Skultoflower Maliumbas Black Ball: art and memory in Venice for Art Night 2019

A black flower that speaks of the future

On June 22, 2019, during Art Night Venezia, the Arsenale pulsed with a visionary energy — an art capable of merging past and future, protest and poetry. In the heart of
Spazio Thetis, an international hub of contemporary art, Italian artist Stefano Bressani unveiled his monumental work Skultoflower Maliumbas© Black Ball, in a performance destined to leave a lasting mark on collective memory.

The evening was part of the group exhibition FRIENDS – Artists, curators & gallerists, which accompanied the 58th Venice Art Biennale and the opening of the Venice Boat Show. A diverse and international audience was guided through an immersive experience of art, industrial memory, ecological reflection, and theatricality.

A poetic sculpture between protest and beauty

Bressani’s work, part of his Skultoflower series, unites strength and fragility: a black flower, wrapped in synthetic fabrics derived from petroleum, rising from a structure that evokes the industrial past of the Arsenale.

At its core, the Black Ball embodies a symbolic short circuit — beauty contaminated, nature wounded, yet still capable of redemption through art. Made of synthetic fiber, the sculpture denounces with grace the consequences of consumerism, transforming the very material of pollution into an aesthetic and ethical gesture.

A collective ritual of word, light, and memory

The Piazzale Beverly Pepper became the stage for a ritual performance in which laser lights, vapor, and virtual sparks evoked the craft of Venetian blacksmiths, restoring dignity and poetry to the space. The performance featured the voice of Stefania Rusconi, reciting verses by Giulia Birolini, creating a vibrant dialogue between word and matter.

Curator Robert C. Phillips and Antonietta Grandesso, cultural director of Spazio Thetis, emphasized the work’s power as an act of shared memory and poetic resistance.

A work that continues to question

Today, Skultoflower Maliumbas© Black Ball lives in the gardens of Spazio Thetis: a monumental, silent flower that continues to speak to those who look at it. It does not merely decorate — it questions, transforms, resists. And it tells, without words, of a beauty born even from pain.