November 22, 2025

Chiharu Shiota: The thread that opens the world

EXHIBITION FROM 22 OCTOBER 2025 TO 28 JUNE 2026 AT MAO TURIN

BY VERONICA MAZZIOTTA

Entering the MAO for Chiharu Shiota: The Soul Trembles means stepping into a landscape of resonances. Not an exhibition, but an emotional ecosystem; not a retrospective, but a map of possibilities.What Shiota stages is never an object: it is a movement. A tremor, precisely. A continuous invocation between what has been, what is still suspended, and what is asking for space to be born. It is extraordinary how her works do not merely occupy the room: they breathe it, transform it, cross it.

The first apparition is a vortex of suitcases: Accumulation – Searching for the Destination. It is a work that seems to float in a time that never passes—the time of waiting, of departures, of returns that may never arrive.The red threads that hold them are not simply bonds: they are interior geographies.They are itineraries of lives that intersect right there, without warning. In this suspension lies a question that recurs obsessively in Shiota’s practice:“Where are we going?” A question that does not seek an answer, but a space for listening.

Then red explodes and becomes architecture. Uncertain Journey is a cathedral of threads, a living organism that pulses and envelops. Entering it means accepting that you are part of a larger design, that you are inside a weave you do not control. Shiota uses thread as others use light or sound: to construct parallel realities. In these knots lie memory, fragility, resistance.They are not metaphors: they are presences.

In Reflection of Space and Time, two white dresses emerge from a black web like apparitions that no longer need a body. The dresses do not tell the story of who wore them, but of who inhabited them with thought. It is a work that speaks of presences that persist even when we can no longer name them.The collaboration with Alcantara adds a material dimension that amplifies perception: the surface becomes skin, memory, echo.

In In Silence, the burned piano is a monument to what remains after trauma. It is an object that has lost its function, but not its voice. The web that envelops it does not imprison it; it protects it, almost like a container of time. It is the scar that becomes form, the wound that does not want to be erased but observed closely, without fear.

A tremor, precisely. A continuous invocation between what has been, what is still suspended, and what is asking for space to be born.

And then Where Are We Going?, which seems to close the exhibition by opening another door.The empty boats are not truly empty: they hold what we do not yet know how to articulate. It is a work that looks toward the future without emphasis, with the calm of someone who understands the strength of uncertainty.The boats, suspended and fragile, do not promise salvation.They promise movement. An invitation to navigate even when we cannot see the shore.

And it is precisely within this dialogue between fragility and possibility that our homage is born: an AI reinterpretation that carries Shiota’s imaginary into a new territory, that of visual communication connected to Prada.We allowed her threads, her tensions, her poetics of knots to enter another language.

Transforming without betraying their nature. It is not about imitation, but about resonance. About showing how Shiota’s visual legacy can cross seemingly distant worlds and generate a new narrative: a weave in which a fashion object becomes a bearer of vibrations, as if it, too, had a memory to preserve.

The exhibition at the MAO is, ultimately, an invitation to rethink what connects the visible to the invisible. Shiota constructs places that do not seek to be explained, but inhabited.Threads that do not wish to be untangled, but listened to. Each work asks you to pause for a moment—to enter, to breathe, to let yourself be crossed.

Because the tremor of the soul, as this exhibition reminds us, is not a disturbance: it is the most authentic way in which life manages to manifest itself.

By Veronica Mazziotta

Inspired by Chiharu Shiota , prompt AI by Veronica Mazziotta

Inspired by Chiharu Shiota , prompt AI by Veronica Mazziotta

Inspired by Chiharu Shiota , prompt AI by Veronica Mazziotta