MILAN.- A building in its final act paves the way for a project that restores a voice to architectures in transition, transforming them into temporary sites of artistic research, emerging creativity, and unexpected practices. Marking the opening of the YES, BUT format, its debut at Milano Art Week 2026 takes place as the inaugural collective exhibition within the spaces of SARCA183, in the Bicocca district. Four international artists—Morgane Tschiember, Florencia S.M. Brück, Aaron Nachtailer, and Rocco Plessi—are called to interpret, through profoundly different languages, the final testimonies of an architecture in waiting, giving voice to what the space guards in silence. Accompanying the visitor is the narrative of Stefano Pirovano.
Aaron Nachtailer, the creator of the format, intervenes with Listening Stone: a circular assembly of anthropomorphic stone figures that transforms the space into a place of encounter and shared presence. The work is not offered as an object to be observed, but as a condition to be inhabited: the stones, on a human scale, act as ancient witnesses, inviting visitors to enter the circle and become part of the assembly. The work activates in silence: every presence subtly transforms its meaning, making listening itself a creative act. A silent forum, a necessary counterpoint to the speed and fragmentation of the present—where dialogue does not begin with words, but with the act of being together, rooted in the same space.
From these same evolving spaces of SARCA 183, Morgane Tschiember harvests matter directly, transforming fragments into witnesses of their own process of transformation. Tschiember constructs forms that stand between object and process, declaring not what they once were, but what is currently happening to them—absorbing and dialoguing with the building's scars, narrating stories of a life lived and one not yet happened. A work suspended in time.
While Tschiember works on the building's material dimension, Florencia S.M. Brück gathers its temporal one. Irreversible in Uncertainty inhabits the threshold between stillness and transformation: at the center of the room, a folded canvas levitates in fragile suspension, as if momentarily removed from the laws that govern the world. In a corner, a drop continues to fall, tracing time with a rhythm that cannot be stopped. Every mark alters the surface that receives the next, so that even in stillness, the work never ceases. A meditation on the desire to arrest time while the world accelerates—and on the quiet inevitability of forces that are already rewriting the present.
Where the other artists choose the meditative density of matter, Rocco Plessi summons artificial intelligence. A pioneer of video art and founder of Plessi Digital, Plessi makes visible the structural tensions that hold the building together, placing it within a broader spectrum of change and evolution. After Venice brings a profound lesson to SARCA 183: that architecture and art are emotional landscapes, and that technology—when truly at the service of vision—does not replace imagination, but amplifies it. A dialogue between cultural heritage and digital experimentation, where tomorrow takes the form of a new renaissance.
Serving as a map for the exhibition is the critical text by Stefano Pirovano, who recognizes something essential in the spontaneity and sincere dialogue between the artists: that the architecture of an exhibition must not rely on a definition; sometimes, it is itself the backbone of its concept. He offers us a text that feels like the first chapter of what promises to become a novel (alongside the evolution of the format).
Milan is a city in perennial evolution, contracting and expanding to the rhythm of its seasons, ceaselessly redrawing the profile of its buildings. But what happens in the void that separates one metamorphosis from another? In that suspended instant between decommissioning and rebirth? Transition architectures—no longer functional, yet not yet destroyed—are not neutral spaces; they guard the latent energy of a structure in mutation. And art is the perfect tool to capture and amplify them.
It is here that YES, BUT finds its place—an atypical format conceived by the studio of Argentine artist Aaron Nachtailer. The title, in the symmetrical brevity of its two terms, accurately reflects the ambivalent nature of the project: spaces exist and ignite (YES), but remain suspended and precarious (BUT), fatally destined to change or disappear. Within a structure that is both backdrop and protagonist, the public traverses the environments without ever possessing them, moving in a temporary dimension and savoring the perfect interval between what still is and what will no longer be.
Neither a gallery nor a conventional exhibition, YES, BUT acts as an act of capturing an often-ignored moment. Art does not occupy the structure: it reignites it, amplifies it, makes it speak. It traverses decommissioned corridors, clings to peeled walls, and resonates in waiting rooms—always aware that it must vanish the moment work resumes. An "activation" that pushes those who walk through it to perceive the city not as a static assemblage, but as a set of processes in continuous becoming.
Despite its ephemeral nature, YES, BUT adopts a persistent vision, aiming to sprout and spread over time, welcoming creative energies of diverse natures—from visual art to food, from sound to the most emergent practices. Thanks to the synergy with VivirDC and the vision of Bruno Cerella and Giancarlo Di Giuseppe, art becomes the engine of unprecedented urban valorization practices. The choice of SARCA183 in the Bicocca district, where industrial memory converges with a cultural future, confirms the format's restorative vocation. In this setting, the Gin dei Sospiri pop-up opens the construction site to a moment of joyful and informal gathering, restoring immediate vitality to the environments and proving how a building suspended in time can rediscover itself, in the here and now, as a pulsating space of sociality.
Morgane Tschiember (France) develops her practice through experimental research into materials and processes of material transformation. She combines industrial techniques with manual gestures, weaving together sculpture, photography, and installation. Her work investigates the tension between control and accident, between construction and destruction, often through the use of glass, ceramics, and surfaces altered by fire or pressure. The works emerge as traces of physical and temporal processes, where matter becomes a space of sensory experience. Her practice explores the boundary between form and energy, between object and process.
Through installations, video, and immersive environments, Florencia S.M. Brück (Argentina) explores the relationships between consciousness, matter, and complex systems. Brück builds perceptual devices that bring scientific languages, narrative, and sensory experience into dialogue, inviting audiences to reflect on the ways we perceive reality and invisible phenomena. Her works take shape as spaces of exploration where intuitive knowledge and theoretical speculation converge. Her practice aims to expand the boundaries of perception and contemporary imagination.
Aaron Nachtailer (Argentina) explores the relationship between natural matter, time, and gesture. His work often originates from processes of gathering and transforming elements such as stones, minerals, and organic materials, subsequently assembled into sculptural and installative forms. Nachtailer's approach foregrounds the tension between raw matter and symbolic structure, allowing natural forms to guide the composition. Through minimal interventions, the works reveal the latent energies of matter and invite a contemplative encounter with geological time. His research places sculpture at the intersection of landscape, ritual, and spatial experience.
The exploration of the relationship between matter, space, and perception is the foundation from which Rocco Plessi (Italy) develops his works, which often take the form of installations and sculptural interventions that engage directly with the architecture and context in which they are situated. Through the use of elemental materials and light-based devices, Plessi constructs perceptual situations in which balance, tension, and rhythm become compositional elements. His work explores the possibility of transforming space into a field of sensory experience, where artistic gesture and environment shape each other.
Stefano Pirovano is an art critic and independent journalist. In 2012 he founded Conceptual Fine Arts, an online platform devoted to exploring the relationship between the ancient and the contemporary, which since 2019 has also operated as a residency space for international galleries in Milan. Since 2025 he has been directing Gazzetta Antiquaria, the historic magazine of the Associazione Antiquari d'Italia. He is the author of “Forma e Informazione” (JohanGLevi, 2010) and “Scene da un patrimonio” (Galaad, 2013), and has published over 500 articles in print, contributing to Italy's leading publications.
