Finché c’è Tempo

Mimmo Scognamiglio Artecontemporanea gallery is pleased to open Lucrezia Roda’s solo exhibition on December 17, 2025, the date on which, 30 years earlier, the gallery opened its first Neapolitan location. After 10 years of photographic research in the industrial field, the artist presents for the first time an intimate and personal project that sees photography interacting with other media and materials.
The exhibition, entitled Finché c’è tempo (While There Is Still Time), invites the public to reflect on the finite nature of time and the quality of the time we live in. The project stems from Roda’s desire to investigate the way in which time manifests itself and leaves traces, reminding us that human time has its own finitude and conclusion, thus taking on not only the conceptual value usually associated with it.
The project takes shape through collective dialogue: the artist interacts with her public, asking them how they inhabit their time, how they measure it, remember it, and preserve it, emphasizing the tangibility of lived time. Finché c’è tempo thus becomes an invitation to become aware of our earthly existence and the value of what we choose to leave behind.
Through sculpture, photography, industrial materials, and participatory processes, the exhibition constructs a path that brings concepts such as duration and end, memory and presence into dialogue. The main room of the gallery houses a photographic series born from a relational and participatory process: the artist launched a public call inviting anyone who wished to share a reflection, resulting in a series of fundamental words about themselves and the mark they would like to leave when their time is over (what words do you imagine on your tombstone?).
The words are sometimes made explicit, while others remain hidden without being fully revealed. In the transformation from paper to image, writing becomes a sign, a scar, a visual fabric. The words are sometimes explicit, while others remain hidden without being fully revealed. In the transformation from paper to image, the writing becomes a sign, a scar, a visual fabric. The installation Minimo Indispensabile (Bare Minimum), a large black canvas, acts as a visual device that allows us to understand the relationship between the work and its photographic transformation. What in reality appears tiny and close to the body, in the prints becomes enlarged, material, almost monumental.
The other spaces in the gallery host the sculpture Giorni Contati (Counted Days), which stems from Roda’s need to give visible form to the time that remains. It consists of a metal structure supporting ninety-nine glass test tubes, divided among themselves to symbolize the three stages of life. Each test tube can hold 365 spheres, the number of days in a year. It is a simple, almost obstinate way of forcing us to observe the duration of our lives. Made of metal and glass, these materials are deeply connected to the artist and her experience as an industrial photographer, but for the first time they are expressed in a sculptural way, becoming instruments of reflection.
In this exhibition, for the first time, Roda uses photography as the final stage of a broader process, transforming the work into an image and creating a dialogue between object and representation. Photography thus becomes the place to fix what, by its very nature, is destined to evolve, transform, or end. The exhibition project thus seeks to eliminate the circular thinking of the concept of time in order to approach linearity, because the time of life has a direction and no return. It is a line that, if we wish, we can follow with our eyes in its entirety.