Juna WesleyLisa LuratiLuzian MessmerMaya OlahMichael TulioSara De Brito Faustino
November 14 – December 12, 2025
A door left unclosed, an open window, light falling through the slit of a curtain. A scent—was it the one we remember? From far away, perhaps childhood, home, warmth. Laughter, echoing, fading. Wind chimes, bell-like and bright—and yet, sometimes, almost eerily still.
What surrounds us in our everyday lives and who is closest to us?
Over the Fence tries to look across, questioning about what lies between us: the cracks, the fine threads that weave our lives together, the in-between spaces. Neighborhood appears as an ecosystem, as a swarm, as a living fabric of humans, animals, objects, and memories. Nothing and no one stands alone. We are always many, always in relation, always in dialogue.
Lisa Lurati’s creatures — bees, and stars, as she calls them—are many too. They populate our walls, cast in bronze, delicate yet stone-like. They hang, swarm, flutter—a whisper, a Murmur, perhaps even behind cupped hands, if they had any. Never alone, always in motion. Between inside and outside, dream and reality, reality and memory. They are here—and already gone again. And yet something remains, a trace, an invisible thread. They search for their doubles, those simultaneously existing elsewhere in Ticino. Calling to one another, incomplete alone, whole only as a swarm. When does the swarm become uncanny? When it comes too close? When it begins to resemble us too much?
Michael Tulio, too, seeks these fleeting moments of togetherness. Where community emerges and then fades again. A single match is enough: it burns as quickly as it fades. I han es Zündhölzli azündt, I han keis Zündhölzli azündt— translated to „I lit a match, I didn’t light a match“ and in between, the memory of a blaze, an uproar in the neighborhood, had the match not been snuffed out on the carpet. Tulio’s work plays with this in-between, with the “what if.” Have you ever toyed with the absurd and liberating thought of starting a fire? The evidence, the traces of burning, right among us. Soot in the in-between, on our hands: arsonists. A song linger, the one once sung together across the neighborhood, by Mani Matter, the neighbor who vanished too soon. Tulio’s works align themselves: matches, one by one. Swiss peculiarity, humor, language, irony—flames flickering through the everyday.
Sara De Brito Faustino’s Constructed Memory leads us into other spaces. Her works appear like quiet still lifes—kitchens, living rooms, familiar scenes. And yet something feels off. De Brito forces us to look closer, between the fragments of her photo-collages. Other images seep through: ecosystems, traces of memory, ghosts, shadows. A film settles over our recollection, and the more we look, the more the once sharply defined picture slips away. Memory as an imperfect reproduction, as forgery, as something that tells and retells itself, transforming in the process. We construct and reconstruct, seek to remember, repress, reclaim, and in doing so, create new stories of the self. With Constructed Memory, De Brito creates spaces in which memory itself becomes a swarm—polyphonic, contaminated, never alone.
Juna Wesley’s work With-hold also carries traces of community. Her pieces, lined up along the wall, are made of glycerin—a material familiar to us from soap-making. A material that unfolds a quiet yet constant inner dynamism: it breathes, shifts, draws in moisture. Wesley’s objects resist boundaries. They merge with the wall, with the air, with us. Within them lie the remnants of others: traces, materials, hands that once shaped something else. Wesley appropriated material from other artists, familiarized herself with it, invited them in — be my guest — transforming it into objects of the present that are also vessels of the past. They hold and are held. Like us, in our daily private spaces, in acts of cleaning, of touching, in the attempt to separate ourselves from one another, without ever fully succeeding.
We are contaminated by one another. We remember together, and are constructed in each other’s memories. We repeat. We mirror. We long for an other.
Do we now see the faces in the swarms? Ghosts of other ecosystems and worlds, superorganisms. And so, on cold evenings, we gather with Zurich beekeeper Luzian Messmer on cold evenings in the garden—drawn by the scent of beeswax in the air and his humming narrative about bees, those beings that form a single organism as a collective. With experience and devotion, Messmer invites us to draw candles together: a quiet moment of remembrance for those creatures without whom our world would come undone. The Bien.
From another apartment, behind another wall, a voice can be heard—the voice of Maya Olah. Her written and spoken words—available as zines to take away — tell of collapsing houses, of floods and fires, of neighbors barricading themselves in, of the search for a new beginning amidst collapse. In her texts, community becomes a question of survival: Who remains when everything falls apart? Who remembers whom? Here, too, swarms of stories emerge, voices overlapping, repeating, doubling. Monuments of friendship, bunkered hearts.
Over the Fence thus becomes a web in itself—a space of voices, objects, memories. An experiment in coexistence, permeability, simultaneity.
Here, in this new art space,
the neighbors meet for the first time.
Over the fence.
And sometimes, when we look closely,
we recognize ourselves on the other side.
Curation:
Arsen33 – Norma Rizzo, Selina Schlumpf & Francisca Patrocínio
Photographs:
Alexandra Ziegler
Nuno Sarmento (Photograph of With-hold by Juna Wesley)
Arsen33 – Norma Rizzo, Selina Schlumpf & Francisca Patrocínio
Photographs:
Alexandra Ziegler
Nuno Sarmento (Photograph of With-hold by Juna Wesley)