By Rebecca Ceccatelli. Cover image by Claudio Ripalti: Federico Gori at Museo di Sant’Orsola, Florence. Courtesy of Museo Sant’Orsola.
Some places are born to have a mutable life, as if their fate were predestined since their very foundation. And in fact, this is partly the story that characterizes the ancient monastery of Sant’Orsola, in the very heart of Florence. Originally a place dedicated to prayer and spirituality, it later became a wartime refuge, a tobacco factory, and more recently, an open-air cinema.
Dressed, stripped, redecorated, and once again gutted, this place now seems to have found peace—or at least for a while. For years it has been a construction site dedicated to the renovation of the building. In 2026, Via Guelfa will see the opening of a new museum, the Museo di Sant’Orsola, which already bears the name today. Over the next year, a true transformation will unfold, culminating in the official opening of the institution. Without a permanent collection, the museum has chosen to make the building itself the protagonist, with the voids that remain within its walls.
Much as has already happened in its spaces: The Rose That Grew From Concrete is the third and final exhibition in a series hosted in the construction site of Sant’Orsola—a prelude to the future identity of the building as an institution dedicated to contemporary art and the dialogue it establishes with the history of the place that hosts it.
Following Oltre le mura di Sant’Orsola (2023) and Rivelazioni (2024), the site greets the public one last time with this closing exhibition.
Sant’Orsola Hosts Final Exhibition Celebrating Resilience Through Art
The final temporary exhibition presents itself as a hymn to survival, even in the darkest places. Quoting the poem by Tupac Amaru Shakur, the image of the rose growing from concrete becomes a metaphor for continuous resilience in the face of adversity—of how flowers can still bloom from the ruins of the past.
“Now or Never,” as curator Morgane Lucquet Laforgue declares, underlines the unique opportunity given to the 14 selected artists who temporarily inhabit the 17,000 square meters of the complex. It is truly a carpe diem, a chance to capture the last essence of a building that still lacks a fixed identity.
The international artists create site-specific works in close dialogue with the materiality of the place and its histories. They are the first actors in the regeneration and awakening of the complex, starting precisely from that concrete which will form the foundations of the new museum.
Art, Nature, and Concrete Reimagined at Sant’Orsola
But this is not only about materiality. The connection to the building’s concrete is also conceptual, as the artists draw upon ancient traditions once practiced within its walls. Techniques such as weaving, ceramics, oil and lime painting are reinterpreted in their works.
In a place once stripped and damaged, plants and flowers have begun to grow again in unlikely corners, and its fragmented heritage is slowly taking a unified form—without erasing the traces of its past—beginning, once again, from the rose that grew from concrete.
The exhibition unfolds like an imaginary archaeological journey in which artists and artisans explore cycles of life, abandonment, and revival, the phases that have defined this place. Their works share a common tribute to the strength of nature as a starting point.
Shubha Taparia’s Vault Installation at Sant’Orsola
The vault that will soon rise above the official entrance of the museum is currently the one welcoming us during its final pre-exhibition. It is here that artist Shubha Taparia installs part of her work Continuum, closely connected to its alter ego Fondo d’Oro, which appears later in the exhibition. A hallmark of Taparia’s practice is the use of gold leaf, understood both as a material that can transform the perception of space and as an element that enhances its liminal quality. Drawing inspiration from Indian cosmological traditions, in the first work the artist applies this material to the vaulted ceiling above us, while in the second she applies it to the floor, in a more visible and tangible location. However, for Taparia, as tradition also holds, there is no hierarchy between above and below, beginning and end; therefore, she applies gold leaf to walls, ceilings, floors, and hidden corners, creating a harmonious cyclical effect.
Vestiges: Traces of Sant’Orsola’s Past
Vestiges is a section of the exhibition that explores the tangible and intangible traces of Sant’Orsola’s past. Here, artists use plays of transparency, reflections, and light to evoke what is no longer visible or present. It opens with Les âmes de Sant’Orsola, glass ghosts rising from the excavations in the first large hall, positioned exactly where archaeological remains such as coins, pins, and nails were found, alongside a large stained-glass window created with candle soot painting (Le retable vaporé), installed directly above the 14th-century altar. Marion Flament’s work captures the evaporation of the past through a unique glass fusion technique.
La Naissance de Lisa: Clara Rivault’s Tribute
Further in, a horizontal stained-glass window reveals a glow emanating from a sepulcher: here Clara Rivault imagines La Naissance de Lisa, a stained-glass piece suspended above the presumed tomb of Lisa Gherardini, the famous Mona Lisa. What was buried reemerges in glass form, complementing Marion Flament’s vision of rebirth and regeneration.
