TO MAKE A WORLD OUT OF
SEDIMENT AND SKY
ARTVERSE is pleased to present TO MAKE A WORLD OUT OF SEDIMENT AND SKY, a duo show featuring artists Camilla Alberti and Wendi Yan, curated by Valentina Buzzi. Taking its title and structural inspiration from Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1985 speculative novel Always Coming Home, the exhibition operationalizes the poetic imperative to construct a world through a gatherer’s ethos, assembling physical artifacts, biological matter, digital simulations, and cultural memories into collective, non-linear futures.
By moving past traditional medium labels, the project establishes two elemental planes of artistic inquiry: Sediment and Sky. Sediment grounds the terrestrial, tactile, and alchemical processes that form the physical baseline of both practices, while Sky captures the expansive, visionary horizons where narrative, symbolic landscapes, and speculative atmospheres unfold. Within this framework, Alberti and Yan engage in an expansive form of world-building across bio printed textiles, metamorphic sculptures, CGI videos, photolithographic copper plates, and paintings.
Camilla Alberti & Wendi Yan
Curated by Valentina BUZZI
20.10.26 - 19.12.26
Camilla Alberti treats matter as an active agent, an archive, and a site of continuous transformation, investigating how interactions between living organisms, built environments, and materials reveal complex systems of coexistence.
Her practice unfolds through rigorous gathering and material alteration, collecting urban ruins, discarded industrial fragments, organic residues, and minerals, which are at times reassembled into new biomorphic sculptures, at times boiled, fermented, or pulverized into modeling compounds. In her sculptural series, Symbiotic Remains (2026) she combines these pastes with natural glues to construct hybrid bodies, onto which living lichens are implanted in collaboration with microbiologists, creating symbiotic systems known as holobionts. In her textile works, including Living Traces: Witchcraft Diary (2026) and Feeding the Ghost (2025), Alberti utilizes bioprinting through natural dyeing processes, allowing wood, leaves, rust, and earth to macerate in steam and imprint unpredictable marks on fabric, which are subsequently expanded through computerized thread embroidery and mounted onto steel structures.
Camilla Alberti, The Adoubement. Ceremony for extremophiles body. Extremophile 3 - 2022 (detail)
Through these methods, alongside research into shamanic practices in Chile, Korea, and Mexico, Alberti presents matter as a dynamic recorder of biological, environmental, and cultural memory. The exhibition features as well a group of earlier sculptural works, from the series Unbinding Creatures (2022) and The Adoubement. Ceremony for extremophiles body (2022), which explore the potential of an imagination evoked by monsters, envisaging the reclaiming of discarded objects, natural and industrial waste, and anthropic artefacts manipulated by time. Through this series, Alberti invites us to re-think the complexity of ecosystems and bodies, and how they exist in a state of a continuing metamorphosis.
Camilla Alberti, Symbiotic Remains. Black Body 3 - 2026 (detail)
Wendi Yan, PorousBody cropped (detail)
Wendi Yan operates at the intersection of history of science, Daoist philosophy, and media technology, constructing speculative epistemologies that probe the artifice of human knowledge. Her digital world-building utilizes CGI, Unreal Engine, and 3D simulation tools to create immersive moving-image landscapes. The exhibition features the work The Cosmos Breathes Through a Porous Body (2026), originally conceived for a 100m long LED screen at Kai Tak Stadium in Hong Kong, where space architecture, satellite parts, energy beams, and Taihu rock vertebrae thread through rotating 360-degree cameras to render physical force and spiritual qi as fluid, interconnected space. Through this video, and Taking the I Ching's principle "when acted on, Yi penetrates forthwith to all phenomena and events under the sky" as its point of departure, Yan recompose conceptual models across in the logic of images, as a response to the rational intuition structuring modern visual schemas.
Transitioning these speculative terrains into singular, tactile images, the exhibition features a new series of Yan paintings titled Mountains of My Becoming (2026) that merge personal memories, historical research, and game environments into aspirational landscapes, combining Chinese scholar stone geometries with satellite fragments, floating pallasite mountains, and liquid metal textures. Her research-driven practice extends to physical material experimentation through photolithography on copper plates. Utilizing studio equipment and UV light setups adapted from industrial semiconductor manufacturing, Yan casts visual depictions of Daoist True Form charts onto copper, etching sacred cartographies of spiritual mountains into metal and finishing them with patinas. This series of copper plates, realised by Yan for this exhibition and titled Conductive Cartographies (2026), will be presented through a scenography that follows the geographical positioning of the 5 Great Mountains that inspired them, moving from materiality to spirituality, from ground to sky.
Together, the artists converge at ARTVERSE to offer dual, interconnected methodologies for re-imagining how physical ground and speculative atmosphere co-create new realities.
Wendi Yan, Does Abundance Short-Circuit Desire, 2026
Wendi Yan, When the signal strikes, 2026
CAMILLA ALBERTI
(b. 1994, Milan) lives and works in Milan. Her artistic practice investigates matter as an active agent, archive, and site of transformation, relation, and transmission. Working through sculpture, textiles, and biomaterial experimentation, she creates hybrid forms through encounters between organic and inorganic residues, biological systems, and situated knowledge. Her methodology involves processes such as combustion, bioprinting, fermentation, and pulverization to develop pastes, pigments, and metamorphic sculptures, often created in collaboration with scientists, microbiologists, and shamanic practitioners across Chile, South Korea, and Austria.
Alberti’s work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Casa del Lago, UNAM Mexico city (2026), Triennale Milano (2025), Kunsthaus Graz (2025), the Italian Pavilion at the 14th Gwangju Biennale (2023), the Central Pavilion of the Malta Biennale (2024), and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) in Seoul (2024). She is the recipient of the Environmental Art Award (2025) and the Naturans/Naturata Prize (2026).
(b. 1999, Beijing) is an artist and historian of science who constructs speculative epistemologies through research-driven worldbuilding, CGI, game engines, and material experimentation. Engaging with the artifice of knowledge, her work bridges the frontier between scientific research, Daoist philosophy, and speculative media. She holds an M.S. in Fiction and Entertainment from SCI-Arc and an A.B. in History of Science from Princeton University.
Yan is the Grand Prix Recipient of the 6th VH AWARD (2025) by Hyundai Motor Group and a Steve Jobs Archive Fellow (2023–2024). Her work has been shown globally at institutions and festivals including Ars Electronica, the ArtScience Museum Singapore, Kai Tak Art Week (Hong Kong), Ujazdowski Castle CCA, arebyte Digital Art Centre, and the 8th International Intermedia Art Festival. She has undertaken residencies with CERN Collide Stockholm (Honorary Mention), A24 Labs, NEW INC at the New Museum, Eyebeam, and The Arctic Circle Expedition.
WENDI YAN
OPENING AND EVENTS
OPENING - 11th of September from 6pm to 9pm
ARTISTS TALK - 11th of September from 5pm to 6pm
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