Gabbiani’s Vague Terrains and Urban Fuckups series explore “non-places” – abandoned, liminal spaces of the city where wilderness and urban texture collide, and are often ignored in our day to day experience. These are littered, empty lots on which brambles and weeds flourish, suffocating all that is underneath them. The viewer witnesses the growth of vegetal species that have adapted to a hostile environment, negotiating their survival with cement and depleted topsoil, in a no-man’s-land that is neither nature nor metropolis. The months to years of time and attention invested on each piece (translations from Gabbiani’s personal snapshots) indicates an admiration for the resilience of a primary world that slowly manages to survive, an empathy for the lives they support, and the quiet, invisible will by which they persist.
(Summarization and excerpts from essay by Paolo Colombo, Curator, 2018)