. Objects are not inert. They mediate, participate, and speak.

To move through this exhibition is to practise love in the sense bell hooks gave the word: not a feeling passively received, but a verb, a willed commitment to the flourishing of life. A love that extends toward the unfamiliar, the other, the nonhuman, the material world. A love that makes kinship where kinship was not thought possible and opens toward a different understanding of history, of one another, and of the futures we might still hold in common.

General opening hours: June 13–August 30. Open every Friday, Saturday and Sunday between 12–5pm at Onomatopee.

Program line
How matter comes to matter is the third exhibition in the five-year program The Future Commons and focusses on articulating processes and activities that foster co-creation and coexistence among artists, institutions, and locality where they operate. These activities, marked as -ing, are always ongoing and in the making as they express acts of living: dreaming, working, loving, learning, and healing. Retracing these activities underscores their role in shaping common goods and values and guiding how we care for them and for one another.