Palazzo Merulana is pleased to present Contenuti per la cura, a two-voice exhibition featuring Cecilia Cocco and Daniela Flores, curated by Giovanna Zabotti, produced and organized by Cultura360 Association. Open to the public from February 6 to March 15, 2026, the show centers on a dialogue between the two artists around the theme of care—interpreted as attention, receptivity, and hospitality. The exhibition will also feature an intervention by Matteo Giardiello, L’arte in backstage (Art in Backstage). Giardiello will photograph the artists while they work (four prints on display), weaving a narrative that blends art with lived experience into an unfolding tale.
Cecilia Cocco develops an artistic language suspended between dream and reality, where ambiguity becomes a tool of suggestion. Her works do not tell stories; they evoke them. Quiet worlds inhabited by enigmatic figures and objects out of use become poetic precisely because they have been deprived of their function. For Cocco, the past is not nostalgia but a source of lost grace. Unusual objects and situations, isolated from their contexts, transform into symbols of an amplified reality where small details blur the ordinary and invite new perceptual possibilities. “I do not paint what I understand, but what resembles me,” the artist states. Her practice lives in the tension between the visible and the invisible, between the everyday and the surreal. The incomprehensible is not a limit but a poetic presence that invites the viewer to slow down and let a subtle, mysterious, and unexpected beauty carry them.
Born in 2001 in Udine, Cecilia Cocco is a young artist who trained at the Academy of Fine Arts of Venice. As the winner of Artefici del Nostro Tempo, she exhibited at Padiglione Venezia during the 2024 Biennale Arte (Sestante Domestico) with the work Continental Breakfast. Through photography, Daniela Flores investigates care as attentiveness to detail, training the eye to notice what is usually overlooked—the cracks, time, and care. Looking at the world from different perspectives broadens horizons, allowing us to assess things differently, observe with a careful gaze, and consider those parts we often underestimate. Seeing differently helps transform cracks from destruction into possibility; after all, time itself does this. Flores pieces together fragments, aligning their seams as part of history and time. Care, in her view, is precisely this: a quiet but powerful support of time and all those things that, if seen from another angle, reveal potential, birth, renewal, or simply otherness. Just as with Palazzo Merulana itself—once a hygienic palace demolished, then a museum—the gaze follows the journey from bodily care to care of the soul. The world is in constant movement, and the eye travels with it.
Cecilia Cocco studied Graphic Design at the local artistic high school before moving to Venice to pursue a three-year degree in Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts, where she graduated in February 2025. In 2024, she won the first prize in Painting at the Venezia Artefici del Nostro Tempo competition and her winning work was showcased at Padiglione Venezia for the 60th International Art Exhibition in Venice, as part of the Stranieri Ovunque project. She has been awarded a studio at the Emeroteca dell’Arte in Mestre, a residency born from the collaboration between Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa and the Municipal Museums of Venice. She has also exhibited as the inaugural artist for Vernice in Rome.
Daniela Flores is an artist and photographer based in Rome. Creative, versatile, and detail-oriented, she combines artistic research with strong organizational and problem-solving skills developed through exhibitions, projects, and collaborations. She graduated with top honors from the Donato Bramante Art High School in Rome and is currently attending the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, pursuing Decorazione – Arti visive per gli spazi architettonici e il paesaggio. Her work spans photography, graphics, mural design, and custom logos and packaging. She has participated in numerous exhibitions and events, including Identità Erranti (2024), The Vice (2025), the Oltre collective at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, and Rome Art Week 2024. She is also involved in interdisciplinary projects such as NEXUSART for Manifesta Barcelona 2024 and collaborations with MAUPAL ARTIST and ABA Roma.
Matteo Giardiello (1998) is a photographer based in Venice. After earning a degree in Photography from the Academy of Fine Arts in Naples, he is completing a Master’s in Visual Arts at IUAV in Venice. His practice centers on long-term projects built on slow, precise observation. His work focuses on transforming spaces, time-worn places, and marginal traces that challenge appearances and what remains hidden. Through minimal details, provisional materials, and temporary structures, he examines the relationship between presence and absence, protection and concealment, prompting viewers to question the distance between perception and reality.
The Cultura360 Association aims to organize and manage national and international initiatives that promote culture and the arts. Its mission is to safeguard cultural assets of artistic and historical interest through conservation, restoration, maintenance, and promotion of art, restoration, and artistic expressions. The association is devoted to promoting talents in contemporary art, music, and audiovisual fields, along with the conception and production of short and feature films, advertising spots, and cultural events, including theatre and cinema productions, as well as publishing books and magazines.
Photo credits: Palazzo Merulana
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