The ACASA Project: A New Book by Artist Adriana Affortunati

Contemporary artist Adriana Affortunati has just published a bilingual Italian-English catalog documenting her project ACASA, a livable artwork open monthly to the public in Borgo San Lorenzo in Tuscany, pursuing her long-standing interest in dissolving the boundary between domestic space, exhibition space, and the work itself.

Born from a direct intervention inside a house and constructed from the objects it contained; dishes, fabrics, portraits, clothing, and traces of everyday life, ACASA transformed the home into a livable work of art composed of site-specific installations created directly on the walls and in dialogue with the architecture of the rooms. The catalog features photographs by Adriana Affortunati and a critical essay by curator and researcher Nam Huh. 

Adriana Affortunati (São Paulo, 1982) is a visual artist who works primarily with sculptures and installations made from found objects and materials related to the places she visits. She studied Visual Arts at the Centro Universitário Belas Artes in São Paulo and Contemporary Aesthetics and Philosophy at the University of Milan. This particular background — studio practice paired with continental philosophical training —helps explain the conceptual rigor and the meditative, almost phenomenological quality that runs through her work.

Affortunati's career has developed across continents. Her exhibition history, spanning nearly 20 years, moves fluidly between Brazil, Austria, and Italy, with additional stops in South Korea, Portugal, Sweden, and Canada.

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The Balearic Islands Beyond the Party Scene

For decades, the Balearic Islands have been sold to the world as a soundtrack, the thump of a superclub in Ibiza, the party shuffle along Magaluf's strip, the sunrise over a foam-filled pool. It is a reputation that has made the archipelago famous and, in some corners, quietly miserable. But the four main islands, Mallorca, Menorca, Ibiza, and Formentera, are something far older and stranger and more layered than any DJ lineup suggests. Beneath the festival noise lies a civilisation worth discovering.

The Balearics were not waiting to be discovered by package tourists. They were already old when the Romans arrived. Menorca alone contains over fifteen hundred Bronze Age monuments, the highest density of prehistoric sites in all of Europe. The talayots, conical stone towers rising from the scrubland, and the taules, T-shaped stone altars of almost impossible engineering, stand in open fields where you can walk among them without a ticket booth in sight. The Naveta des Tudons, a megalithic burial chamber on Menorca's western plain, was already ancient when Hannibal is said to have passed through these islands recruiting his legendary slingers.

Ibiza, for its part, was a Phoenician colony of considerable importance. The Puig des Molins necropolis in Ibiza Town, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, contains thousands of Phoenician and Roman tombs carved into a hillside. The island's archaeological museum holds terracotta figurines, carved ivory, and Punic amulets that predate Christianity by centuries. Dalt Vila, the walled old city that crowns Ibiza Town, is one of the best-preserved Renaissance fortifications in the Mediterranean. Walking its cobbled lanes in the evening, when the cruise-ship day-trippers have gone and the light turns amber, it is easy to forget that there is a nightlife industry happening on the other side of the island at all.

The Balearic light, clear, mineral, almost surgical in summer, has drawn painters and sculptors for over a century. Mallorca was home to Joan Miró during the most productive decades of his life. His studio at Son Abrines in Palma, now the Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró, preserves his workspace exactly as he left it: paint-daubed floors, brushes stiff with pigment, unfinished canvases leaning against the walls. It is one of the most intimate artist's studios in Europe, and it tells you something about what the island gave him; the terracotta earth tones, the Mediterranean blues, the hard geometry of village architecture that no biography quite captures.

Picasso and the Mediterranean: A Lifelong Bond

Pablo Picasso was born in Malaga, on the southern coast of Spain, in 1881. The Mediterranean was not simply a backdrop to his childhood. It was a formative presence, a source of light, color, mythology, and sensory intensity that would return again and again throughout his seven-decade career. Even as he built his reputation in Paris and became one of the most celebrated artists of the twentieth century, the sea and the cultures surrounding it remained a constant gravitational pull.

Malaga in the 1880s was a port city with a warm, unhurried Mediterranean character. The light there is particular: bright and flat in summer, cutting sharp shadows at midday. Picasso grew up surrounded by this quality of light, and by the visual culture of Andalusia, which blends Moorish, Roman, and Spanish influences. His father, José Ruiz Blasco, was a painter and drawing teacher, and from an early age Picasso was exposed to art that was deeply rooted in the figurative tradition of southern Europe. Bullfights, fishing boats, local markets, and the bodies of bathers on the beach all entered his visual vocabulary before he left Spain.

He moved to Barcelona as a teenager, and that city added another layer to his Mediterranean formation. Barcelona in the late 1890s was a cosmopolitan, artistically alive city, influenced by Catalan modernisme and open to currents from France and the rest of Europe. The sea was present there too, and so was a culture of cafes, bohemian gatherings, and intense intellectual exchange. Picasso became part of that scene quickly, and it sharpened his ambition to work at a level beyond what Spain could yet offer him.

Paris was the necessary move. He arrived there in 1900 and eventually settled permanently, integrating himself into the center of the European avant-garde. Cubism, which he developed alongside Georges Braque in the years before the First World War, was a radical break from representational painting and would have been impossible outside the concentrated creative environment of Paris. The city gave Picasso a platform, a market, and a community of artists, critics, and collectors who understood what he was attempting.