Palazzo Brami hosts MP5's "Paradiso," a series of shared visions and social innovation
Jayde BrowneShare
Starting September 20, 2025, Reggio Emilia hosts one of the season's most anticipated exhibitions: Paradiso by MP5, a multifaceted and incisive artist, hosted in the spaces of Palazzo Brami by SpazioC21, a cutting-edge creative workshop specializing in contemporary art. Following her work at the Museo del Novecento in Florence, MP5 arrives in Emilia with a project that celebrates matter, the body, and community, combining sculptural technique, political vision, and theatrical imagery.
The exhibition represents a true turning point in the artist's career, recognized worldwide for her bold black-and-white lines and her ongoing reflections on identity, gender, and social relations. On this occasion, MP5 experiments with three-dimensional sculpture for the first time. A site-specific intervention takes shape on the historic façade of Palazzo Brami, transforming the building into an imaginary hanging garden, populated by suspended, mutually connected figures: the conceived silhouettes welcome visitors as living presences, inviting them to explore a new dimension of proximity and sharing. In her essay "Progetti Umani," critic Beatrice Leanza describes the project as an attempt to evoke intimate spaces of transition, environments where individual identity merges and renews itself within the collective.
This research encompasses both the interior and exterior of SpazioC21. The exhibition features twelve sculptures, ten installed in the gallery and two in the windows overlooking the courtyard. The aluminum profiles create a dialogue between fluid bodies and solid matter, offering the public a new perspective on physicality and metamorphosis. Viewers find themselves immersed in a contemporary decameron where the plurality of experiences strengthens a sense of belonging, and where solitude is restructured into creative conviviality.
MP5 is an artist who has traversed disciplines and contexts: born in the context of theater set design and video animation, she has established herself in the European underground scene, exhibiting her work from the GNAM in Rome to the Centro Pecci in Prato, to museums and exhibition spaces in Asia and the United States. Her distinctive graphic and narrative style has become visible everywhere: she has illustrated posters for the Turin Book Fair and the Strega Prize, collaborated with Gucci on the global Chime for Change campaign, and published Corpus in 2023, a retrospective journey through the first twenty years of her work.
The Paradiso project manifests a dialectical conception of corporeality: MP5's paradise is not a mystical destination, but an ethical and intersectional territory, a habitat where the individual and the social meet and redefine themselves. As Leanza states, the exhibition invites reflection on the conditions that allow communities to shape a sense of shared space, stimulating questions about freedom, relationships, and the construction of new forms of coexistence. It is an art that values experience and proximity, challenging the public to rethink themselves as active participants in the real metaplace generated by the encounter between matter, sign, and gazes.
MP5's language constantly engages with the tensions of our time. His figures are not simple representations, but changing presences that embody the challenges of fluid identity and nonconformity. Each sculpture, even when isolated, finds its raison d'être in its relationship with space and other bodies. Displayed in the gallery, the work transforms into a participatory experience, constituting a new ritual of collective living.
The choice of Palazzo Brami and SpazioC21 as the venues for the exhibition is consistent with the spirit of openness and cross-fertilization that characterizes contemporary visual culture: here, historical memory merges with innovation, the past becomes a platform for the future, and art bridges generations. MP5 captures the complexity of today's society and conveys it through signs, materials, and forms that question both the private and public spheres. The impact of the sculptures on the façade and in the interior spaces accompanies the visitor on a pilgrimage between distance and contact, solitude and belonging.
The exhibition is part of a growing trend toward enhancing the ethical and social dimensions of art. In Paradise, one does not seek afterlife salvation, but the concrete possibility of building other worlds, founded on reciprocity, acceptance, and solidarity. Leanza's curation emphasizes the positive tension toward a freedom that is always a relationship and never a simple escape from reality: "A process practiced with others," a construction of meaning born of exchange and active presence.
In this new production, MP5 demonstrates his ability to integrate aesthetics and political commitment. The aluminum figures, though static in their materiality, are imbued with contemporary anxieties: the theme of corporeality is no longer merely figurative, but symbolic, open to a multiplicity of perspectives and experiences. It is an "immanent utopia" where every body becomes a vehicle of change, experience, and shared desire. The exhibition, hosted in the vibrant setting of Palazzo Brami, becomes a place of recognition, a mirror of the community, and a platform open to dialogue.
