Art
ART WORLD •
“Ornament is a language we have forgotten.” Art according to Diego Mirabella
“I try to write through visuals and to suggest a different way of thinking.” Travelling to lose oneself and learn to look at the world. From carved pumpkins in Peru to Indian woodblock prints. “Artisans are the scribes who understand visual languages that are often overlooked.”
Diego Miguel Mirabella in a photograph by Ahmed Fares
First name and surname: Diego Miguel Mirabella
Place and year of birth: Enna, 1988
Related galleries and social media links:
SALES Studio by Norberto Ruggeri, Rome
The interview
Interview in collaboration with Giulia Bianchi
What does an artist’s studio mean to you?
I have two. One is nomadic, without a fixed space, where I do not produce much but interact extensively, exchange ideas, meet people, observe, write and plan future projects that I hope to realise in collaboration with others. It is a studio without walls, on the move, visiting contexts different from my own, intrigued by other cultures and ways of thinking.
The physical studio is in Rome: a storage space and a place for experimentation and failure; I go there every day. It is the solid ground where my travels can settle and from where I try to understand how to find my way back to myself. The studio in Rome is also the place where I meet up with my travelling companions, with whom I share it. In addition to their artistic practice, they pursue other professional activities: Dandini de Sylva runs a publishing house; Barile teaches photography and consistently offers incisive commentary; Di Lorenzo is the founder of an education and production project in the contemporary arts sector. There is also Emmanuele, my neighbour across the way, who occasionally interrupts the silence to read me some beautiful poems – a role he undertakes with the enthusiasm of a connoisseur. The studio is a vibrant place where one can discuss and engage with oneself and with others.
The physical studio is in Rome: a storage space and a place for experimentation and failure; I go there every day. It is the solid ground where my travels can settle and from where I try to understand how to find my way back to myself. The studio in Rome is also the place where I meet up with my travelling companions, with whom I share it. In addition to their artistic practice, they pursue other professional activities: Dandini de Sylva runs a publishing house; Barile teaches photography and consistently offers incisive commentary; Di Lorenzo is the founder of an education and production project in the contemporary arts sector. There is also Emmanuele, my neighbour across the way, who occasionally interrupts the silence to read me some beautiful poems – a role he undertakes with the enthusiasm of a connoisseur. The studio is a vibrant place where one can discuss and engage with oneself and with others.
How do you manage to weave your personal stories together with those of the cultures you encounter on your travels?
He often remarks that one travels to lose oneself, to set crisis dynamics in motion. He also states that he is not a visual artist but a visual writer. Writing, he explains, requires a first draft composed in a single sitting—one of his professors would have said that things are done first whilst drunk and then whilst sober—followed by a process of refinement. In my experience, one begins with what one knows, with the words one knows, and then seeks out others through the rewarding exercise of choosing the ‘right’ words. In this way, perhaps, a personal idea can become a concept – something that others, indeed everyone, can understand. Let me give
you an example that I believe encapsulates these two things: getting lost and writing. In 2022, I travelled to Peru, to the Central Sierra – near Huancayo – to meet the artisans practising one of the country’s oldest techniques: mate burilado. These are ornamental gourds – meaning they grow without flesh – which for thousands of years have been carved to tell – using techniques that foreshadow comic-book art – the stories of the country, from the coast to the jungle via the Sierra. I am half Peruvian on my mother’s side, and in Cochas Grande and Cochas Chico I spent weeks meeting the families who preserve this millennia-old technique; to varying degrees, I shared my own personal stories with them, read their stories in their splendid works, showed them what I do, displayed many images and printed numerous pictures in the village’s only shop. I tried to put myself in the shoes of a rhapsodist and asked to create a series of mate in which to blend my own tales with the village’s traditional stories, leaving the visual aspect to them whilst focusing as much as possible on my role as an oral storyteller.
