Contemporary Cluster is pleased to present THE POST-MATERIAL ARCHIVE 02, a solo exhibition by Elisa Capucci (Italy, 1998) and the second chapter of an extensive artistic investigation rooted in contemporary Neo-materialist and post-humanist thought. The exhibition, opening on Thursday 4 December at the historic Complesso delle Murate in Florence, has been generously supported by the Danish Art Council. The works on view were conceived and produced at Thoravej 29, provided by ArtHub Copenhagen, where the artist is currently conducting her research.

The Post-Material Archive 02 explores the kinships between living and non-living beings, the interactions between species and productive infrastructures, and the possible configurations of post-human futures. Capucci’s research does not regard sculpture as a mere formal or aesthetic result, but as an active, epistemic, and pedagogical practice.

Drawing on speculative realism and vital materialism, with particular reference to the thought of Donna Haraway, the artist investigates sculpture as a diffractive instrument capable of reconfiguring the relationships between humans and complex matter. In this perspective, the sculptural work becomes a site of memory, a device for the elaboration of grief, and a space of active transformation. Haraway’s notion of Communities of Compost informs Capucci’s exploration of the vitality and agency of organic, urban, and industrial matter, shifting the focus from formal outcomes to relational processes that dissolve the boundaries between body, space, species, and infrastructures.

The artist employs sculpture as a diffractive apparatus able to generate new narratives through the layering, interference, and metamorphosis of materials. This approach is expressed primarily in installations conceived as multisensory environments and ecosystems in continuous transformation. These compositions arise from the combination of industrial components, organic matter, and urban residues collected from the places the artist moves through daily. Scraps and fragments, through processes of sculptural modelling, assemblage, reactivation, and casting, take shape as new hybrid corporeal entities. Through this act of recomposition, the work becomes a shared device of memory and contemporary representation, questioning how our active relationship with matter contributes to processes of knowledge and to the construction of collective consciousness.

Capucci devotes particular attention to the agency of neglected or discarded materials, examining their capacity to generate awareness, cognitive flexibility, and ethical responsibility toward contemporary socio-economic issues. In this second chapter of the project, the artist invites the public to pause, remember, and cultivate new forms of coexistence, forms capable of emerging and persisting even within the ruins of the present, rethinking the relationships that bind bodies, infrastructures, and current socio-economic systems.

Elisa Capucci holds both a BA and MA in Sculpture from the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna, followed by a study period in London where she attended the Master of Fine Arts at Chelsea College of Arts (UAL). Her training includes studio assistant positions with internationally recognised artists such as Michael Dean (London) and Uffe Isolotto (Copenhagen). She is also the founder of HIDDEN GARAGE, an independent space in Bologna dedicated to emerging artists and autonomous curatorial practices.

— Contemporary Cluster