Developed during her residency in Split earlier this year, Martina Cioffi’s project takes its title, I primi pensieri del mondo (The First Thoughts of the World),  from the evocative verses of poet Giorgio Caproni, who describes a potent, primordial image of dawn—the precise, fragile moment when the world awakens, light breaks, and the morning's first bird songs pierce the silence. For Cioffi, this daily awakening functions as a continuous origin, a threshold where the world is born anew each time. The work traces a poetic lineage of the city of Split through two foundational plants deeply embedded in its landscape and material identity: the broom (Spartium junceum, known locally as brnistra) and the acanthus (Acanthus mollis, or akant in Croatian). Found thriving side by side within the garden of the nearby Archaeological Museum, these botanical specimens frame a conceptual dialogue between the untamed natural world and the historic weights of human construction. 

The broom, with its radiant, sun-like yellow blossoms, carries the mythic origin of the city’s ancient Greek name, Spálathos. Before the physical city existed, there was possibly only this luminous natural image: a wild topography flooded by golden light. Conversely, the acanthus represents the triumph of architecture over the organic. Carved into the Corinthian capitals of Diocletian’s Palace—the very nucleus of Split—the living plant was historically petrified into stone, trading its biological vitality for structural permanence and formal order. Cioffi operates within the fertile tension between these two poles: nature and architecture, spontaneous growth and calculated construction. Disrupting classical tradition, the installation intentionally privileges the flower over its iconic leaf. While the leaf has long symbolized stability and architectural rigidness, the flower introduces time, ephemerality, and reproduction. Through this shift, architecture sheds its static permanence, becoming something fluid, unstable, and generative. 

In the gallery space, two elongated iron stems emerge directly from the architecture, reaching out into the room. Perched upon them are delicate ceramic flowers, resembling small birds frozen in a moment when they are about to sing. They are not just flowers, but figures suspended between the vegetal and the animal, between silence and voice, between stillness and awakening. Enveloped by a soft, artificial fog that blurs the boundaries of the physical environment, the installation transforms the room into a dream-like, pre-architectural sanctuary. This environment exists both before and beyond human fabrication—a speculative landscape where the city dissolves back into its vegetal origins, collapsing the act of building into a simple gesture of growth.

Lalliginosa l’alba
nasce sulle colline,
balbettanti parole ancora
infantili, la prima luce.

La terra, con la sua faccia
madida di sudore,
apre assonnati occhi d’acqua
alla notte che sbianca.

(Gli uccelli sono sempre i primi
pensieri del mondo).
_

installation
glazed and lustred ceramics, raku ceramics,  iron, vapour
2026