A year later, in Rome, he opened the large box containing the finished works and ‘read’ on those meticulous and fascinating spheres the result of those intense days – days far less linear and certain than he has described. The most wonderful thing was realising that what he was seeing was no longer his story, but a complex body of imagery that no longer belonged entirely to him. As often happens to me, I had to revisit the project to find my way back into it: drawing inspiration from what I’d seen during the journey, I designed the bases from which the pumpkins would rise, like a visual narrative.
The project is called El asunto Miguel. Why not? A search for identity shared with a community.
you an example that I believe encapsulates these two things: getting lost and writing. In 2022, I travelled to Peru, to the Central Sierra – near Huancayo – to meet the artisans practising one of the country’s oldest techniques: mate burilado. These are ornamental gourds – meaning they grow without flesh – which for thousands of years have been carved to tell – using techniques that foreshadow comic-book art – the stories of the country, from the coast to the jungle via the Sierra. I am half Peruvian on my mother’s side, and in Cochas Grande and Cochas Chico I spent weeks meeting the families who preserve this millennia-old technique; to varying degrees, I shared my own personal stories with them, read their stories in their splendid works, showed them what I do, displayed many images and printed numerous pictures in the village’s only shop. I tried to put myself in the shoes of a rhapsodist and asked to create a series of mate in which to blend my own tales with the village’s traditional stories, leaving the visual aspect to them whilst focusing as much as possible on my role as an oral storyteller.
A year later, in Rome, he opened the large box containing the finished works and ‘read’ on those meticulous and fascinating spheres the result of those intense days – days far less linear and certain than he has described. The most wonderful thing was realising that what he was seeing was no longer his story, but a complex body of imagery that no longer belonged entirely to him. As often happens to me, I had to revisit the project to find my way back into it: drawing inspiration from what I’d seen during the journey, I designed the bases from which the pumpkins would rise, like a visual narrative.
The project is called El asunto Miguel. Why not? A search for identity shared with a community.
What are you working on?
I’ve just come off the back of a long and rewarding period of work. Amongst many others, there were two group exhibitions with ‘Paese fortuna’, my former studio colleagues with whom I spent so many years: José Angelino, Alessandro Dandini de Sylva, Marco Emmanuele and Luca Grechi. The group opened a project space at the 22.48m² gallery in Paris and an exhibition entitled Fortunatamente at the La Nuova Pesa gallery in Rome.
Concurrently, he presented his fourth solo exhibition, Sonoiononsonoiosonoio, at Norberto Ruggeri’s Studio SALES in Rome. Three projects were on display: "El asunto Miguel", which I’ve just mentioned; "Pensieri selvaggi" – a series of paintings created in Jaipur using traditional Indian wooden textile stamps; and "Un’allegria di naufragi", a book produced with Aniene and Filippo Nostri, which brings together a photographic project I’ve been working on since 2013, accompanied by a short story I wrote.
This intensive schedule has depleted my energy, but I plan to replenish it in December with a trip to the Odisha region of India, where I will study the system of production, organisation and transmission of knowledge through images using a palm-leaf engraving technique called Talapatra Chitra. This year I will travel to India three times and intend to focus exclusively on this research, supported by a grant from the Italian Council programme.
Concurrently, he presented his fourth solo exhibition, Sonoiononsonoiosonoio, at Norberto Ruggeri’s Studio SALES in Rome. Three projects were on display: "El asunto Miguel", which I’ve just mentioned; "Pensieri selvaggi" – a series of paintings created in Jaipur using traditional Indian wooden textile stamps; and "Un’allegria di naufragi", a book produced with Aniene and Filippo Nostri, which brings together a photographic project I’ve been working on since 2013, accompanied by a short story I wrote.
This intensive schedule has depleted my energy, but I plan to replenish it in December with a trip to the Odisha region of India, where I will study the system of production, organisation and transmission of knowledge through images using a palm-leaf engraving technique called Talapatra Chitra. This year I will travel to India three times and intend to focus exclusively on this research, supported by a grant from the Italian Council programme.
What insights does engaging with artisans and the traditions they uphold provide?
