Poemi Della Terra Nera

“There’s always a weak point, an Achilles’ heel – and that’s what I look for… How can one unearth the truth in a place that has done everything to erase the traces of deeply disturbing secrets?”
(W. Mutu)

The imaginative universe of Wangechi Mutu is inhabited by hybrid presences, ever-changing entities that transgress the boundaries between the biological and the mechanical, the mineral and the organic. Her figures, often female, emerge from a living collage of skin, leaves, metal, and fur. They are neither mythical creatures nor futuristic cyborgs: they are unruly organisms, embodied forms of resistance against normative aesthetics, the serial consumption of images, and dominant narratives about the body.

In works such as those exhibited in I Am Speaking, Are You Listening? (Legion of Honor, San Francisco, 2021), the artist weaves together themes of wounded and regenerated femininity, broken ecologies, and systems of visible and invisible domination. But Mutu does not proclaim: she fragments, distorts, and hybrids. Her works speak like mute, yet screaming oracles, in languages made of earth, muscles, and rust.

1. Subversion of the Black Female Body
Through material overlays, contaminated iconographic fabrics, and the surgical use of collage, Mutu deconstructs the long visual tradition that has reduced the Black body to a surface of colonial projection. Her figures elude any univocal interpretation: they resist the gaze, divert it, challenge it, wound it.

2. Radical Alliances with the Terrestrial
Sentinel-sculptures, erected as guardians of ancestral knowledge, embody a deep and irreducible relationship with soil, plants, water, and decay. In them, the female body is not an ornament but a sacred geography inscribed with memory, erosion, and fertility.

“I truly believe all art interrogates reality... and anyone really listening wonders: is power paying attention?”
(W. Mutu)

3. Aesthetics of the Uncanny
Glamour and violence, seduction and ruin, spirituality and mutation coexist in a visual language that destabilizes. Her works operate as apparitions: iconic yet unstable, sacred and carnal, they bring into the symbolic realm everything that culture has excluded – the monstrous, the deformed, the desiring.

4. A Diasporic Language of the Present
Mutu’s practice is inscribed within a radically planetary vision. It attracts and blends African aesthetic codes, diasporic echoes, postcolonial specters, and Afrofuturist imaginaries, creating a visual archive where future and past collapse into one another. Her art is a fluid, intersectional lexicon capable of speaking to the global without forgetting local wounds.

“I use the feminine as a lens; I don’t even think all my creatures are women. I just think I bring out the feminine in them.”
(W. Mutu)

From June 10 to September 14, 2025, the Galleria Borghese will host, for the first time within Cardinal Scipione’s residence, a solo exhibition by Kenyan-American artist Wangechi Mutu titled Poems of the Black Earth, curated by Cloé Perrone. Like the recently concluded exhibition on the Baroque poet Giovan Battista Marino, this project reflects the museum’s ongoing interest in poetry. Conceived as a site-specific intervention unfolding across the museum's interiors, façade, and Secret Gardens, it challenges classical tradition through suspensions, fragmented forms, and new imagined mythologies, creating a multilayered dialogue between the artist’s contemporary language and ancient authority.

The title evokes the deep significance of Mutu’s dual practice, woven between poetry and mythologies yet deeply rooted in contemporary social and material contexts. The “black earth,” rich and malleable under rain like clay, appears across multiple geographies – including the Secret Gardens of the Galleria Borghese, which resonate with the artist’s imagery. From this earth, the sculptures seem to emerge, shaped by a primordial force, giving life to stories, myths, memories, and poems. The metaphor highlights the generative and transformative power of her work: grounded in materiality yet open to multiple future interpretations.

Mutu’s intervention introduces a new vocabulary into the historic and symbolic architecture of the Galleria Borghese. Through sculpture, installation, and moving image, she proposes an innovative approach to the museum space, challenging hierarchy, permanence, and fixed meaning. Her works question the visual weight and authority of the collection, adopting strategies of suspension, fluidity, and fragmentation. In this way, the museum is not simply a static container of objects, but a living organism, constantly transforming, shaped by loss, adaptation, and reconfiguration.

