[PCdV], August 22 – September 26, 2026 (Valparaíso, Chile)
Exhibition IRA_ESPERANZA_FRUSTRACIÓN
Curated by Christian Castro

3D-printed PLA / LED sign installation
Edition 1/3

"Se vogliamo che tutto rimanga com'è, bisogna che tutto cambi."
"If we want everything to stay as it is, everything must change."

This piece is the second installment of Il Gattopardo (2025), previously presented at Espacio O Gallery (Santiago) and Progetto Empegno (Bracciano, Italy). Where the first version situated Lampedusa's phrase within the register of luminous sculpture and symbolic gesture, Il Gattopardo II transposes it into a different apparatus: that of institutional communication.

The work that greets the viewer is an installation comprising four illuminated LED signs arranged vertically on the wall, like the lines of a poem or the paragraphs of a decree. Against a black background, in a typeface of white dots that recalls the information panels of airports, train stations, hospitals, and ministries, the full phrase by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa unfolds in its original Italian. The cold light of the LED is not neutral: it is the same light that fills waiting rooms, the corridors of detention centers, and the offices of bureaucratic power. Much of the piece's tension lies in that coldness.

The quotation, drawn from Il Gattopardo (1958), condenses a political paradox that Lampedusa identified in nineteenth-century Sicily and that power has practiced without interruption ever since: transformation as a strategy of preservation. Every regime that arrives promising change, every electoral cycle that reproduces the same structures, is a reissue of that mechanism. The work does not cite the novel decoratively; it displaces it onto a medium that imposes upon it a new urgency. The institutional LED turns a literary phrase into a bulletin, a warning, something that seems on the verge of demanding that a space be cleared or an order obeyed.

Within the context of Ira, Esperanza, Frustración, this rereading of Il Gattopardo finds a precise channel: where the first version operated as a critical mirror of contemporary politics in general terms, this second piece installs it directly within the visual grammar of power—signage, communiqué, protocol—to ask what remains of promised change when anger, hope, and frustration take turns without altering the structure that produces them.

The piece is produced entirely through 3D printing—housings, supports, joints—a decision that is at once aesthetic, economic, and political. The visible cables connecting the signs are not concealed; they are part of the work, underscoring its constructed character and its condition as a machine.

Photography courtesy of: Carlos Silva & Cristian Maturana

All pieces printed by: Studio Maipa

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