Arte Circolare Project

The 2025 exhibition was hosted at Triennale Milano from 20 November 2025 to 6 January 2026.

The project and the CONAI Prize

Since 2022, CONAI has invited a new generation of Italian artists each year to reinterpret environmental sustainability through an artistic lens.

The Circular Art project brings together two-dimensional works by Italian artists under 35, capable of interpreting the present through a conscious aesthetic focused on the future challenges linked to sustainability. Through a perspective that is increasingly focused on environmental issues, the invited artists use their work to show how these challenges can become valuable creative opportunities to interpret the world from a perspective that is more mindful of environmental conservation.

In addition to the exhibition, CONAI supports emerging artists through the CONAI Prize, which involves the Consortium acquiring one of the works on display. A dedicated jury selects the artwork that best represents the principles of innovation and sustainability, contributing to the CONAI Corporate Collection.

Winners of previous editions

Terrestre by Binta Diaw

The image is taken from the video performance Essere Corpo, a sensory exploration that restores the body’s original role as a bridge between humans and nature. Through movement, the artist seeks to dissolve the layers imposed by a patriarchal and capitalist reality that separates, controls and forgets. The body becomes a living archive of oppression and memory, but also a place of rebirth: a realm in which primordial origins re-emerge as a pulsating force.

The dance with the earth is not a representation but a ritual – a gesture of recomposition that restores continuity between what has been divided. In the interplay between body and landscape, the artist recognises an ancient, shared and feminine form of knowledge in which humanity and nature reflect one another. This demonstrates how nature can be seen as a common good rooted in ancient traditions.

In this cyclical dimension of loss and return, black and white becomes an essential language, capable of bringing out the purity of movement and the rhythm of breath.

Unbinding Creatures. Organismo 30 by Camilla Alberti

“Unbinding Creatures. Organismo 30” is a sculptural work that explores in depth the concept of hybridisation and metamorphosis through the use of collected materials, both organic and inorganic, carefully fused into a complex structure. The work forms part of a body of work that began in 2019 and has been presented in numerous national and international exhibitions.

It represents an approach centred on the encounter and coexistence of different species. The sculpture reflects on the symbolic and conceptual potential of “monsters” – figures traditionally seen as unsettling and marginalised, but here reinterpreted as central characters in a narrative that celebrates the complexity and profound interconnectedness between species. Through a process of “urban archaeology”, the artist gathers discarded materials and traces the stories that have shaped them: insects, mosses, fungi and other organisms have inhabited and transformed these contemporary “ruins”, creating a map of interspecies relationships.

The work invites us to rethink identity as a network of relationships, illustrating a new balance between technology, nature and the biological future.

The neverending story by Ruth Beraha

In The NeverEnding Story, fragments of antique stained glass are given new life, shedding part of their previous identity in order to merge into a new work.

The piece represents an ouroboros, formed from fragments originating from different places and periods. These elements are transcultural, like the iconography of the serpent biting its own tail – a symbol that, from ancient times to the present day, has embodied transformation across cultures worldwide. The ouroboros symbolises the cyclical nature of life and the union of opposites. It represents the culmination of relationships, the end of one element in the beginning of another; the alchemical cycle of transformation, the impossibility of life without death and vice versa, the one and the whole, the individual and the multiple. It is energy that is endlessly consumed and regenerated.

The NeverEnding Story is also a wish – an invitation to keep imagining anew.

NON SO DOVE, NON SO QUANDO by Giulio Bensasson

“Non so dove, non so quando” is an archive that came into being (and continues to grow) through a series of chance discoveries in damp storerooms of old studios, at market stalls, or near discarded waste. It consists of hundreds of mould-covered slides.

When time takes hold of matter, transforming and reshaping it, it deprives us of all points of reference, freeing the mind to reconstruct or reinvent that memory and allowing it to become a vision of the future.

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