The exhibition unfolds in two complementary sections. Inside the museum, Mutu radically rethinks spatial orientation. Her sculptures never conceal the Borghese collection but subtly add to it. Ethereal presences float in the air, fly lightly, or rest on horizontal surfaces. Works such as Ndege, Suspended Playtime, First Weeping Head, and Second Weeping Headchallenge gravitational logic, gently hanging from ceilings and framing new perspectives. This act of suspension is not merely formal but suggests a shift in historical narratives and material hierarchies. The museum’s visual field is reconfigured, opening new perceptual modes to the viewer.

Materials—bronze, wood, feathers, earth, paper, water, and wax—are essential to the ethics of the exhibition. Bronze in particular sheds its traditional associations to become a vehicle of ancestral memory, recovery, and multiplicity. By inserting organic, fluid, changeable substances into a context historically dominated by marble, stucco, and gilded surfaces, the artist reaffirms a poetics of transformation and becoming—anticipating a central theme in the museum’s 2026 program: metamorphosis.

Poems of the Black Earth invites us to transcend fixed perspectives, shifting our gaze to allow the coexistence of multiple narratives, and revealing the museum not only as a space of memory but as a place of imagination and transformation. Mutu’s interventions urge viewers to inhabit the museum differently, to see not only what is displayed, but what has been removed, silenced, or made invisible.

Outside, on the museum façade and in the Secret Gardens, the following works are displayed: The Seated I and The Seated IV, two modern caryatids originally created for the façade of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (2019) as part of the Façade Commission, marking a pivotal moment of engagement with a public institution; Nyoka, Heads in a Basket, Musa, and Water Woman, which reinterpret archetypal vessels as spaces of transformation. In The End of eating Everything, Mutu expands her artistic language through video, adding a temporal and immersive dimension to her ongoing exploration of myth. These works give life to new hybrid forms—part human, part mythological, part symbolic container—drawing from East African traditions and global cosmologies, as if emerging from symbolic soil. Their poised presence in the gardens and on the façade offers a counterbalance to the site’s classical order, challenging idealized form and linear narration in favor of ambiguity, otherness, and spiritual presence.

Sound—real or suggested—and its traces play a subtle yet pervasive role in the exhibition: from the suspended rhythm of Poems for my great Grandmother, to the whispered lyrics of Grains of War, drawn from Bob Marley’s song War, inspired by a key figure in anti-colonial movements, Haile Selassie I (1930–1974), the last Emperor of Ethiopia, whose 1963 UN speech called for an end to racial injustice. Language becomes sculptural, and sound a form of memory.

“A fragmented world and time, in which material details resonate with metaphorical overtones: Mutu’s work at the Galleria Borghese compels us to look more intensely and attentively not only at contemporary creativity, but also at the space and the artworks of the Galleria. By looking up or down, we encounter Mutu’s sculptures and installations, which never block the view of the permanent collection, but enrich the visitor’s experience by engaging with the site's history. They invite us to search for spirits, ghosts, transformation, and poetry—to go beyond the visible, beyond our horizon and its familiar beauty,” says Francesca Cappelletti, Director of Galleria Borghese.

The exhibition continues at the American Academy in Rome, where Shavasana I is on display. The bronze figure, lying down and covered with a woven straw mat, is titled after the yoga pose "shavasana" (corpse pose) and inspired by a real news event. Its placement in the Academy’s atrium, among Roman funerary inscriptions, amplifies themes of death, abandonment, and the dignity of life.

With this exhibition, Galleria Borghese continues its commitment to contemporary art, following Universal Gestures by Giuseppe Penone (2023) and Louise Bourgeois: The Unconscious of Memory (2024), offering a renewed vision of space through the lens of a major international artist.

The exhibition is made possible thanks to the support of FENDI, official sponsor of the project.

The accompanying public program, titled Existing as a Woman, is organized by Electa with Fondazione Fondamenta and explores the exhibition’s themes through conversations and lectures with institutional partners.

PRESS CONTACTS
Lara Facco P&C
[email protected]
Lara Facco | M. +39 349 2529989 | E. [email protected]
Camilla Capponi | M. +39 366 3947098 | E. [email protected]
Marianita Santarossa | M. +39 333 4224032 | E. [email protected]
Alberto Fabbiano | M. +39 340 8797779 | E. [email protected]

Galleria Borghese
Piazzale Scipione Borghese 5 - Rome
www.galleriaborghese.beniculturali.it
https://galleriaborghese.beniculturali.it/exhibition/poemi-della-terra-nera/