VENICE.- A collective exhibition presented at The Human Safety Net, Piazza San Marco, featuring works by Leila Alaoui, Ange Leccia, Anouk Maugein, Lorraine de Sagazan, Sarah Makharine, and a large-scale installation inspired by JR’s Inside Out project, that will be displayed on the façade of the Procuratie in September.
What becomes of dreams when one leaves their homeland?
What happens to memories, languages, and bonds when we are thrown into the uncertainty of displacement?
The exhibition Dreams in Transit explores the state of suspension that follows exile: a fragile moment between a vanishing past and a future yet to be reassembled. Between migration and reconstruction, the artists gathered here trace the contours of an imaginary in motion — where memory converses with waiting, and borders shift to the rhythm of hope.
Ange Leccia presents a poetic encounter between worlds through Globes Terrestres: glowing, drifting spheres that are both familiar and elusive. They float freely, escaping their solitude. This constellation of planets speaks of a world reassembled, of fluid cartographies that merge, support, and reflect one another. They may symbolize, in his words, “the lifebuoy of humanity”: illuminated and interconnected lands. We all belong to this shared reality.
Nearby, a Tower of Babel rises — a fragile monument built from white sheets by Lorraine de Sagazan and Anouk Maugein. It evokes the post-exile narrative: the fate of those who cross the sea to find themselves, often, in hotels or domestic service. These sheets become a universal language.
Facing it is Natreen, a series of photographs by Leila Alaoui documenting Syrian refugees in Lebanon, fleeing war and instability. Through intimate and striking portraits, Leila captures the anticipation and hope of those seeking a better future. Each image reveals the dignity and resilience of individuals confronting the unknown. With a deeply humanist eye, she restores identity and visibility to lives too often reduced to silence or statistics.
Next to her, Sarah Makharine immerses us in a dreamlike soundscape woven from the voices of those who have fled their homelands. Her sound piece, Échos, assembles fragments of dreams — stories of drifting and rebuilding. Lost lands reappear, seas withdraw, and new horizons emerge. Here, dreams become a refuge, a space for resistance and transformation. On a printed tarpaulin, a young girl rests in her mother’s arms, carried forward with trust. Her gaze, however, lingers behind — over her mother’s shoulder, toward their past, their identity, the place they once belonged to. Toward something else. Toward here.
Dreams in Transit sketches a sensitive cartography of displacement. Here, exile is not merely an absence or a rupture — it becomes a living substance, a state of transformation in which memory and imagination shape new territories. Each work echoes the trace of that passage: an in-between space where identity trembles, redefines itself, and is reinvented.
Between drifting and grounding, between remembrance and projection, these artists invite us to reconsider exile not as loss, but as a process of metamorphosis. Borders become fluid, languages intertwine, attachments take new forms. What we leave behind continues to live within us. These works remind us that exile is not only geographic — it is also an intimate crossing, a quest for meaning and belonging that unfolds in the spaces between the visible and the invisible, the real and the imagined.
