Between February and March 2025, an exhibition at the intriguing ArtNoble gallery in Milan left me deep in thought.

 

During this exhibition, inside the gallery, the persistent sound of buzzing flies echoed from small speakers scattered throughout an otherwise empty space. At the entrance, each visitor received a fly swatter, a gesture that turned anyone who entered into a hunter. But what, exactly, was being hunted?

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​​​​In 'C’era una mosca', Filippo Mazza turned an insect commonly associated with filth and death into the center of a sensory and symbolic experience. The fly, or the idea of it, buzzes around, irritates, escapes. You have to walk, listen, trace the presence of something nearly invisible. And when you find it, it’s no ordinary fly: it’s a tiny golden one, hidden, delicate. A treasure. An irony.

 

Over the course of the exhibition, which lasted exactly as long as the average lifespan of a real fly, these “living” miniature sculptures were replaced, on the final day, with a dead fly. As if the cycle had closed. As if, in the end, the art also died, or finally revealed itself.

 

Anyone who found the golden fly earned the right to see it in a separate room, framed like a noble portrait. Trash becomes luxury. Pest becomes relic. The most banal animal receives reverence.

 

There’s a kind of dirty poetry in this search. A beauty that is neither clean nor obvious, but alive and unsettling. Because by turning a fly into art, Mazza also confronts us with what we usually reject: the banal, the annoying, the leftover. It’s not just about finding something shiny in the trash. It’s about the very shimmer of the trash itself. The ability of art to make us look at what we normally ignore.

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The exhibition doesn’t offer a finished work, spotlighted and waiting for applause. It demands movement, effort, listening. You have to be willing to walk in the dark, to get it wrong, to be annoyed, until something appears. And when it does, it’s not imposing. It’s tiny. Fragile. Almost a joke. But that’s where the revelation lies: art as something that hides, that doesn’t impose itself, but when it emerges, it changes how we see everything around us.

 

This poetics of discomfort makes us think about how we search for meaning in the middle of noise. How life sometimes demands that we go through discomfort in order to find something that moves us. Sometimes, it’s in what is dirtiest, smallest, or most unlikely that we stumble upon some kind of truth.