I am not, in fact, interested in craftsmanship itself, but in the visual knowledge systems underlying certain traditional techniques, often from cultures other than my own. I am learning that there are different ways of living, understanding and relating to the world, and that every language is a form of organising intelligence, a way of codifying reality. By ‘language’, I do not mean only the spoken word, but also visual languages which, whilst not languages in the strict sense, can function as systems of knowledge and organisation of thought. Artisans are the scribes who know these visual languages, which are often neglected, just as many written languages and many systems of intelligence different from our own are. They fascinate me because what I try to do as an artist is to write through the visual: I learn from them, observe them, and ask to be part of their world.
How did you get started as an artist?
Complicating things, then simplifying them, then complicating them again, then simplifying them once more, and so on.
What are your visual and theoretical references?
I find it difficult to answer without giving you a long list that I’ll regret shortly afterwards.
So I’ll just mention the first few that spring to mind: Camus, anthropology, and underground comics from the 1970s and 1980s.
So I’ll just mention the first few that spring to mind: Camus, anthropology, and underground comics from the 1970s and 1980s.
How did your interest in decoration as a form of language come about?
In Italian, 'decoro' also refers to a way of presenting oneself to the world: a person of 'decoro' is someone who has internalised and codified a certain behaviour, often linked to their cultural background. Ornament, on the other hand, is a set of signs that conforms to certain characteristics and rules: we could say that it is the medium through which a culture makes its decorum visible.
Now let us consider languages, for there too there is a codified system that organises thought. Each language has its own structure and offers different possibilities for doing so. It has often been said, for example, that German is the language of philosophy, partly because of its ability to combine multiple words into complex concepts. If I knew German, I would reason differently; and if German were to disappear, the world would lose a distinctive way of thinking. Something similar occurs with ornament. Its language has changed profoundly over the course of history, just as, for example, our relationship with nature has changed.
Before relying on science and technology, human beings sought to understand and influence the forces of nature through magic as well – understood as an attempt to dominate and explain the world around them. When I am feeling particularly romantic (a rare occurrence, as is the case now), I like to think of ornament as a form of speech that we have forgotten: a silent language, perhaps the last means we have left for communicating—at a different pace—with the world, as we once did when we were closer to things.
Of course, these are rather rambling thoughts, which a student of philosophy or semiotics could, I have little doubt, refute in a matter of minutes. But if there’s one thing I dislike about our society, it’s that it seems to have robbed us of the chance to contemplate the absurd and speak it aloud, even at the risk of being wrong. My interest as an artist stems precisely from this: taking ornament seriously as a language is, after all, already a different way of thinking, a suggestion as to how to look at things. To relegate ornamental practices to secondary art forms is, for me, the result of a long period of neglect: we have ceased to recognise in those signs a way of relating to the world, of observing it, of imitating it and perhaps of engaging in dialogue with that which we do not control. Who said that ornament represents only itself?
Now let us consider languages, for there too there is a codified system that organises thought. Each language has its own structure and offers different possibilities for doing so. It has often been said, for example, that German is the language of philosophy, partly because of its ability to combine multiple words into complex concepts. If I knew German, I would reason differently; and if German were to disappear, the world would lose a distinctive way of thinking. Something similar occurs with ornament. Its language has changed profoundly over the course of history, just as, for example, our relationship with nature has changed.
Before relying on science and technology, human beings sought to understand and influence the forces of nature through magic as well – understood as an attempt to dominate and explain the world around them. When I am feeling particularly romantic (a rare occurrence, as is the case now), I like to think of ornament as a form of speech that we have forgotten: a silent language, perhaps the last means we have left for communicating—at a different pace—with the world, as we once did when we were closer to things.
Of course, these are rather rambling thoughts, which a student of philosophy or semiotics could, I have little doubt, refute in a matter of minutes. But if there’s one thing I dislike about our society, it’s that it seems to have robbed us of the chance to contemplate the absurd and speak it aloud, even at the risk of being wrong. My interest as an artist stems precisely from this: taking ornament seriously as a language is, after all, already a different way of thinking, a suggestion as to how to look at things. To relegate ornamental practices to secondary art forms is, for me, the result of a long period of neglect: we have ceased to recognise in those signs a way of relating to the world, of observing it, of imitating it and perhaps of engaging in dialogue with that which we do not control. Who said that ornament represents only itself?
