Simona Uberto’s retrospective exhibition “Fatum Futura,” currently held in Lodi, spans thirty years of her artistic career (1996-2026) through approximately fifty works, including photography, installation, collage, sculpture, and environmental interventions. Born in Savona in 1965, Uberto consistently explores the boundary between reality and imagination, transforming observations of daily life into a poetic device. Her research focuses on themes such as the individual, space, and perception, analyzing the relationship between urban and natural environments and human action. The title, “Fatum Futura,” combines the Latin concept of “what has been spoken” (destiny) with “the time yet to come” (future possibilities), outlining the artist’s poetic approach which works with images suspended between memory and vision.
Since the 1990s, Simona Uberto’s research has focused on the urban dimension and everyday gestures. Series such as Interferenze (Interferences), Aggregazioni (Aggregations), Appartenenze (Belongings), and Incontri (Encounters) depict the city as a tapestry of micro-narratives, transforming passers-by and fleeting presences into a visual rhythm. Using the image as a “temporal frame” to capture the instant, Uberto starts with photographic fragments of urban reality and transforms them through cutting, enlarging, superimposition, and recomposition. This process results in images that progressively lose their original reference, creating an ambiguous territory where reality merges with mental construction.
More recently, her research has expanded to include landscapes, adopting a more visionary dimension. The Fata Morgana series is a significant example, featuring images that fluctuate between reality and mirage: skies reflecting like liquids, inverted skylines, and unstable horizons. The landscape transforms into a field of altered perceptions, challenging the viewer to reconsider what they see. The image, dissected and reassembled, transcends mere documentation to become a device that generates disorientation, revealing Uberto’s poetic strength in balancing compositional rigor with imaginative vision.
The exhibition is hosted at the Bipielle Arte Management Center in Lodi, designed by Renzo Piano. The display guides visitors through the artist’s evolution, from her early photographic series on urban flows to her more recent landscape visions. This journey highlights the coherence of her artistic practice which, despite utilizing diverse languages, maintains a constant focus on the perception of space and image.
A catalog titled Fatum Futura, published by Vanillaedizioni, accompanies the exhibition, featuring critical texts by Maria Laura Gelmini, Simona Bartolena, and Giorgio Bonomi, alongside a rich iconographic section. The exhibition thus provides a comprehensive and in-depth overview of Simona Uberto’s work, demonstrating how her research begins with reality to create images that challenge our perception of the world.
