Andrea Polichetti · Residency

A dialogue between time and materiality, from Rome to Shenzhen.

Andrea Polichetti undertook a residency in Shenzhen presented by COLLECTA and ACSE Foundation. The residency was based in the Yinhu Ecological Zone, a protected reservoir-and-forest area folded directly into the city's built fabric, on the boundary between dense urban infrastructure and land held deliberately out of development.

The site sharpened the central question of Polichetti's current research: what does it mean to practice archaeology on a city that isn't finished yet? Rather than ruin accumulated over centuries, Shenzhen offered a landscape defined by speed, functional renewal, and constant construction — set directly against a zone of land protected precisely so that it would not develop at the same pace. Over two months, Polichetti used this juxtaposition to develop what he frames as a contemporary archaeology: reading the present tense of an unfinished city as already-stratified evidence, rather than waiting for ruin to accumulate before treating a place as a site of excavation. He observed how industrial material, left briefly idle at the edge of the ecological zone, begins to weather in ways that recall the corrosion he has long staged deliberately in iron and neon.

Working across iron, neon, and glass on site, Polichetti treated the ecological zone not as a picturesque backdrop but as a counter-timescale against which to read the city's infrastructure: protected, slow-changing land set beside industrial obsolescence. The resulting body of work extends his ongoing inquiry into spolia and anti-conservation, testing whether a landscape defined by construction and active protection — rather than decay — can still generate the friction his contemporary-archaeological method depends on.

The research undertaken in Shenzhen feeds directly into Polichetti's broader 2026 program in China, including his subsequent presentation at Beijing Dangdai Art Fair and his forthcoming solo exhibition at Beiqiu Museum of Contemporary Art, Nanjing.

Andrea Polichetti (b. 1989, Rome) lives and works in Rome. His practice moves across sculpture, installation, and painting, working through industrial materials — iron, neon, glass — left exposed to corrosion, condensation, and time. Polichetti's work has been recognised with the Generazione Contemporanea award (2023) and presented at institutions including the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna, Rome, and FuoriFestival, Spoleto. In 2018 he co-founded "Da Franco, Senza Appuntamento," a project space in central Rome, and in 2020 the artist-run space SPAZIOMENSA. His work was presented by COLLECTA at Beijing Dangdai Art Fair (2026), and he will present a solo exhibition at Beiqiu Museum of Contemporary Art, Nanjing, in 2026.

Duration: January – March, 2026
Location: Shenzhen

Environments, Fondazione Salvatore Meo & Andrea Polichetti, exhibition view at SPAZIOMENSA, Rome, 2021. Photo credit: Roberto Apa

Etching Meo*, lithograph on handmade dyed paper, environmental dimensions, edition 1/4 + PDA, produced by Litografia Bulla, Rome, 2021. Photo credit: Roberto Apa

Gloria y amigos, wrought iron, neon, environmental dimensions, 2018. Exhibition view at "the national exemplar," C/O Pastificio Cerere, curated by Eneas Capalbo, Rome, 2018

Duale*, exhibition view at Contemporary Cluster, Rome, 2023. Photo credit: Giorgio Benni

Untitled (Architetture) #5*, Cor-Ten, neon, 110 x 56 cm, 2023. Photo credit: Simon Dexea

Upsidedown, travertine and brass, 237 x 30 x 35 cm, 2023. Installation view. Photo credit: Carlo Romano

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