Artissima 2025 | Davide Sgambaro

In Whistle and I’ll Come to You, Davide Sgambaro creates a site-specific installation that combines play, destruction and memory.Through acts of combustion on the architecture, the artist uses firecrackers as instruments of action and disturbance: a gesture that is both childish and violent, leaving marks of explosion, burns and un-predictable residues in the space. The activation takes place during the set-up and always in the absence of an au-dience. The work, therefore, does not coincide with the performance, but with what remains of it: a physical trace of an invisible action, the silent residue of a gesture al-ready performed.In this way, Sgambaro constructs a melancholic narrative, in which the energy of play is deprived of its spectacle, and fun is transformed into memory and absence. The playful act — traditionally ephemeral and collective — becomes a solitary gesture, leaving behind an echo, a wound, an image of passing time. The artist thus invites us to reflect on a poetic dimension of exhaustion: what re-mains after the action is no longer the object or the moment of the explosion, but a surface imbued with traces, dust, burns and silences. The architecture itself is tran-sformed into living matter, into an organism that reacts to the action and records it in its own body.
The result is a sort of environmental monochrome: a space that does not represent, but absorbs and restores the experience of time, effort and transformation. Sgambaro works here on the border between play and trauma, creation and de-struction, intimacy and spectacle. The firecracker, an ephemeral and popular object, takes on a symbolic force: it becomes an emblem of capitalist spectacle, of our con-stant search for entertainment and visibility. However, in the artist’s gesture, this tool loses its festive and spectacular function; it becomes an act of subtraction, a way of freeing play from its logic of consumption.
What emerges is a subtle reflection on contemporary hyperproduction: by burning, dirtying and reducing, the artist produces a paradoxical anti-object, a work based on the consumption of itself and its context. The beauty that results is not that of the accomplished or the decorative, but that of error, risk and transformation.
Thus, Whistle and I’ll Come to You becomes a metaphor for desire and loss: a whistle in the void, a call that finds no answer, but leaves a trail, a mark, a muffled voice im-printed on the walls.