E tuttavia crediamo che la vita sia piena di fortunate possibilità / Yet we insist that life is full of happy chance
Fondazione Made in Cloister, Naples
21 March – 21 June 2026

Yet we insist that life is full of happy chance is a proposal to reflect on persistence — as an archive of survival, a practice of mutual aid and an ethical imperative; ultimately, as an obstinate commitment to repair and to mend what has been broken. The exhibition looks at love as a sprawling landscape of vulnerability, error, and deliberate impurity, framing it as the labor of “un-despair” and exploring ways to conjure agency — however tenuous — in the face of polymorphous adversity.

The title is borrowed from Lyn Hejinian’s My Life, where this insistence is a claim against closure: an affirmation that contingency
is a condition to be lived with, and sometimes through, and not a defect to be corrected by meaning. “Happy chance” names method — a disciplined openness to what interrupts mastery, what cannot be owned by explanation or resolved into a lesson. The works gathered here trace love in that same register — as it persists through collective testimony, material witness, ritualized defiance, and the minor gestures of daily survival — not as triumph, but as the unresolved, ongoing labor of keeping one’s nerve when the alternative is abandonment. To quote philosopher Gillian Rose, “to live, to love, is to be failed; to forgive, to have failed, to be forgiven, for ever and ever.”

Another kind of material — also resembling flesh in texture and color — but with a different visual glossary is used by Pauline Curnier Jardin. Five objects from her ongoing series Peaux de Dame are disseminated around the cloister space. Made of artificial leather, these ghostly soft female bodies, discarded and wasted, hide — almost invisible — between the columns and the garden plots. They are limp and flaccid the way the human skin becomes with age; flat shadows, vague memories, or unwanted shabby costumes forgotten in the dressing room of a cabaret show. Unmistakably identified as human bodies creeping, teasing or clowning around, they also contain amorphous and eerie traits reminiscent of the more-than-human imagery from Aysha E Arar’s canvases.

Les voeux de l’amour fou numéro 1 and Fireflies were developed by Pauline Curnier Jardin together with the Feel Good Cooperative, an art collective of Colombian transgender sex workers and their allies from Rome, co-initiated by Curnier Jardin, photographer and sex worker Alexandra Lopez and architect and researcher Serena Olcuire during the pandemic in spring 2020. Based on affective and working relationships, this collaboration tests the limits of collectivity, raises the issues of authorship in art production, and celebrates the agency of the stigmatized community.

As part of this endeavour, the video work Fireflies is created as a cumulative contemplative experience and a form of shared affective labor, rather than a story narrated by the artist. The film was shot in the outskirts of Rome, in a place once known for the light-emitting insects whose production of light is a warning signal system. Today, car lights prowl around the forest at twilight in search of sex workers, and their bodies reflect and create light like the fireflies themselves.

Les voeux de l’amour fou numéro 1 is an object manifestation of the religious ritual for insisting on life full of happy chances. A group of giant candles were manufactured by Gambino, a famous candlemaker in Catania. First consecrated and then assembled by the artist and the Feel Good Cooperative, it was initially dedicated to St. Agatha, the patron saint of breast cancer patients, victims of sexual abuse and Mount Etna. In that year of the pandemic, the sex workers were deprived of work, the St. Agatha annual procession was canceled and the volcano happened to erupt more violently covering the city in ashes. The candles with their specific yellow hue, akin to the color of human skin and bodily fluids, adorned with sexual drawings remain unconsumed and full of hopes and prayers.