The Body as Refuge and Resistance: Benni Bosetto’s Universe

The Body as Refuge and Resistance: Benni Bosetto’s Universe
#Exhibitions
Benni Bosetto. Rebecca | Courtesy Pirelli HangarBicocca

Entering Benni Bosetto’s work means crossing an unstable threshold, where the body ceases to be a mere shell and becomes language, space, and an act of resistance. Drawing, sculpture, installation, and performance intertwine within a practice that places physicality at its core - as a site of desire, vulnerability, and presence - challenging conventional definitions of identity and human experience. Bosetto constructs a dense, layered imaginary populated by hybrid figures in which human and animal, the real and the dreamlike, coexist without hierarchy. Her works emerge from an almost compulsive process of accumulation of images, texts, and references - from psychoanalysis to literature, from anthropology to cinema - which are reworked and edited until they generate open, potentially infinite hyper-narratives. Within this flow, each piece is the result of a convergence of memories and visions rather than a single origin.The exhibition Rebecca marks the artist’s first major institutional show. Inspired by Daphne du Maurier’s novel of the same name, the exhibition transforms the exhibition space into a feminine architectural body: a house-organism that welcomes, contains, and remembers. Here, the domestic environment becomes both refuge and political statement - an invitation to withdraw from the tyranny of productivity and reclaim a subjective, slow, and fertile sense of time. Within the immersive landscape created by Bosetto, patient manual labor and artisanal making take on a symbolic value - ornaments and decorations, seemingly without function, become tools for suspending linear time. It is a space where dreaming with open eyes is still possible, and where one can imagine one’s present - and one’s future - without mediation.

Viola Canova - © 2026 ARTE.it for Bvlgari Hotel Milano