How is your day organised?
Nothing quite like it. However, as a general rule, I always go to the studio, even if it is merely to work at the computer or create some drawings. I speak with the craftspeople; I often have ongoing projects that need to be produced or brought to the studio; I call numerous individuals, organise trips and draft projects. Then I return home.
What is the role of art today?
While the precise function of art today remains elusive, the role of artists ought to be clear: to propose an alternative, contrary mode of thinking that persistently challenges the status quo. We live in a society that has managed to standardise even diversity, a society in which one can be anything, yet poverty remains unacceptable. We prefer not to see this, except in those reels that—all too lightly—alternate between dramas and high-protein recipes. If that is not the function of art, it should at least be the role of artists: to take the trouble to propose alternatives to this state of affairs.
One example might be a return to spirituality. This is not a call to question secularisation, but it is perplexing that we appear to be abandoning the notion that art can serve as a bridge to the sacred. If, tomorrow, a figure—not a deity, but perhaps a prophet or an enlightened individual—were to appear, how would we recognise them amid this chaos? Would such a figure even establish a TikTok account? Are we really sure that ours is such an advanced society, we who have decided that the Apus – the spirits of the Andean mountains – are merely a pile of rock to be quarried and not fascinating beings with whom to engage?
One example might be a return to spirituality. This is not a call to question secularisation, but it is perplexing that we appear to be abandoning the notion that art can serve as a bridge to the sacred. If, tomorrow, a figure—not a deity, but perhaps a prophet or an enlightened individual—were to appear, how would we recognise them amid this chaos? Would such a figure even establish a TikTok account? Are we really sure that ours is such an advanced society, we who have decided that the Apus – the spirits of the Andean mountains – are merely a pile of rock to be quarried and not fascinating beings with whom to engage?
The works
I am, I am not, I am, I am
installation view
SALES Studio by Norberto Ruggeri, Rome
Photo credit: Roberto Apa
The Miguel Affair – Blimey
2022
160x26x30cm
chiselled wood, iron, plywood, glass, enamel
Courtesy: the artist and Studio SALES by Norberto Ruggeri, Rome
Photo credit: Studio DMM
The Miguel Affair – The Saint
2026
approx. 168 x 35.5 x 25.5 cm
brushed wood, MDF, gold-plated chain, shirt
Courtesy: the artist and Studio SALES by Norberto Ruggeri, Rome
Photo credit: Studio DMM
Pensieri Selvaggi – Immense greenery; at night I was leafing through the atlas
2026
Acrylic paint (woodblock) and graphite on cotton canvas
105.5 x 142 cm
Courtesy: the artist and Studio SALES by Norberto Ruggeri, Rome
Photo credit: Eleonora Cerri Pecorella
it also conveyed a secret happiness
Installation view
MAR Museum, Ravenna
Photo credit: Studio DMM
We were discovering the sun
2021
ceramics and iron
330 x 255 x 2 cm
Courtesy: RISO – Regional Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Palermo
Winning entry in the public call for entries “Cantica21. Italian Contemporary Art Everywhere” – Under-35 section, organised by MAECI-DGSP / MiC-DGCC
Photo credit: Ivan Erofeev
I pay for everything with my eyes
2025
90x70cm
ceramics and iron
Courtesy: the artist and Studio SALES by Norberto Ruggeri, Rome
Photo credit: Studio DMM
Not titled left – Rrose Sélavy
2025
80x52cm
tempera on panel and gold leaf
Courtesy: the artist
Photo credit: Eleonora Cerri Pecorella
Tales of Fire – Uncertain Lucidity
2025
17x110.5x23
bronze and brass
Courtesy: the artist and Studio SALES by Norberto Ruggeri, Rome
Photo credit: Eleonora Cerri Pecorella