He Spoke To The Birds
What the Birds Already Knew by Suso Barciela, July 21, 2026
Installation view of He Spoke To The Birds, Rome. Artist: Diego Azzola. Curated by Fanfan Yuxuan Fan. Courtesy of AAIE and FanFlus.
Some exhibitions are remembered for what they show. Others, for what they suggest. He Spoke To The Birds, the group show curated by Fanfan Yuxuan Fan at the AAIE Center for Contemporary Art in Rome, belongs to this second category. It is not an exhibition that strikes directly; it whispers and hits differently. And perhaps for that very reason, it lingers.
The title, taken from a reflection by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev on Saint Francis of Assisi— “il parlait même aux oiseaux”, encapsulates the curatorial thesis with a delicacy almost like a haiku. The curator Fanfan Yuxuan Fan does not seek to revive Arte Povera as a historical movement, but rather to salvage from it an attitude: the disposition to listen to what matter has to say when it is allowed to speak. As Fan has noted, "the interest is not in imposing meaning on materials, but in discovering the energy they already carry within," and in that approach there is something almost contemplative, a will to slow down the gaze that is quite uncommon in today's exhibition landscape. Fan speaks of the exhibition as a "spatio-temporal arrangement," and that expression strikes me as apt because it suggests that time is not something that simply passes, but rather something that can be inhabited differently according to each person's vision.
The three artists Jeremias Rumpl. Diego Azzola and Huang Zhe brought together work with such disparate registers that, in principle, they might seem incompatible, yet Fanfan Yuxuan Fan has woven them together skillfully. Jeremias Rumpl subjects zinc plates to processes of corrosion, welding, and exposure to the open air, until rust becomes an involuntary inscription, a diary that the metal bears on its own skin. His images of ruins and destroyed buildings are the visual echo of the changes taking place before us. I do not know whether to call it painting or sculpture, because his work resides in that no-man's-land between the two disciplines, and I believe it is precisely that indefiniteness that makes it so fascinating. Decay, in his hands, ends up being a form of persistence, and it is the best way for history to remain legible long after narratives have disappeared. I am fascinated by the artist's insistence on not closing off the meaning of the work and on allowing the material to continue transforming even after it has been hung on the wall.
Installation view of He Spoke To The Birds, Rome. Artists: Diego Azzola, Huang Zhe. Curated by Fanfan Yuxuan Fan. Courtesy of AAIE and FanFlus.
Diego Azzola works with galvanized pipes that emerge from his paintings as if they were physical extensions of the image. It is disconcerting to see how those conduits, which were designed to carry water and remain hidden, now become protagonists of a spatial modification that demands our full attention. Azzola does not separate the organic from the industrial, nor the natural from the constructed; he prefers to inhabit the intermediate spaces, those thresholds where categories become indiscernible. Aquatic forms, hybrids between marine creatures and human artifacts, remind us that nature is not something out there, separate from us, but rather reveal the flow in which we are already immersed. The aqueducts that still run through the city of Rome seem to make themselves metaphorically present in these metal structures that rise in the gallery like fragments of a system that never entirely stopped functioning. The artist seems interested in what happens at the edges, in those places where one thing ceases to be one thing and begins to be another.
Huang Zhe was born in southern China and raised in a Buddhist environment where incense was part of the everyday landscape; thus, the artist has turned that sensory experience into the core of his practice, with smoke as the guiding element of perception in those atmospheric scenes he paints. The mist that spreads across his canvases sometimes "hides" the image and transforms the way we see and feel it. He uses green symbolically, as a kind of filter that shows us another way of inhabiting the space of painting. Smoke connects the near with the far, the present with the absent, creating a distance that is not evasive but seeks the materialization of memory. There is an unusual patience in his work, a way of painting that seeks to capture, to suggest, and that aims to fix smoke by letting it disperse at its own rhythm.
What makes this exhibition work is that it does not try to force a single reading. There is no central message to be deciphered, nor a hierarchy among the materials that places them in order of importance. Each inhabits its own time, its own rhythm of decomposition and transformation… and Rome is the perfect stage for this dialogue to take place.
Speaking to the birds, after all, is not an act of magic. It is an act of attention and intention. This exhibition, without stridency or grandiloquence, invites us to practice that. At a time when society demands only quick answers and clear meanings, pausing to listen to what materials have to say may seem like a minor gesture, but perhaps it is precisely one of those gestures we most need.