We are Aea: Culture Initiative, a collective of émigrée artists, designers, and researchers shaped by a female perspective and horizontal collaboration. This October we will present our first exhibition, The Shape of What Remains: Six gestures of repair across broken geographies, as part of the 5th Venice Design Biennial.

We are covering most of the exhibition costs ourselves, but we can’t do it alone. Your support will allow us to transport and install the works in Venice, cover the venue and organizational fees, source production materials, and document the project through video, photography, and publication.

About the exhibition

It tells a story of how we live when the ground beneath us is uncertain — how we respond when the systems, homes, and histories that once held us can no longer be relied on.

It’s a time of rupture: wars, displacement, collapsing infrastructures. Our project does not pretend to offer solutions or restoration. Instead, it asks what it means to continue inside the break. To show this is not to resign ourselves to damage, but to make visible the small, persistent practices that allow life to go on. Remaining with what is broken is not passive: it resists paralysis, refuses despair, and creates room for others to imagine their own paths forward.

Each work is a personal gesture of repair.

Silvia reconstructs an old house not through grand design but through attentive listening — to the trace of a stair, the echo of a wall color, the sense of something altered yet still faintly present.

Lisa tends to broken ceramics once repaired at home, keeping the fracture visible; not to disguise what was damaged, but to hold it gently as part of its ongoing life.

Kimia and Alisa, painters by profession, set images aside and improvise music together, creating a shared language without words.

Nanka plants a garden in an unfamiliar ground, where each season becomes a lesson and each plant a small renewal.

Olena’s discovery of her grandmother’s unfinished tapestry reveals survival not as victory, but as the weaving of care into fragments salvaged from everyday life

Together, these works form a non-linear atlas of survival. They are modest, persistent acts that refuse despair and imagine ways of living with what remains.

What your support will make possible

Who we are

Aea: Culture Initiative was founded to create space for émigrée creatives to pause, reflect, and rebuild. Our work is guided by collective intelligence, interdisciplinarity, and a female perspective that values process over outcome, details over declarations, and resilience over competition.

Bringing this perspective into an international setting like Venice is a chance to share a different language of creative making — not spectacular or emphasizing individualistic originality, but attentive and quiet.

With gratitude

Any amount of support brings us closer to realizing this exhibition. We invite you to be part of the process and to help bring these gestures of repair into the world.

— Aea team

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