“Art to me is a medium to make visible what is invisible, working on apparently marginal situations and showing how they are fundamental to understanding the society in which we live” – Claudia Virginia Vitari

Vitari’s practice develops at the intersection of contemporary art, field research and political inquiry. Through experimental installation, she investigates the relationship between individual identity and the social and institutional structures that define, regulate and exclude. Her research focuses on marginal and interstitial conditions, examining how systems of control, normalization and bureaucracy shape individual experiences and determine who becomes visible or invisible within society.

This relationship between research, representation and material language reaches a synthesis in PANOPTICON, her retrospective presented at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin from November 22, 2024 to January 17, 2025. Bringing together more than two decades of research, the exhibition connected Melancholie (2002), PERCORSOGALERA (2007–2009), Le Città Invisibili (2009–2013) and Interstitial Identities (2014–ongoing) within a broader investigation of marginality, institutional power, identity and exclusion. The exhibition traced the development of a practice grounded in direct observation, personal encounters and the transformation of social research into spatial and material forms.

PERCORSOGALERA, developed through direct research inside Turin’s Lorusso e Cutugno penitentiary, marked a fundamental stage in this practice. Through observation, interviews, portraits and documentation, Vitari confronted individual stories with the institutional environment in which they were contained. Le Città Invisibili, developed in Barcelona in collaboration with Radio Nikosia, a radio project organised by people with psychiatric diagnoses, extended this investigation into psychiatric and social marginality. In both projects, individual experience becomes a means of examining the wider structures through which society defines, isolates and manages difference.

Since 2014, Vitari’s research has increasingly focused on migration and the condition of asylum seekers in Europe. Interstitial Identities developed from her participatory observation of migrant communities and asylum seekers in Berlin, their protests and their experiences of displacement and bureaucratic suspension. The project investigates the condition of individuals caught between countries, identities, legal statuses and forms of belonging. The notion of the “interstitial” describes precisely this state of being neither fully inside nor outside: a condition shaped not only by displacement, but also by the social and bureaucratic structures of the host country. Through portraits, interviews, personal testimonies and graphic documentation, Vitari gives individual experience a central role while addressing the broader political and social structures surrounding forced migration.

The artist’s methodology is based on proximity, dialogue and prolonged engagement with her subjects. Rather than reducing people to predetermined categories—prisoner, psychiatric patient or migrant—she uses personal stories to restore complexity and individuality. This participatory dimension connects the different stages of her practice and transforms research into a process of encounter. The resulting documentation is not simply an archive of social realities, but becomes the material through which Vitari constructs new forms of representation.

Her research is translated into installations through the combination of drawing, photography, sculpture, glass, metal, plaster and light. Portraits, texts, quotations and documentary material are frequently transferred onto transparent glass through silkscreen printing and incorporated into sculptural structures. Glass becomes simultaneously material, boundary and lens: the viewer looks through it while encountering the stories embedded within it. Metal frameworks, enclosed forms and magnifying structures introduce a contrasting language of restriction, surveillance and containment. The tension between transparency and enclosure thus becomes a physical expression of the social conditions explored in the work

The artist expresses an interest in the “hidden stories taking place in the cities where we live, existing because of society’s structure and representing a parallel voice to what we are used to and aware of”.

Across her practice, Vitari uses art as a form of investigation and encounter. Visibility and invisibility are not only subjects of her work but also conditions that she makes tangible through space, transparency, documentation and the act of looking. By bringing individual stories into dialogue with the structures that surround them, her installations invite the viewer to reconsider how identities are constructed, how marginality is produced and how apparently peripheral experiences can reveal the broader contradictions and power relations of contemporary society.