Virginia Zanetti. La danza del sale

From January 15th to February 14th 2026, BUILDING TERZO PIANO presents La danza del sale, a solo exhibition by the artist Virginia Zanetti (Fiesole, 1981), curated by Giulia Bortoluzzi.  

The exhibition brings together a selection of photographic, video and sculptural works that document and expand on the theme of impermanence and transformation of state, a line of inquiry the artist initiated through a site-specific intervention and collective performances in the saltworks of Margherita di Savoia (BT). Zanetti offers a collective narrative in which the natural environment—characterised in this case by the presence of salt—and the social fabric of the community, expressed in the activity of harvesting the crystalline compound, converge in a common process of transformation. 

The representation of this process, in which nature reclaims the knowledge and products created by man, emerges in this exhibition from fragments of salt gathered as relics of a disappearing past, generated by the natural deterioration of crystallised sculptures created in the summer of 2023 under the guidance of salt worker Raffaele Valerio. These fragments derived from the works, originally obtained from the process of mineral solidification on work tools and collective symbols of the Apulian community, are the tangible trace of impermanence, not only of ancient memory that is dispersed in parallel with the community fabrics that preserve and pass it on, but also of man’s desire to control the geological and climatic processes of the Earth. In this absence of control, the artist acts to preserve the impossible by activating an ecstatic dance of rebirth. Not only that: in the new and unprecedented phase of analysis of this process of evanescence and preservation, presented for the first time exclusively in the exhibition for BUILDING TERZO PIANO, Zanetti chooses to respond to fragility with his own language, using glass to imprint the cast of objects otherwise dispersed by the passage of time.