Embroidered Histories by Davidovici & Ctiborsky
But Vestiges also includes the works of Davidovici & Ctiborsky, who, in collaboration, reinterpret digital 3D reconstructions of the site with needle and thread on delicate organza surfaces. On them, they embroider portals that play with the perspective of the hall, inviting viewers to reconstruct, through the light and ethereal veils of organza, ancient visions of the building’s history and those who once inhabited its spaces. These are interior portraits of Sant’Orsola, executed in needle-painting: a technique of layers, overlaps, and transparencies that contrasts with the brutality of raw architecture (La guérison des pierres and Fenêtre perpetuelle).
The hall closes with the intervention of Chris Oh, who defines himself as an “image editor.” His work consists in the selection and re-contextualization of small details of historical artworks in different contexts, giving them new meanings and languages. Here he reintroduces a detail of the ancient decorations of the complex (Current) and the face of a Magus taken from Benozzo Gozzoli’s chapel in the nearby Palazzo Medici Riccardi, painted on a tile found on the construction site (Fragment).
Abandonment and Memory: Artistic Explorations at Sant’Orsola
What Vestiges recalls is, however, a previous act of Abandonment, which in turn is evoked in the exhibition and forms another section of interventions—this time aimed at recreating a geography of the ancient human traces scattered in the plaster, in the stone, and in the plants that are being reborn today. Abandonment is what creates emptiness or accumulation, and for Chiara Bettazzi it is precisely accumulation—beginning with that of her own family—that generates her art.
Chiara Bettazzi’s Monumental Memory Columns
In the hall that welcomes us, the artist creates true column-sculptures inside the former apothecary. As she recounts, whenever she exhibits in a new location she always brings part of her studio with her—her archive—which is assembled, dismantled, and reassembled at the end of the exhibition as a form of detachment. These columns are composed of both natural and artificial elements, some taken from the construction site, some from her archive: ancient books, roots, false teeth, umbrellas, broken glasses, and fans. She thus creates monumental columns made of fragments of other people’s memories: transforming individual memories into collective memory, through a vocabulary of common objects, the artist evokes possible stories and narratives of the place in which she constructs these totems (Sospinti in permanenza). Every fragment becomes a possible trace to be questioned.
Bianca Bondi’s Salt-Crystallized Kitchen
Bianca Bondi, on the other hand, in the adjacent former kitchen, creates Sotto Sale, the process of a fictitious abandonment of objects such as bowls and other utensils of the old kitchen, left to crystallize under a thick layer of salt. The artist activates slow processes of transformation, crystallization, and waiting, through materials that require the action of time to reach their final state, thus turning these objects into fossils positioned between the sacred and the everyday. Once again, she evokes old stories of Sant’Orsola’s inhabitants and passersby—not only human, but also vegetal and natural—as Elise Peroi reminds us with her tapestries (Vestiges des plantes absentes and Là où transperce la lumière des jardins), in which she depicts herbs and flowers once cultivated in the garden and the flora that still inhabits its spaces. The visit through this hall becomes a passage across the transparencies of the embroideries, laid out horizontally along the visitor’s path, transforming the crossing into a poetic walk.
Time: The Final and Strongest Force in the Exhibition
Time, finally, is the last section of the exhibition, and perhaps the strongest agent shaping it.
It begins with the wind rising in the first hall of the show, in Federico Gori’s work Come afferrare il vento, composed of about 2,200 copper oak leaves hanging in space, oxidized almost by the passage of a breath that keeps them suspended in the air, still trembling as visitors walk by. What the artist attempts to do is represent how to capture the wind, how to stop that unstoppable force, how to hold back time.
Similarly, Mireille Blanc, assisted by the Bianco Bianchi workshop, creates paintings that suspend the time of everyday moments, mainly linked to the conviviality of shared meals, as in the convent refectory. Often, meal remnants or still lifes are the subjects of her works, which become kitsch representations when rendered both in reduced dimensions and on a monumental scale.
But as we leave the exhibition, in a corridor flanking the inner courtyard, time suddenly freezes in Flora Moscovici’s Polvere e Cielo, where our own bodies pause in suspended expectation and wonder. Here pigments of lime, water, and pink spread across walls and floors using the ancient technique of fresco, recreating a faded rainbow and a chromatic journey. Colour becomes atmosphere, and the companion that guides us toward the exit of the exhibition.
