Venice Design Biennial 2023 — Auto-Exotic

Venice Design Biennial 2023 — Auto-Exotic. Venice, 19 May – 18 June 2023

Curated under the theme Auto-Exotic, the fourth edition of the Venice Design Biennial invited designers and artists to reimagine the notion of elsewhere; not as a distant geography, but as an internal condition.
If traditional exoticism projected otherness onto faraway lands, Auto-Exotic proposed a reversal: a self-exoticism, an introspective gaze into the hidden folds of our own culture and imagination.

In this framework, Riccardo Rizzetto presented works from his ongoing series Secature and Crashes within the unexpected context of the San Sebastiano Bowls Club — a modest social space turned into a site of reflection on material and cultural identity.

Through acts of cutting, folding, and reassembling discarded materials, Rizzetto’s practice embodies a form of infra-exoticism: a search for the unfamiliar within the familiar.
His golden sutures transform fractures into connective lines, suggesting that the true elsewhere may reside within our own residues — in what we overlook, discard, or deem obsolete.

At once intimate and infrastructural, his works resonate with the Biennial’s curatorial question: what happens when the exotic no longer lies abroad, but within the material culture of the everyday?
In Venice — a city historically suspended between East and West — Secature and Crashes unfold as quiet meditations on care, continuity, and the seductive strangeness of what we already are.

SELECTED PRESS

Riccardo
Rizzetto
Studio