The birth of art has a lot to do with the specular image of the wall. From prehistoric caves to the long history of frescoes, which from the Middle Ages reaches contemporary murals, walls have always spoken and continue to speak about our history and help to broaden the vision, making it somehow more complete. An extraordinary set of surfaces as memory outposts scattered throughout all cities, in churches, palaces, on monuments, which is part of history and makes walls carriers of profound and different meanings.

Within the institutional objective of the foundation aimed at caring for the relationship with historical heritage as an act of contemporary culture, the walls of the current exhibition venue of the foundation, dating back to the 17th century, have been used as a starting point for the development of the exhibition project entitled SURFACES WITH: . In fact, if contemporary art has exploded its own definition by insisting that it depends on the context, this aspect has been used as raw material for this exhibition that aims to relate the semiotic and historical universe present on the walls of the foundation's exhibition pavilion (frescoes, coats of arms, petroglyphs, inscriptions, cracks, archigraphs), in relation to the creative universe of some artists, who, in relation to the work, have engaged in a dialogue with the wall surfaces, intended both as surfaces welcoming the image, as osmotic devices for vision, and finally as membranes activating the exchange between work, artist, and spectator.

By mixing painting, photography, and installation, the exhibition, which does not happen "in a place" but "with a place", therefore starts from the memory of the signs present in the foundation's exhibition venue to show some works of contemporary art that, by sensitizing the surfaces of the environment, highlight the fundamental relationship between language, visual representation, and built space, inviting viewers to also pay attention to a hidden side of the use of exhibition spaces, that is, the walls of the exhibition space where signs or texts devoid of pretense are hidden, which, if in the past represented an outlet or a trace, today gain authority, becoming heritage elements.

In this context, the walls and walls of the SoutHeritage exhibition pavilion, as degraded testimonies of time and history, become the ideal framework for a project in which territory and architecture are no longer simply geographical locations and exhibition contexts, but become mediums themselves. In this perspective, the exhibition places at the center of the cultural experience not only works of contemporary art that transform the volumes of historical architecture into sensitive spaces and containers of collective experiences, but also the symbolic value of the same, in a setting that shifts the cultural experience towards a mixture of languages between contemporary visual arts and museography.

Shifting the focus from the signs present on the walls of the exhibition space to a group of artistic practices (the research of artists: Pierre Ardouvin, Stanley Brouwn, Andrea Francolino, Andrea Fraser, That’s Painting Production, David Tremlett, Ger van Elk), the exhibition not only redistributes power to all participating artists, but also generates a critical interrogation of its format as the public is invited to refer to the surfaces of the exhibition space as a whole. In this context, the exhibition is designed and articulated in such a way that every surface of the place - from the walls to the ceiling, down to the floor - is an integral part of the visual discourse in which architecture not only serves as a background, but actively dialogues with the works revealing connections between content and container, between art and space, suggesting a deeper and more layered reading of the visual experience.