Under the Same Sun
Sebastiano Zafonte, Die With Your Boots On, 2025, Polyurethane foam, painted finish | Sebastiano Zafonte / A plus A Gallery
How much are we still part of nature, and how much have we learned to regard it as something outside ourselves? This question runs through We all Needed the Same Sun, a group exhibition presented by the School for Curatorial Studies Venice at A plus A Gallery from 29 August to 30 September 2026. Developed by 13 young international curators, the project brings together ten artists: Jonathas de Andrade, Clelia Cadamuro, Simone Carraro, Paola Cenati, Daria Dmytrenko, Ketty Gobbo, Glenda León, Anna Marzuttini, Matilde Sambo and Sebastiano Zafonte. Drawings, sculptures, photographs, videos and installations unfold across the gallery’s two floors, creating a journey in which the boundaries between humans, animals and the environment become increasingly blurred. Matilde Sambo’s zoomorphic creatures meet Simone Carraro’s changing landscapes and Daria Dmytrenko’s hybrid figures, while Jonathas de Andrade stages an encounter between a fisherman and a fish. Elsewhere, Anna Marzuttini’s ceramic mushrooms appear to colonise the exhibition space, while Sebastiano Zafonte creates an artificial nest from cigarette butts. Rather than simply addressing the environmental crisis, the exhibition attempts to reverse our perspective: humanity is no longer an external observer, but one among the many presences inhabiting the same ecosystem. Hence the reference to “inter-being”, the concept developed by Thích Nhất Hạnh to describe the interdependence of all forms of life. The exhibition’s title thus becomes an elementary observation: however different we may be, we all continue to need the same Sun.