NIGRI CORVI PARTURIENT ALBAS COLUMBAS: GENEALOGIES OF ILLUSION IN MAGDALENA FERMINA’S ANTHOLOGICAL EXHIBITION

Illusion and disillusion represent the dialectical poles that have traversed Magdalena Fermina’s artistic research for years, finding synthesis in the works gathered in Nigri corvi parturient albas columbas, her solo exhibition held from October 18 to November 15, 2025, at SCD Studio, Via Bramante 22N in Perugia, curated by Barbara Pavan.

The exhibition project proposes a trajectory that brings into dialogue some of the artist’s most significant cycles, outlining a path that is both intimate and universal. It is accompanied by a catalogue published by Al3vie Editore, with texts by Davide Artico, Lorella Giudici, and Luca Vannozzi.

The Exhibition

The exhibition opens with a curtain embroidered with La colomba by Trilussa: a liminal gesture inviting viewers to cross the threshold of illusions and confront reality in its barest essence. From here begins Disenkanto, a Judeo-Spanish word that denotes the loss of enchantment, the fracture between desire and reality. The installation features white-on-white embroideries of iconic advertising slogans from the 1980s, a decade steeped in optimism and confidence, now emptied and rendered spectral by the awareness of the contradictions and crises that followed those promises of progress.

The path continues with Nuntius Dei, a cycle initiated over fifteen years ago and still evolving: photographs of stone angels, sepulchral guardians, stitched shut with surgical thread. Figures that once symbolized protection and transcendence here become silent relics, deprived of voice, witnesses of a West that, emancipated from the power of religions, has surrendered to other forms of faith: the market, technology, the illusion of infinite progress.

The reflection on illusion and disillusion also extends to the dynamics of daily life. In AltF4, Fermina investigates suspended lives glimpsed through windowpanes and smartphone screens: fragments of existences oscillating between being and appearing in a social fabric increasingly marked by fragile, mediated relationships. With Medea, the artist addresses the ambivalence of primal emotions, showing how maternal love itself can become a destructive force, generating wounds transmitted across generations.

The exhibition concludes with De nexibus quibus mundus capitur (Of the connections by which the world is captured), the artist’s latest project. The invisible threads of technology, communication, and consumption materialize as a web that envelops and imprisons the planet, making visible the often-repressed cost of our daily choices. The work reflects on the illusions of the present and foreshadows the disillusions of the future, while at the same time inviting a moment of awareness and offering, through art, the possibility of looking beyond the surface.

Nigri corvi parturient albas columbas is thus both an anthological exhibition and a manifesto: fragments of cycles and visions which, like tesserae of a mosaic, reconstruct the image of an era marked by broken promises yet still capable of generating new awareness. In this space suspended between poetry and politics, Fermina’s work becomes an invitation to interrogate our time, to lift the veil of illusion, and perhaps glimpse a new way of looking toward the future.

The Artist

Magdalena Fermina (Novara, 1968) is a visual artist and performer. She trained at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan, where she earned a degree in Scenography with a thesis on the art of the Makonde people, further developed through residencies in Mozambique. She subsequently completed a Master’s degree in Visual Arts and Performing Arts, specializing in Sculpture, with a research focus on Christian Boltanski and Roman Opałka.

She has exhibited in numerous Italian and international cities, presenting solo shows in institutions and galleries such as the German Cultural Center in Novara and Banca Sella in Genoa. Her work has been featured – among her most recent collective projects – in venues of note including Palazzo Medici Riccardi in Florence, the Museo Civico del Marmo in Carrara, the Castello delle Polveri on the Isola della Certosa in Venice, the Sala delle Pietre in Todi, the Cupola di San Gaudenzio in Novara, the Società Umanitaria in Milan, and the Museo del Ricamo e del Tessile in Valtopina, as well as in international contexts such as the Akaki Tsereteli Central Library in Batumi (Georgia). She has also taken part in festivals and fairs including the Borderline Arte Festival in Varallo Sesia and BAF Bergamo.