ABITO L’APPARTENENZA (I INHABIT BELONGING)
Li Biletska, Federica Duma, Anna Maconi, Mirko Ostuni, Niccolò Quaresima, Zhilin Xiang
INSIGHT Foto Festival is a contemporary photography festival spread out through locations in Varese, dedicated to emerging and mid-career artists. The 2026 edition is dedicated to ABITO, a word which is both noun (dress) and verb (I live / I inhabit), and which asks questions about the way we inhabit our body, spaces, relationships and society.
The Padiglione Morselli exhibition starts with a question: what would the world be like if we inhabited it as we really want to?
We have designed the exhibition starting from the individual and then opening up to the collective dimension. Body, identity and self expression are not isolated realities: what we are takes shape in our outlook, in recognition and in relation to others. To truly inhabit our identity means confronting these pressures and finding authentic forms of self expression and relationships.
On the ground floor, Federica Duma’s Metamorphoses narrates the physical and emotional development of a young woman through natural metamorphosis, shedding light on the fatigue of growing. In How does it feel? Li Biletska weaves together personal experience and collective history: rage, impotence, pain and waiting connected to war through body and writing, making identity the place where a shared trauma starts to settle and stratify. With Your Room, Zhilin Xiang explores domestic space as a place of memory and belonging even in the absence of physical bodies, a landscape of emotions marked by the diaspora and generational trauma. In the context of the university, these private spaces dialogue with places of learning and temporary belonging.
On the second floor, Anna Maconi and Niccolò Quaresima lead the way towards a construction of identity in relation to others. In 7 (different) possibilities of human beauty, Anna Maconi works with seven people to create seven representations of their idea of beauty which, through a process of collaboration and performance, become an exercise in freedom. In Fantamania, Niccolò Quaresima presents an unstable identity using self portrait, performance and transparent materials which deform the body without concealing it: an “ever-changing self” suspended between what it shows and what it withholds.
The second staircase takes us back to the ground floor, where Four to the dirt by Mirko Ostuni opens up the collective dimension. Raves and the traditional Salento pizzica become forms of ritual, belonging and liberation. The work makes the pages of the book “explode” in a rapid sequence of photographs, archive images, landscapes, performances and texts, using music and the movement of bodies to draw out the common thread between the two rites, a collective dimension and resistance to individualism.
The works exhibited here remind us that the world takes form through the way we choose to inhabit our bodies, to look at and recognise ourselves and each other, and to build together new spaces for expression and for freedom. The Padiglione Morselli exhibition suggests that the answer cannot be purely individual, but must take form within a dialogue, in relationships and in the building of new ways of belonging.
