Luca Campestri: Watering the Plants

Capsule is pleased to present Watering the Plants, a solo exhibition by Italian artist Luca Campestri (b. 1999 in Florence, Italy; lives and works in Bologna). The exhibition offers a contemplative exploration of the concept of home, examining the gestures, tensions, and emotions that shape the experience of inhabiting a space.

Through sculptural, installation, and photographic works, Campestri deconstructs the idea of home into fragments of journey, memory, and nomadism. Central to the exhibition is the tent as a mobile and temporary dwelling—a space continuously assembled, disassembled, abandoned, and revisited. Everyday acts, such as the care involved in watering plants, are highlighted in a set of camping cutlery engraved with the simple instruction, “I need to remember to water the plants”, underscoring the intimate rituals that constitute domestic life.

The narrative of the exhibition continues in VD0725 (Visual Diary July 2025), a series of four half-frame diptychs that reflect on domesticity through both narrative and formal parallels. The visual diary slows down the perception of reality, allowing for an analytical contemplation of continuity, discontinuity, and the layered nature of experience. Complementing this series is Like Velvety Scars, a “soft image” printed on fabric whose long velvet fibers retain impressions of touch, evoking the persistence of memory, childhood, and growth.

In The Dreamer Slept but Did Not Dream, Campestri engages the viewer in a reflection on vision and perception. Using reflective supports activated by changes in light or movement, the work simulates the sensitivity of an owl’s nocturnal gaze, evoking a hypnagogic state between sleep and wakefulness, dream and reality. The installation captures the ambiguity of thresholds—silent, dreamless, and hauntingly present.