Cabinet Universalis
from the archive of Arianna Lelli Mami
Arianna Lelli Mami’s archive takes the form of a critical platform where art, design and visual thinking converge into a single research practice. Her poetics lie in the process: collecting, shifting, transforming. The archive becomes a dynamic system of observation, a place where fragments become tools of knowledge and the material itself becomes language.
Alongside her design work, Lelli Mami has developed an independent research project in which ceramics emerge as a medium of inquiry. Through an instinctive process, marked by errors, juxtapositions and intuitions, the artist constructs a language that blends archetypal forms and symbols from diverse cultures, generating a cosmos of objects suspended between memory and invention. Function takes a back seat, making way for the emotional and narrative dimensions: the object begins to tell stories and memories, becoming a living presence that, in silence, speaks to us about ourselves.
The Cabinet Universalis form the conceptual heart of this system. They are devices for recontextualisation in which natural fragments, artefacts and images are removed from their original context and reordered into a new poetic arrangement. Their balance between full and empty space evokes the sensibility of Fausto Melotti, for whom negative space was a living matter, a necessary pause between forms. In Lelli Mami’s work, the void becomes a field of tension, a structural element of thought, a place where form breathes and regenerates.
Around these devices unfolds a universe of ceramic micro-architectures, miniature theatres, stages, small worlds that gather natural artefacts, real or imaginary animals, fragments of objects stripped of their utility and restored to a symbolic dimension. The human body is reduced to signs, almost relics — a foot, a hand, an eye — whilst the space is populated by hybrid, enigmatic and silent presences, hailing from an archaic and visionary elsewhere.
The same tension runs through collages, drawings and photographs, born of cutting and reassembly. Here, fragmentation becomes a method: a critical tool for restoring unity through the partial, for narrating the continuity of time through its disintegration.
The exhibition design extends the creative and conceptual process. The choice of exhibition space — Nordic Thing — is an integral part of the curatorial project. The works are set within an environment of precise character, minimalist yet warm, which ideally recreates the atmosphere of Arianna Lelli Mami’s workshop-studio, inviting the visitor to slow down and rediscover the time to look.
At this point, the theme of Archivissima 2026, “What Is Not There”, resonates with the exhibition: absence becomes the driving force. The void guides the gaze, holds the fragments together, and makes room for memory to return and become a narrative.
