Words were said that I cannot recall
Federico Arani and Andrea Lo Giudice
September 23 - November 14
2026
Federico Arani and Andrea Lo Giudice
September 23 - November 14
2026
Flexitron is pleased to present ‘Words were said that I cannot recall’, a duo exhibition by Federico Arani and Andrea Lo Giudice.
EN/IT
Exhibition text and translation by Giulia Crivellaro
There is a house whose threshold my body has never crossed.
And yet, I have been there forever.
It is a sense of familiarity that goes beyond things, beyond space and what inhabits it, and yet remains inextricably bound to it and its history. Archives of family life, remnants and traces, objects retained, abandoned, or lost – all to remind us that nothing escapes time and that the price of memory is its structural incompleteness. Something inevitably gets lost, because remembering, like living, is an act in the present tense.
Hélène Giannecchini [1] wrote that our lives take on meaning through becoming linked to the lives of others. Others who must, however, be found. Sometimes, it is precisely objects, or their absence and evanescence, that allow us to recognize or rediscover ourselves. There are objects that lie beyond language; objects that, much like certain words, do not reduce their power to the field of semantics or the expression of a clear concept. They are a guttural sound, a filler word, an emotional sigh: the equivalent of seeing a finger pointing toward something off-screen that never enters the frame.
I believe it is possible to craft a story out of absence and the impossibility of translation, because what is missing, or what cannot be remembered or conveyed, serves as a clue to a way of living and a different kind of memory. After all, “our inheritance was left to us by no testament.” [2]
And so, failure (in preserving, remembering, or recounting) becomes the very method of the inquiry, its ontology. Making failure an integral part of how things unfold is both a legacy and a potentiality; it is the destiny of what remains on the margins—untold stories or lost objects—but also the fertile opportunity to fill that space with a personal, untranslatable element amplified by absence. Thus, an absent object can become vastly more precise and present, in its infinite vagueness, than any other object, precisely because it is capable of containing them all.
In every personal story, there is a threshold that represents not a state of transition, but a suspended existential state; a moment when the story itself, however specific, sheds its individuality and opens itself to resonance, becoming a relay. Gaston Bachelard calls this moment rêverie [3] . It is the opposite of a dream; it is the instant in which one relates to objects and spaces in a state of contemplative wakefulness open to the image. An image that does not arise from an idea, nor illustrate one, but rather simply is, in a way that is at once so specific and so vague as to make us spectators of something suspended, something both personal and collective.
“Words were said that I cannot recall” is an exhibition grounded in subtraction and a continuous re-hurl toward something that, whether ontologically or physically, is not present in the space.
Arani and Lo Giudice work individually yet collaboratively to construct an allusive space suspended in time, never truly projected into the future nor anchored in the past. It is a place that gains significance through this suspension, challenging the viewer to contemplate the present moment without the possibility of a single, definitive resolution.
“the Eternal Dance” addresses the impossibility of retrieving a past memory in the exact form and manner in which it originally occurred. Yet, by using a tattoo machine to carve into glossy paper that once belonged to the artist's architect father, the artist transforms the act of perforation into a magical, ritualistic, and sculptural gesture. Here, the failure to presentify something lost is not viewed as a limitation; rather, it represents the very possibility of creating something new through process and embodiment. In this way, the work transcends the artist’s personal history, opening itself to cross-pollination and defining a new horizon of possibilities.
Framing a limitation as a new possibility, and overturning the very conception of failure as a moment of potentiality rather than of rout, is also what Arani stages in this new version of “Third Attempt To Mould a Lens”, albeit from a different perspective. Arani focuses on the interstice, on everything suggested at the boundary between presence and absence. His work fully embraces and highlights the absent, creating a setting that is ambiguous yet controlled, where the viewer becomes a necessary choreographic element. Indeed, it is within the relationality of absence, object, space, and audience that a tension unfolds, one devoid of anticipation or any apparent external reference, offering the experience of witnessing a world that does not exist for us, but rather with us.
1. Hélène Giannecchini, An Army of Lovers Cannot Fail, trans. Anna Moschovakis (London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2026).
2. The phrase originates in René Char's Feuillets d'Hypnos (1946); the English translation used here follows Hannah Arendt's rendering in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Viking Press, 1961).
3. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994).
Floorplan
1. Federico Arani and Andrea Lo Giudice, Site-specific Intervention, 2026
2. Federico Arani, Third Attempt To Mould a Lens (new version), 2026, cracked salvaged lighthouse Fresnel lense, cardboard, light buld, rotatory platform, Site-specific installation, Dimensions Variable
3. Andrea Lo Giudice, the Eternal Dance, 2026, tattoo gun on architectural layout paper, glass and alluminium frame, 35.4cm x 45.7cm (framed)
Biographies
Federico Arani
Federico Arani (1995, Italy) is a London-Rome based visual artist. He studied Painting and Visual Arts at NABA in Milan and earned a MFA in Sculpture from the Slade School of Art in London in 2023. Federico is co-founder and member of the collective Porto Simpatica in Rome and the founder of Scoppio Project in Umbria, Italy. Recent and upcoming exhibitions include Cantadora, Rome (2026), NEST, AlULa (2025); Commonage, London (2025); Akku Kunstplattform, Emmen (2025); Litografia Bulla, Rome (2025); Anni Wu, Milan (2025); Salon ACME, Mexico City (2025); Hypha Studios, London (2024); Spaziomensa, Rome (2024); Split Gallery, London (2023).
Andrea Lo Giudice
Andrea Lo Giudice (Rome, 1994) is a visual artist whose research focuses on the semantic redefinition of places, words, and images. Through drawing, tattooing, installation, and performative actions, he recontextualizes the environments in which he intervenes, generating new poetic perspectives in which the Subject gradually blurs its boundaries, merging with the Other and with the surrounding space. He studied Painting at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma (ABA Roma), where he also earned an MA in Sculpture and New Technologies. Andrea is co-founder and member of the collectives Porto Simpatica. Recent and upcoming exhibitions include Cantadora, Rome (2026); Spazio Supernova, Rome (2026); Ten Documents, Rome (2026); Litografia Bulla, Rome (2025); ADA Project, Rome (2023); Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin (2023); Short Theatre, Rome (2023).