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Starting from June 14, 2025, Villa Carlotta will host The Little Words Project by artist Debranne Cingari, curated by art historian Elisa Larese for Tablinum Cultural Management.
Imagine looking up and seeing an airplane soaring through the sky, trailing behind it a streak of words. Phrases that dissolve into the blue, leaving a fleeting mark in our memory. These are not just advertising messages, like those that cross the skies of Miami during Art Basel, but words that become images, transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary. The Little Words Project is born from this inspiration and invites us to reconsider language in a new visual and conceptual key.
How do words change when removed from their usual context? What happens when they become material, object, sculpture? The Little Words Project explores this tension through a dynamic interaction between photography, three-dimensional elements, and images with a nostalgic flavor. The word is no longer just a vehicle for meaning: it becomes a sign, a form, a volume, interacting with the visual and mental landscape of the viewer.
Some works remain purely photographic, much like the images of Ed Ruscha, which isolate words within the landscape, charging them with new narrative possibilities. Others incorporate sculptural elements—reused toys, airplanes, unexpected objects that subvert conventional narratives, evoking Duchamp’s ready-mades, where common objects take on new meanings. Cingari’s words move within this same space of ambiguity and reinvention, challenging the way we relate to language and opening the door to unexpected interpretations.
In the historical and evocative setting of Villa Carlotta, The Little Words Project finds a special resonance. In this place, where art and nature intertwine harmoniously, the dialogue between image and word is amplified, creating a bridge between contemporaneity and tradition. Through the photographic medium, the word becomes sculpture, memory, poetic gesture, and conceptual reflection.
A special project, in which each little word assumes new meaning—a wake-up call, both internal and external, born from the poetics of the everyday, from the infinitely small that becomes essential because it is so often taken for granted.
The Little Words Project is part of an artistic discourse that crosses conceptual art, visual poetry, and site-specific installation, all sublimated by the photographic medium. Debranne Cingari creates a bridge between language and image, between urban imagination and natural contexts, between the ephemeral and the permanent. In this sense, the exhibition at Villa Carlotta becomes the perfect place to host this dialogue between word, image, and space—a conversation in which every visitor is invited to find their own meaning.
Her works stimulate the curiosity of the viewer and push them to go beyond, transporting them into a world suspended between reality and imagination, between memory and reinvention, where the true semantics of words and objects can be rediscovered.
Elisa Larese, Art Historian, Tablinum Cultural Management
SOME SELECTED ARTWORKS…
DEBRANNE CINGARI
Debranne Cingari is a multidisciplinary American artist whose work spans photography and visual storytelling. A self-taught photographer, she has built her artistic practice through a blend of formal education and hands-on exploration. Cingari holds an Associate in Advertising from Endicott College and a Bachelor of Science in Media and a Master’s in Education from Sacred Heart University. Throughout her career, she has deepened her expertise in photography through mentorships, including with renowned photographer Joyce Tenneson, and by engaging in various workshops covering photo transfer techniques, sculpture, glassblowing, collage, and mosaics, including specialized training in Ravenna, Italy.
Her art merges photography with dynamic compositions that intertwine images captured during her travels. These compositions evoke dreamlike landscapes, blending memory, nature, and narrative in a way that invites reflection.
Cingari’s work has been showcased in prestigious venues such as the Grand Palais in Paris, Art Miami, and Villa Carlotta Museum and Botanical Garden, curated by Tablinum Cultural Management will be hosted with a solo exhibition,The Little Words Project, at the Villa Carlotta Museum and Botanical Garden from June 14, 2025 to 29.
She is represented by leading galleries, including Tablinum Cultural Management (Bellagio), Cavalier Galleries, Christopher Martin Galleries, and Chase Edward Gallery.
Her artistic achievements have garnered numerous accolades, including the Philip Isenberg Award and recognition from the Salmagundi Art Club in New York. Cingari’s works are part of prominent public and private collections, including that of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, The Kinsley Institute and Cantor Fitzgerald.
In addition to her artistic endeavors, Cingari contributed to numerous publications in magazines and books, further shaping her influence in the art world.