Z33 Presents Withering into Breath, Wetness Undoes Itself in Hasselt

This exhibition review accompanies our conversation with Luca Vanello on matter, attention, and the ethics of making. Read the interview →

The arrangement of care usually assigns roles. Someone tends; someone is tended to. The capacity travels in one direction, and the architecture of most institutions, hospitals, gardens, galleries, reflects this assumption.

What takes longer to see is that materials also participate in this arrangement. Not symbolically. A structure that alters the humidity of a room is not a metaphor for attention; it is attention, rerouted through hardware and water vapor. The question becomes whether the organic and the synthetic can occupy the same side of the relation.

Kinship, as Vanello seems to understand it here, is not biological. It is a matter of shared vulnerability, of existing within a condition that neither party designed and neither can fully resist.

Luca Vanello's Withering into breath, wetness undoes itself, curated by Kevin Gallagher, occupies Z33 in Hasselt, an institution that consistently holds art and design in proximity rather than hierarchy. The exhibition runs through April 12; its closing week is the version currently visible.

Those who know Vanello's thinking through the conversation we published with the Brussels-based artist, on attention, matter, and the ethics of making, will recognise the commitments here made physical.

Across bright, high-windowed rooms, works spread across the floor on white weather-sheltering panels, climb toward the ceiling along bamboo structures fitted with glass vessels and humidifier hardware, and adhere to walls in forms nearly thin enough to mistake for a painted mark.

The plants that open the encounter have been collected from therapeutic gardens and processed by removing their chlorophyll. They retain their structure entirely, branching stems, seed pods, arching habits, but the green is gone. What remains is tan, papery, close to bone in places: the form of a living thing with its primary metabolic process interrupted. One large dark branch arches across a floor panel in a shape that reads less as arrested than as mid-movement, carrying the physical tension of growth, preserved at that moment. From its branches hang clusters of pale, translucent pods.

Distributed across the white panels are smaller objects that share the vocabulary of vulnerability without sharing the taxonomy: soft forms derived from marine organisms; humidity-sensitive coatings spread across organic masses; what the material list identifies as spare parts for medical devices and 3D-printed prosthetics for animals.

The prostheses are not mounted or presented as artifacts. They rest among the other objects as if mid-transit, made for a specific body, now in proximity to things that were never their intended context.

Withering into breath, wetness undoes itself - Z33

For his first solo exhibition at Z33, Luca Vanello has created a poetic installation in which delicate forms balance ghostly between life and stillness.

Z33

The bamboo-and-glass structure handles the exhibition's environmental argument most directly. Fitted with glass vessels clamped along the cane and connected to humidifier hardware, it releases distilled water vapor into the space.

AI-imagined seeds printed in humidity-responsive PVA respond to shifts in moisture; glycol-modified polyethylene strips clinging to the wall curve or relax with the air. Maintenance is listed as an occasional act, part of the work, not an interruption to it. The exhibition continues to co-form with whoever occupies the space, and with the space itself.

The language of vulnerability has circulated widely in recent years across care studies, ecology, and post-humanist philosophy, without always finding a corresponding material practice. Vanello's arrangement at Z33 makes a quiet claim: that the meeting of a de-chlorophylled plant and an animal prosthesis is not metaphorical. Both come from conditions of need.

Neither occupies the caretaker position. When the PVA seeds shift in response to the vapor, the room itself is the medium of care, arriving from no single origin. The exhibition's closing days also carry weight. Two months of altered humidity have acted on these forms. What is visible in April is not what opened in February.

The objects wait in the air they have helped to shape, and the question of which one is the patient remains open.

Instagram of Luca Vanello
Instagram Z33

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