Paradiso is thus the testimony of a research that challenges conventions and embraces the complexity of identity and social life, offering the observer a space for contemplation, action, and continuous metamorphosis. The public is invited to participate in a collective experience where differences meet without canceling each other out, and where art asserts itself as a practice of freedom, of building bonds, of memory, and of the future.
The exhibition represents a true turning point in the artist's career, recognized worldwide for her bold black-and-white lines and her ongoing reflections on identity, gender, and social relations. On this occasion, MP5 experiments with three-dimensional sculpture for the first time. A site-specific intervention takes shape on the historic façade of Palazzo Brami, transforming the building into an imaginary hanging garden, populated by suspended, mutually connected figures: the conceived silhouettes welcome visitors as living presences, inviting them to explore a new dimension of proximity and sharing. In her essay "Progetti Umani," critic Beatrice Leanza describes the project as an attempt to evoke intimate spaces of transition, environments where individual identity merges and renews itself within the collective.
This research encompasses both the interior and exterior of SpazioC21. The exhibition features twelve sculptures, ten installed in the gallery and two in the windows overlooking the courtyard. The aluminum profiles create a dialogue between fluid bodies and solid matter, offering the public a new perspective on physicality and metamorphosis. Viewers find themselves immersed in a contemporary decameron where the plurality of experiences strengthens a sense of belonging, and where solitude is restructured into creative conviviality.
MP5 is an artist who has traversed disciplines and contexts: born in the context of theater set design and video animation, she has established herself in the European underground scene, exhibiting her work from the GNAM in Rome to the Centro Pecci in Prato, to museums and exhibition spaces in Asia and the United States. Her distinctive graphic and narrative style has become visible everywhere: she has illustrated posters for the Turin Book Fair and the Strega Prize, collaborated with Gucci on the global Chime for Change campaign, and published Corpus in 2023, a retrospective journey through the first twenty years of her work.
The Paradiso project manifests a dialectical conception of corporeality: MP5's paradise is not a mystical destination, but an ethical and intersectional territory, a habitat where the individual and the social meet and redefine themselves. As Leanza states, the exhibition invites reflection on the conditions that allow communities to shape a sense of shared space, stimulating questions about freedom, relationships, and the construction of new forms of coexistence. It is an art that values experience and proximity, challenging the public to rethink themselves as active participants in the real metaplace generated by the encounter between matter, sign, and gazes.
MP5's language constantly engages with the tensions of our time. His figures are not simple representations, but changing presences that embody the challenges of fluid identity and nonconformity. Each sculpture, even when isolated, finds its raison d'être in its relationship with space and other bodies. Displayed in the gallery, the work transforms into a participatory experience, constituting a new ritual of collective living.
The choice of Palazzo Brami and SpazioC21 as the venues for the exhibition is consistent with the spirit of openness and cross-fertilization that characterizes contemporary visual culture: here, historical memory merges with innovation, the past becomes a platform for the future, and art bridges generations. MP5 captures the complexity of today's society and conveys it through signs, materials, and forms that question both the private and public spheres. The impact of the sculptures on the façade and in the interior spaces accompanies the visitor on a pilgrimage between distance and contact, solitude and belonging.
The exhibition is part of a growing trend toward enhancing the ethical and social dimensions of art. In Paradise, one does not seek afterlife salvation, but the concrete possibility of building other worlds, founded on reciprocity, acceptance, and solidarity. Leanza's curation emphasizes the positive tension toward a freedom that is always a relationship and never a simple escape from reality: "A process practiced with others," a construction of meaning born of exchange and active presence.
In this new production, MP5 demonstrates his ability to integrate aesthetics and political commitment. The aluminum figures, though static in their materiality, are imbued with contemporary anxieties: the theme of corporeality is no longer merely figurative, but symbolic, open to a multiplicity of perspectives and experiences. It is an "immanent utopia" where every body becomes a vehicle of change, experience, and shared desire. The exhibition, hosted in the vibrant setting of Palazzo Brami, becomes a place of recognition, a mirror of the community, and a platform open to dialogue.
Paradiso is thus the testimony of a research that challenges conventions and embraces the complexity of identity and social life, offering the observer a space for contemplation, action, and continuous metamorphosis. The public is invited to participate in a collective experience where differences meet without canceling each other out, and where art asserts itself as a practice of freedom, of building bonds, of memory, and of the future.