Bergamo and Brescia become the exhibition spaces for the iconic installations of Kaarina Kaikkonen, a contemporary Finnish artist who has been working for years with large-scale urban and relational art interventions. Waves in Bergamo – Brescia presents itself as a master project that, in honour of Bergamo Brescia Capital of Culture, opens the doors of the two cities to an international reality capable of empowering the urban bond between individuals and place. The two cities, violently affected by the global pandemic, have become a focal point for the artist in her research about the flow of life even in extreme and post-traumatic situations. Kaarina’s sculptural installations involve the use of shirts of local people, items of clothing that, in contact with the skin, have absorbed both pleasurable and painful moments, and have retained their own loneliness. Clothes thus become for the artist a living material capable of creating infinite connections and of retaining, as well as maintaining characteristics such as colour, size, composition, the loving energy of the living heart that wore them.

The Palazzo dell’ Ex Centrale Telefonica in Via Tasso, Bergamo, lends its façade to become the venue for Waves of Life, an art installation realised with the contribution of the citizens of Bergamo who can

donate old shirts, starting the process of transforming old clothes into artistic devices which are fundamental for the realisation of the work. The façade of the Palazzo, inaugurates on 4 June 2023, is filled with stories, shirts hanging from its structure, forming a chain of memories, relationships, symbolising the passing of life, of time, of its continuous flow from an intimate dimension to a more extended one. Waves of Life refers to the waves, recalling conditions that are very distant from those of the city, the condition of the sea, but capable of sharing with it the reference to an ancient symbolism, made up of connections, of a return to the origin, to birth and to life.

At the same time, the Church of Borgo Trento, Brescia, becomes the site of Reaching Light, expands to an even more heterogeneous dimension, with artistic units made up of shirts and also children’s and woman’s clothes donated by people in the Brescia community. The installation from 11 June 2023 until the end of September turns the entire building become the root for the formation of a flower, which grows outside the structure, rising upwards to seek the light and be able to blossom. From the roots of the church grows a new form that with its upward thrust, almost waiting to be able to fly, embodies hope, of the future and of a new way of looking at the city, relationships and the present time.