This spring, Villa Bernasconi hosts Helvetropicos, a platform that brings together Switzerland-based artists with strong ties to Latin America. The exhibition explores hybrid identities and contemporary forms of cultural mixing through diverse works—installations, sculptures, paintings, and more—inviting visitors to rethink how reality is shaped and experienced.
Opening : Tuesday 5 May, 18:00 – 21:00
An extensive survey assembled from a long-standing research collection devoted to glass, this exhibition takes a contemporary look at a millennia-old material. Over two hundred glass and mixed-media works, including sculptural objects, design pieces and installations, testify to a transdisciplinary experimental spirit. Featuring artists such as Ettore Sottsass, Pierre Charpin, Betty Woodman, Bob Wilson, Giuseppe Penone, Jana Sterbak and James Lee Byars, the show examines materiality, technique and the porous boundaries between craft, design and contemporary art.
Opening : Thursday 23 April, 18:00
Guided Tours (in French)
Afro‑Caribbean Stories brings together works by Ivonne González Núñez and Laura Arminda Kingsley that weave narratives of memory, identity and visibility rooted in Afro‑Caribbean cosmologies. Through photography, writing, performance, painting, digital imagery and sculpture, the artists examine heritage, resistance, creolisation and the interconnections of the living. The exhibition pairs intimate archival gestures with experimental material practices to reveal layered histories and speculative modes of belonging.
Opening: 28 May, 18:00
Ana Carolina Sargenti presents drawings, paintings and sculptural elements that examine the processes used to identify people who disappeared during Argentina’s last dictatorship.
Using charcoal portraiture, engraved layers of earth, watercolour impressions and plaster forms, her practice navigates appearance and erasure. Works range from material excavations to subtle removals of surface—charcoal portraits created by subtracting from black reserves, and landscapes shaped from layered earth—probing memory, territory, disappearance and the reconstruction of collective traces.
Artist Jessica Decorvet investigates the landscape as an unstable concept where seeing implicates participation and representation transforms the world. The exhibition brings together drawings, textiles, ceramics and living plants to stage tensions between intense, almost vital wonder and cultural framing that distances the living.
Playing with scale from miniature objects to a monumental curtain, Decorvet unsettles assumptions: textiles become stained glass while ceramics verge on reliquary. The works evoke and question how perception and materiality shape our relation to place.
Opening: Tuesday 28 April, 18:00
May 1972 is an exhibition dedicated to Salvatore Emblema (Naples, 1929–2006), bringing together works produced between the late 1960s and the early 1980s. Across paintings, sculptures and installations, Emblema refines a conceptual language that interrogates materiality, form and temporality. The presentation highlights his experimental use of found materials, assemblage and reductive gestures, situating these works within postwar Italian avant‑garde practices and the artist’s evolving exploration of spatial and epistemic limits.
The International Museum of the Red Cross and Red Crescent presents the first European solo exhibition of Guatemalan Maya Kaqchikel artist Angélica Serech (*1982). Pach’un Q’ijul (Temps entrelacés – Deep Time) intertwines ancestral weaving gestures with personal and collective memory, drawing on Serech’s history shaped by Guatemala’s civil war. Using self-built looms and natural materials like corn husks and branches, her works explore resilience, repair, and the deep ties between textile traditions and humanitarian action.
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