Fantastic library

Bvlgari’s first foundation‑led exhibition at the Venice Biennale opens in a library, signalling a commitment to beauty as something carried through memory and shared knowledge rather than solely displayed. Inside the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, knowledge is both subject and medium: a living archive that artists Monia Ben Hamouda and Lara Favaretto disorganise and reanimate.

Fondazione Bvlgari chose the Sale Monumentali of the Marciana as the setting for two new site‑specific works: Lara Favaretto’s Momentary Monument –The Library and Monia Ben Hamouda’s Fragments of Fire Worship. Running from now until 22 November 2026 as an official collateral event of the 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, the exhibition’s ambitious curatorial vision centres on beauty and the ways knowledge is preserved, circulated and subject to change.

Established at the start of 2024, the Foundation formalises a longstanding philanthropic thread within the Maison, one directed, in the words of director Matteo Morbidi, towards preserving beauty and making it accessible for the next generation – through restoration, artist support and art education in equal measure. The choice of artists here reflects that ambition: both works align the Maison’s upkeep of legacy with a more precarious, and therefore more interesting, understanding of memory.

The encounter begins in the vestibule, where Ben Hamouda’s Fragments of Fire Worship is presented as two large panels. Two neon sculptures – all loops, severed stems and molten arcs – usher us through the passage, their luminous signs suggesting a language that evades legibility. Ben Hamouda approaches the discipline of Islamic script as something ripe for re-imagining. Across her installations and sculptures, letters fracture into abstract curls of metal, sacred geometries warp into unstable structures, and from fire there emerges damage and clarity – traces of a practice that asks what survives when language, belief and identity are repeatedly taken apart and rewritten.

Light, usually the guarantor of clarity, withholds instead of illuminates, insisting that some forms of knowledge must remain opaque. Neon – an industrial, tightly regulated technology – conjures the feral force of flames, capable of revelation and destruction at once, casting knowledge itself as unstable matter, always in metamorphosis. It forms a script that refuses to behave as information, an alphabet that defends its own untranslatability. Ben Hamouda’s sculpture Ya’aburnee (Untranslated Fragment I) (2025), installed concurrently in the garden of the Bvlgari Hotel in Milan, extends this meditation on fragments across cities – an unfinished sentence in light and steel that asks who gets to read and what goes unread.

Moving through to the Salone Sansovino, the neon reflections give way to a long metal bookcase beneath an ornate, painted ceiling. Here, Favaretto presents the seventh and final chapter of her long‑term project Momentary Monument – The Library. For Favaretto, monuments are experiments in duration. She reactivates the book as both epistemic infrastructure and testing ground for how we verify and transmit knowledge. Across the Biennale’s duration, the donated selection of books is exposed to redistribution, circulating through use and perhaps even disappearance, unsettling the stable idea of preservation. Favaretto pushes the Marciana – a paradigm of conservation – into a state of productive fragility, where memory is defined less by what is locked away than by what passes between.

If both installations probe the limits of preservation, they also open a conversation about what a corporate foundation can return to the cultural ecosystem that sustains it. And they do so against a Biennale already under intense scrutiny. After the entire international jury stepped down in protest at the institution’s continued hosting of countries whose leaders face accusations of crimes against humanity and genocide at the International Criminal Court, questions of what is shown and who is seen are anything but neutral. In this context, two works built around illegibility, fragmentation and the refusal of easy transmission carry a potent charge.

Standing in the vestibule, you feel the tension between what a library promises – clarity, order, catalogues – and what it actually holds: misreadings, gaps, unfinished thoughts and invitations to learn more. That is perhaps the radicalism of Fondazione Bvlgari’s debut: to begin its story not with a definitive declaration, but with fragments, unstable and glowing, that ask us to read as if the ending were yet to be written.

Caroline Issa In Fragments of Fire Worship, the neon signs seem to reject legibility. When you developed this “impossible alphabet” for the Marciana vestibule, what did you want that refusal to say?

Monia Ben Hamouda This linguistic and visual opacity reflects a broader political and epistemic condition. The language we inhabit today is already compromised: meanings are continuously negotiated, redirected, instrumentalised or emptied out while still maintaining the appearance of stability. What interests me are the structures that regulate visibility and intelligibility: how narratives acquire authority, how certain texts, images and histories are preserved while others become vulnerable to erasure. The marks are gestural inscriptions that carry the pressure of multiple histories without resolving them into a single narrative. The “scar” is not a reference to a specific event, but a mark that cannot be entirely reabsorbed into the system that contains it.

CI Being the daughter of an Islamic calligrapher, you inherited a discipline that is all about rules and devotion. Which aspects of that tradition are you disobeying in Venice, and which are you protecting?

MBH Islamic calligraphy is one of the matrices that traverses my work, but it does not exhaust it. My work is not trying to “break” tradition, nor to position itself outside of it. Traditions already contain internal tensions, contradictions and forms of instability. From Islamic calligraphy, I retain an understanding of language as structure, sculptural material and spatial construction.

CI Fire is everywhere in this piece, but it’s mediated through the controlled technology of neon. What kind of friction are you interested in producing there?

MBH Fire has historically occupied a paradoxical place in relation to knowledge. It destroys archives and libraries, but it also illuminates and produces visibility. The memory of Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation in Tunisia in 2010 remains part of this symbolic field for me. In that moment, fire became a political gesture of ultimate exposure: a body forced to become visible through destruction when every other form of speech had failed. The neon medium is central because it behaves like a paradoxical fire. Neon belongs to signage, to the city, to commerce, to visibility. Introducing that material into the Marciana produces a subtle friction between different regimes of illumination: the historical architecture of knowledge and a contemporary light that is unstable, fragile and electrical.

CI The Biennale context can be quite loud. Do you imagine Fragments of Fire Worship as resisting that noise, or fostering a different kind of language within it?

MBH The Biennale is an environment saturated with visibility, interpretation and discursivity. I do not think the work speaks only to certain viewers, but I do think it asks for a specific form of attention, less dependent on recognition or agreement. The work does not deliver a statement to decode; it produces a condition to inhabit..