At the Galleria Borghese, Mutu reimagines the weight of classical tradition through suspension, hybridity, and the generative force of black soil.
Installation view with Throned, Wangechi Mutu. © Galleria Borghese
The Galleria Borghese presents ‘Black Soil Poems’, the first solo exhibition in the museum dedicated to Kenyan-American artist Wangechi Mutu. Curated by Cloé Perrone, the project unfolds across the villa’s galleries, façade, and Secret Gardens, engaging directly with a site long defined by classical ideals of beauty, power, and permanence. Mutu’s practice, known for its hybrid figures and mythological sensibility, introduces fragility, play, and spiritual presence into an environment shaped by marble, frescoes, and imperial histories. Her suspended sculptures, fragmented forms, and new mythologies establish a dialogue between African diasporic imagination and the symbolic authority of the Borghese collection. At its core, the exhibition turns to the metaphor of black soil, fertile, malleable, and generative, as both material ground and poetic image. In this interview, Perrone reflects on curating an exhibition that unsettles and reorients one of Rome’s most charged historical spaces.
Stephan Rheeder: You describe the exhibition as a site-specific intervention rather than a traditional show. How did you and Wangechi Mutu approach the act of ‘intervening’ in a space as symbolically and historically charged as the Galleria Borghese?
Cloé Perrone: The Galleria Borghese is a space that is conceptually, historically, and visually highly connotative. Every surface carries the weight of classical ideals, beauty, power, permanence, and the collection itself is deeply entangled with the self-representation of the Borghese family. The primary curatorial challenge was to navigate this context without being overwhelmed by it; to open up new perspectives within the structure without forcing a rupture. Instead, the idea was to root different cultures and temporalities into one shared ground, the black soil from which all ideas germinate. Wangechi Mutu’s intuition was crucial. She entered the museum through its “in-between” spaces, those liminal zones that are often overlooked, and activated them through the use of suspension and translucency. Her works hover or lie horizontally, breaking the vertical logic of the architecture and reorienting the viewer’s perception. The goal was to introduce the ephemeral, the spiritual, and the ungraspable into a context defined by solidity and spectacle. To let her language, chameleonic yet deeply personal, circulate through the museum without ever seeking assimilation.
Installation view of Nyoka, Wangechi Mutu. © Galleria Borghese
The show’s title, ‘Black Soil Poems’, evokes both material groundedness and lyrical evanescence. How did this duality shape the curatorial vision and spatial rhythm of the exhibition?
Conceived as a site-specific intervention, ‘Black Soil Poems’ unfolds throughout the museum’s interior galleries, its façade, and the Secret Gardens. It challenges classical tradition through suspensions, fragmented forms, and newly imagined mythologies, establishing a multilayered dialogue between the artist’s contemporary language and the symbolic authority of institutional structures. The title evokes the dual nature of Mutu’s practice: poetic and mythological, yet deeply connected to modern social and material contexts. ‘Black soil’, rich and malleable under the rain, almost like clay, appears across multiple geographies, including the Secret Gardens of the Galleria Borghese, which resonate with the artist’s imagination. From this soil, the sculptures seem to emerge, as if moulded by a primordial force, giving shape to stories, myths, memories, and poems. The metaphor underscores the generative and transformative power of her work: rooted in materiality, yet open to multiple future interpretations.
Works like Suspended Playtime and Prayers alter the viewer’s gaze, pulling it upward or diffusing it across space. What does the gesture of suspension mean to you in this context, formally, historically, and politically?
Suspension, in this exhibition, is a strategy of quiet disruption. Formally, it shifts the gaze towards the marble floor, or towards the air, the ceiling, the atmosphere, towards what is usually overlooked. Prayers, with its long red thread of soil and pulp beads, inserts a slow, meditative rhythm into a room shaped by imperial materials like porphyry. Suspended Playtime floats makeshift soccer balls crafted from discarded plastic, evoking joy, improvisation, and collective memory. Together, these suspended works defy gravity, permanence, and hierarchy. They interrupt the museum’s rigidity and allow fragility, play, and ritual to enter the space, not as decoration, but as forms of resistance and presence.
Installation view of Prayers and Older sisters, Wangechi Mutu. © Galleria Borghese
Mutu’s hybrid figures, part woman, part serpent, part vessel, reside in states of flux. How did you think about the politics of metamorphosis in relation to the museum’s own fixed narratives of beauty, power, and permanence?
Wangechi Mutu is an artist of profound imaginative power, whose practice merges the poetic and the political. Drawing from East African traditions, diasporic mythologies, and global cosmologies, she transforms these references through sculpture, video, and installation. Hybridity and fluidity are central to her formal vocabulary; her figures inhabit liminal spaces, straddling the boundaries between the human and non-human, the ancient and futuristic, and the grounded and suspended. Through materials like bronze, soil, feathers, paper, and wax, she questions the value systems embedded in matter itself. Rather than confronting dominant narratives head-on, she unravels them through complexity, offering new perspectives and shifting the very gaze through which we interpret power, history, and representation.
Bronze recurs throughout the show but is often stripped of its imperial connotations. How did you and the artist work with material hierarchies, between marble and soil, between weight and weightlessness, as curatorial tools?
The use of bronze, a metal largely absent from the Galleria Borghese’s sculpture collection, is particularly significant. Historically associated with durability and value, this metal has also been systematically looted and melted down; its absence in European collections is often linked to acts of destruction, colonial extraction, or repurposing for new uses. Mutu reverses this trajectory, employing bronze not to glorify power but to recast overlooked histories: the cultural and aesthetic legacies inscribed in hair, a place where history, identity, and resistance converge.
Her choice of materials — wood, soil, feathers, paper, wax, and bronze — interrupts the language of perpetuity that has long defined the villa’s rich surfaces of marble, frescoes, and mosaics, challenging the idea of durability as a marker of value. These materials do not simply contrast with the classical tradition; they counter its authority, exposing the narratives and omissions embedded within its history.
Installation view with The Seated I, Wangechi Mutu. © Galleria Borghese
With Esistere come donna, the exhibition extends into dialogue and public discourse. How did you envision the exhibition’s feminist and decolonial frameworks unfolding beyond the museum walls?
From the beginning, we wanted the exhibition to generate dialogue, not only within the museum but far beyond it. Esistere come donna was conceived as a space for open exchange, inviting voices from diverse disciplines and backgrounds to engage with the show’s themes. Feminist and decolonial thinking are not fixed positions; they are ongoing practices of listening, questioning, and reimagining. The Galleria Borghese has expressed a strong desire to open itself to multiple readings and to act as an active platform for scientific dialogue and cultural exchange. With this exhibition, that intention becomes both visible and embodied.
The exhibition will be on view until September 14, 2025. For more information, please visit Galleria Borghese.
