Rifugi

On Wednesday 18 February 2026, Fondazione Pastificio Cerere presents Rifugi, the group exhibition marking the conclusion of the residency for the winners of the 6th edition of 6ARTISTA. Progetto per giovani artisti 2025-2026, realised for this edition in partnership with RUFA – Rome University of Fine Arts, with the support of the Italian Ministry of Culture and SIAE as part of the Per Chi Crea programme.
Curated by Davide Lunerti and Marcello Smarrelli, the exhibition features the six winning artists—Vanshika Agrawal, Emma Brunelli, Micol Gelsi, Davide Miceli, Giulia Romolo, and Nadia Vallino—and will be open to the public from Thursday 19 February to Saturday 18 April 2026.

Now in its 6th edition, the 6ARTISTA programme, conceived in 2009 by Marcello Smarrelli for Fondazione Pastificio Cerere, has over the years welcomed some of the most compelling Italian artists on the international scene. This edition offered six artists under 35, selected by an expert jury, the opportunity to develop their research during a three-month residency in the ateliers of Pastificio Cerere, a former industrial building in the heart of Rome’s San Lorenzo neighbourhood. The site has become a place of training and artistic creation following an urban regeneration process carried out by the artists who have worked there over the decades. “6ARTISTA,” states Marcello Smarrelli, Artistic Director of Fondazione Pastificio Cerere, “is a major opportunity to renew our institution’s commitment to training new generations of artists, valuing the sharing of practice and experience in a place such as Pastificio Cerere, where art generates art, and which for over fifty years has been a crossroads of multidisciplinary experiences and figures. This significant action has shaped an area of the city dedicated to the contemporary, capable of activating connections, processes, and new possibilities for cultural growth on a global scale.”
The objective of 6ARTISTA is to build a solid institutional network, offering participants opportunities for professional development and exchange at both national and international level. For the 6th edition, the call launched in March 2025 was addressed to RUFA students and graduates (up to 2019), aged no more than 35, resident in Italy or abroad but holding Italian citizenship. During the residencies—which ran from May 2025 to January 2026—a rich programme of training activities, events, studio visits, and exchanges with sector professionals was organised. The artists also had free access to seminars and workshops offered by RUFA.
“For RUFA, collaboration with Fondazione Pastificio Cerere in 6ARTISTA. Progetto per giovani artisti 2025-2026,” states Melany Parasole, Chief Executive Officer of RUFA, “represents a natural evolution of a shared path through which we have been committed for years to supporting young artists. Ours is an alliance founded on a shared vision and strengthened by the proximity of our locations, which encourages daily dialogue between training, research, and professional practice. Projects like this offer emerging artists an authentic context for exchange and experimentation, accompanying them towards conscious growth and active, critical engagement with the contemporary art system.”
The 6th edition of 6ARTISTA. Progetto per giovani artisti 2025-2026 pathway culminates in the exhibition of the winning artists’ works, realised during the residency with the ongoing support of the curatorial team. “The title Rifugi,” says Davide Lunerti, co-curator of the exhibition, “is intended to reflect the meaning of support and creation of an artistic community that Fondazione Pastificio Cerere has always helped to foster; it is probably for this reason that much of the work presented during the residency, by exceptionally young talents who have been able to inhabit and share these spaces, revolves around the idea of ‘refuge’: a place in which what is threatened from outside can instead take form.” A space of care and attention where fragile things can find safety, as in the cyanotypes of Giulia Romolo, which capture the ephemeral nuances of a landscape at risk, or the cultural memories interwoven in the woollen threads of Vanshika Agrawal. Political refuge, ontological resistance, as in the work of Micol Gelsi; a utopian place in which to imagine collaborative realities, as suggested by the practice of Emma Brunelli, weaving interspecies bonds between human and non-human. The sandcastles of Nadia Vallino, symbols of childhood fantasy destined for dissolution, solidify into concrete to guarantee their permanence: a refuge of the mind, a cradle for imagination, and at times even for madness, as occurs in the underground spaces of Spazio Molini, where the installations and sculptural portraits of Davide Miceli come to life as incarnations of conspiratorial obsessions.