By Diana Aslibekyan. Cover image courtesy Marisol Mendez, Quinceañera, 2020
Rifugio Digitale: Florence’s Underground Hub for Immersive and Multimedia Art
Rifugio Digitale is an innovative exhibition space in the heart of Florence, born from the regeneration of a former World War II air-raid tunnel known as the Rifugio della Fornace. Once a place of shelter from a tragic reality, it has been transformed into a site of renewal—where technology and art converge, opening new paths for contemporary expression. Conceived as a platform for digital art, immersive art, and multimedia art, the space embraces emerging practices and future-facing visual languages, moving decisively beyond the traditional gallery model.
Stepping into Rifugio Digitale feels like descending into a secret artery beneath the city. You follow the curve of an old WWII air-raid tunnel — once built to shield citizens from destruction — and suddenly find yourself in a dreamlike corridor of shadow, brick, and flickering light. Sixteen luminous screens pulse along thirty-three meters of underground space, transforming the bunker into a contemporary ritual path.
Marisol Mendez’s MADRE/PADRE: Redefining Identity in Florence’s Digital Art Scene
This metamorphosis, designed by Archea Associati, turns past trauma into a ground for artistic reinvention. It is here that MADRE/PADRE, the latest project by Bolivian photographer Marisol Mendez, takes over. Closing the curatorial cycle The Body I Inhabit, led by artistic director Laura Andreini and curators Irene Alison and Paolo Cagnacci, the show becomes a confrontation — intimate, political, emotional — with the foundations on which identity is built.
For younger viewers used to navigating fluid identities, hybrid aesthetics, and constant self-remixing, this tunnel becomes instantly relatable. It doesn’t offer a timeline; it offers a transformation.
MADRE/PADRE is not about simply illustrating gender. It is about exposing the mechanics behind the stories we’ve inherited — the myths that tell us who we should be before we even learn who we are. Growing up in Cochabamba, Mendez learned to recognize how colonial legacies, Catholic imagery, and Andean symbols intertwine to shape the definitions of “man” and “woman” in Bolivia.
But these myths don’t belong only to South America. Their logic echoes around the world: stereotypes, binaries, performative roles, inherited expectations.
Mendez approaches these archetypes not with rejection but with reconstruction. Her images are staged yet intimate, mythic yet deeply grounded, occupying the cinematic space between reality and imagination. She reveals identity as a dynamic architecture — something built, broken, rebuilt, and constantly negotiated. For a generation that questions every inherited script, this is not just art; it’s resonance.
Girls Who Don’t Ask Permission: The New Faces of MADRE
The MADRE series unfolds like a visual uprising. Each image challenges centuries of symbolic reduction, where women were confined to just two roles: saint or sinner, Madonna or Magdalene. Mendez’s subjects reject this dichotomy. They step into the frame not as tropes, but as decision-makers. Quinceañera (2020) is a perfect example. At first glance, the young woman in her deep red dress seems part of a familiar rite of passage. Yet the longer you look, the more her expression cuts through the glossy ritual. There is assertion in her posture and intelligence in her restraint. The photograph becomes a portrait of someone who knows exactly what the world expects of her — and is quietly rewriting those expectations.
PADRE Series: Breaking Stereotypes of Masculinity
If MADRE dismantles stereotypes of femininity, PADRE deconstructs masculinity from the inside. Here, Mendez spotlights the pressures faced by men in societies where toughness is a mandate and vulnerability is taboo. In Charro (2023), the famed cowboy — symbol of virility, pride, domination — melts into shadow. His face fades, leaving only the shell of the icon. The result is haunting: a man caught in the gap between who he is and who he is supposed to be.
PADRE offers men something rare: permission to be uncertain. To be soft. To be whole. For younger audiences used to discussing toxic masculinity and emotional resilience, the work feels deeply relevant.
Rifugio Digitale Florence: Why You Can’t Miss This Immersive Art Exhibition
Rifugio Digitale doesn’t merely display Mendez’s work — it becomes an extension of her thinking. The architecture, born in a moment of historical fear and later transformed through digital design, mirrors the duality at the heart of MADRE/PADRE: the past you inherit and the future you build.
Walking through the installation feels like stepping into a consciousness laboratory. Images flare and fade, shadows stretch, and colors ignite against the raw brick. The narrow passage forces bodily participation: you don’t just look at the photographs, you move through them. They flank you like presences, push against your thoughts, and shift your internal pace. The space becomes a metaphor: identity is a tunnel too — inherited, enclosed, but ultimately traversable.
Until 11th January 2026, the exhibition runs Wednesday through Saturday, offering time not just to view the work but to return to it — to let it evolve with your own reflections. For younger visitors, accustomed to immersive, interactive, and shared experiences, MADRE/PADRE provides not a static display but a communal terrain: a place to think aloud, confront internalized beliefs, and renegotiate identity.
As the final installation in The Body I Inhabit, MADRE/PADRE delivers a statement that is both fierce and hopeful. It suggests that identity is not a fixed inheritance but a remix — a negotiation between cultural memory and personal reinvention.
Inside this digital underworld, past narratives flicker but lose their authority. New narratives emerge from the cracks. And in the interplay of image, architecture, and movement, viewers are invited to imagine themselves differently. Marisol Mendez offers possibilities. She hands back to each viewer a question that feels both ancient and urgently contemporary: “If the roles we were given were never meant to contain us, who might we dare to become”?
