On the occasion of the 61st Biennale Arte, the Fondazione Querini Stampalia presents Fragile Forces W, a new project by Thomas De Falco curated by Clara Tosi Pamphili. Conceived as an expanded work between performance and installation, the project unfolds throughout the Foundation spaces with a performance scheduled for Monday, May 18 and an exhibition at the Wonder Q of the Libreria Giovanni della Querini Stampalia (from May 19 to June 14).
Produced between the United States and Italy, the work marks a new phase in De Falco’s artistic research, centred on fragility understood not as a limitation but as a generative force capable of creating connections and relationships within a present shaped by social tensions and conflicts. Between September 2025 and January 2026, the artist created in New York the new textile sculptures premiered in Venice, conceived together with a site-specific installation that places body, matter and architecture in dialogue.
At the core of the project, textile practice takes on both a sculptural and symbolic role: wool, silk and linen become elements of a visual grammar composed of interlacings, tensions and stratifications. Faces, flowers, leaves and organic forms emerge from structures that evoke protection and transformation, creating an immersive environment suspended between installation, sculpture and landscape.
The performance activates this material as a living weave. Bodies move through the installation and continuously reshape its perception, constructing a silent narrative in which identities and differences meet and redefine one another. For the first time, De Falco abandons any musical accompaniment, choosing silence as a central element of the work: a silence crossed by the sounds of the city and the presence of the audience, transformed into a space of shared listening.
In dialogue with the architecture designed by Carlo Scarpa for the Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Fragile Forces W establishes an ongoing relationship between fluidity and structure, memory and transformation. The result is a layered and immersive work in which vulnerability becomes active energy and relationship itself becomes a possibility for imagining new forms of balance.
