Yassine Ben Abdallah, Tin Ayala, Vera van der Burg, Arjun Das, Katarzyna Perlak, and Ginevra Petrozzi
How matter comes to matter
Curated by Cecilia Casabona
Scenography & Graphic Design by Paskamer
We write this in a time of war – a time when grief, trauma, and fear move through us collectively, when the fragility of life is not a philosophical abstraction but a daily, bodily reality. It is in this weight that the question of how we survive together becomes most urgent, and most tender.
How matter comes to matter explores precarity as a shared condition of life and a generative ground for collaborative survival — among human and nonhuman beings, living and non-living creatures. It approaches survival not as an individual achievement but as a collective practice shaped by vulnerability, interdependence, and uncertainty.
The exhibition brings together artistic practices that articulate survival through material kinship: relationships constituted through shared processes, dependencies, and what philosopher Karen Barad calls "intra-actions." Here, knowing becomes a form of becoming kin: to know something is to be entangled with it. Matter carries ancestral traces, memory, continuity, and transformation. Objects are not inert. They mediate, participate, and speak.
To move through this exhibition is to practice love in the sense bell hooks gave the word: not a feeling passively received, but a verb, a willed commitment to the flourishing of life. A love that extends toward the unfamiliar, the other, the nonhuman, the material world. A love that makes kinship where kinship was not thought possible, and opens toward a different understanding of history, of one another, and of the futures we might still hold in common.
General opening hours
June 13–August 30
Open every Friday, Saturday and Sunday between 12-5 PM
At Onomatopee
Public Programme
Exhibition opening
Friday, June 12, 2026
7:30–10 PM (doors open 7 PM)
Listening session + free drink
At Onomatopee
Free entrance
The Collective Survival Manual, A Collage Risograph Printing Workshop
Saturday, June 13, 2026
2-5 PM
At Onomatopee, riso space
More info follows soon