Installation view of Fragments of Fire Worship (I & II), Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Venice, 2026, Photos by T-space, Courtesy of Fondazione Bvlgari
Fragments of Fire Worship
PRESENTED by fondazionE bvlgari Collateral Event of the Biennale Arte 2026
As part of the Biennale’s Collateral Events, the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana in Piazza San Marco will host the first exhibition promoted by Fondazione Bvlgari, with artists Lara Favaretto and Monia Ben Hamouda. Ben Hamouda has won the biennial prize established in 2017 by the Maison in collaboration with MAXXI, the National Museum of 21 st Century Arts, now carried forward by Fondazione Bvlgari.
In a world shaped by conflict, where the destruction of memory is an integral part of military strategy, Fragments of Fire Worship proposes a non-monumental form of resistance. It does not preserve, but exposes; it does not archive, but allows things to filter through. A blaze that does not destroy, but holds. A light that does not clarify. A cult of the unfinished, of wounded language, of knowledge that survives despite — and within — its constant threat of disappearance.
In the current geopolitical landscape, writing is among the first territories to be occupied: archives destroyed, books burned, languages marginalized, alphabets erased or rendered illegible. Fire returns cyclically as a tool of power — a gesture of purification, a punitive act, a strategy for the annihilation of memory. Yet fire is also what makes things visible, what leaves traces, what transforms without guaranteeing a stable form.
Fragments of Fire Worship moves within this ambivalence: it does not represent the fire, but adopts its logic.
The work takes shape in a time of diffuse combustion — a time in which language is subjected to extreme pressure, words emptied out, weaponized, censored, or turned into instruments of control. It emerges from this friction: from the impossibility of saying everything and the necessity of not remaining silent.
The signs that compose it present themselves as active remnants of a broken script, luminous presences that resist translation and clarity as an imposed value.
Inserted into a space historically devoted to the preservation of knowledge, the work does not celebrate its authority, but introduces a fracture. In a place founded on order, cataloguing, and transmission, these opaque signs render visible what every archive tends to remove: selection, exclusion, loss.
Not everything that exists can be preserved; not everything that is preserved can be read. Fragments of Fire Worshipoperates precisely within this zone of friction, where knowledge ceases to appear neutral and reveals its exposure to risk.
9 May – 22 November 2026
