Exhibitions / Fossil of the Future

20 Jun 2026 - 20 Aug 2026

Opening time 10:00 - 23:00

Closing time 12:00 - 20:00

Cascina Bauci
Regione Serra Denari 10 - La Morra Italy

Transformation Between Nature and Artifice in the Works of Olga Buneeva

Olga Buneeva’s artistic research revolves around processes of transformation involving memory, matter, and living forms. Through ceramics, the artist develops a sculptural language in which observation of reality, imagination, and critical reflection converge into hybrid organisms that elude fixed classifications. Her works do not describe either the natural or the human world in a representational way; rather, they reveal their deep interconnections, fragilities, and ongoing metamorphoses.

Presented in the Langhe region, Fossil of the Future finds a particularly meaningful context. This territory, characterised by complex geological stratification and a historical relationship with the transformation of the land, offers an interpretive framework that resonates strongly with the artist’s practice. The clay Buneeva uses is itself a sedimentary material: a physical archive of different temporalities, capable of preserving traces while generating new forms. From this perspective, each sculpture can be understood as a meeting point between memory and possibility, between what endures and what continues to change.

The coil-building technique through which the artist constructs her forms entirely by hand rejects the standardisation of industrial processes in order to preserve the visible relationship between body and material. Clay is not forced into a predetermined shape; instead, it accompanies a slow and progressive process of growth. From this practice emerge organic and irregular structures that evoke fossils, seeds, archaeological finds, plant organisms, or forms still in the process of evolution. In Buneeva’s poetics, memory is never a static archive: it is a living matter that resurfaces, transforms itself, and generates new configurations.

This tension runs throughout the exhibition like an underground current. The works speak of consumption and solitude, protection and concealment, value and desire, dispersion and biological continuity. Ultimately, they speak of how every form of life—human, animal, and vegetal—is embedded within systems of relationships that both precede and exceed it. Social critique intertwines with ecological reflection; irony coexists with care; everyday details reveal broader structures. Each sculpture thus becomes a device through which to question the present.

At the origin of this research lies the artist’s continuous observation of her rural garden. It is not a subject to be represented, but rather an environment of study and experience from which much of her imagery emerges. Plants, mosses, seeds, organic forms, imaginary beings, current events, personal memories, and fragments of collective history coexist within the same mental landscape. It is from this attention to detail and to the relationships between seemingly distant phenomena that the five works in the exhibition take shape.

From this practice emerges a vision in which the boundary between reality and imagination becomes progressively thinner. The forms seem to come either from a distant past or from an as-yet-unknown future; yet, upon closer observation, it becomes evident that what appears fantastical often has its roots in dynamics already present in the contemporary world. The future is not imagined as an abstract projection, but as something already manifesting itself today through the social, environmental, and biological transformations that shape the present.

The Langhe, with its geological and cultural stratification, amplify this reflection. The landscape itself can be read as a material archive in which different temporalities coexist and overlap. In this sense, the dialogue between the artworks and the territory is not illustrative but structural: both investigate the relationship between memory, transformation, and duration.

Fossil of the Future is therefore a reflection on time as a process of accumulation and change. Each work appears both as testimony from a possible future and as a trace of the present. Ceramics—earth transformed by fire—becomes the medium through which this condition is made visible: a material that preserves the past, records the present, and offers a glimpse of forms that have yet to emerge.

Curated by Enrica Benedetto