Alice Peach - A case of ordinary shuffle

I imagined Contrappunto for what it is — an extension of the gallery space, a containing structure. Precisely because of its nature it can legitimise the presence of experiments that can exist only in relation to it. Within this space, intimate and hidden environments take shape, where modular and everyday elements take on new meanings. The atmosphere is familiar and intimate, what dominates is an affectivity between objects and human beings.

Alice transforms the space of Contrappunto with modular elements, visual fragments, and personal archives materials that she carefully preserves. It is precisely these modules — simple, everyday, often overlooked — that reveal a profound transformative potential. Alice incorporates into her work materials commonly associated with amateur practices and domestic craft-making — such as beads, threads, and small wooden sticks. These elements, often considered marginal, are recontextualized through a process of repetition, accumulation, and care. Removed from their functional or decorative role, they become part of a personal language, charged with affective potential and poetic resonance.

These elements are selected and repeated through a process of hyper-focus, where obsessive attention meets the intrusion of thought. Each repetition carries with it an error, a variation, a deviation. With every passage, something is lost and something else is retained.

It is an exhaustive process in which form emerges through accumulation, transformation, error, and erosion. Images, replicated to the point of wear, regenerate precisely at the moment of rupture. What remains between one transition and the next becomes the true material of the work.

In Alice’s practice, repetition both affirms and consumes meaning. Boundaries blur, and objects become confused, mingled with one another. As with a word repeated until it loses its sense, her sculptural process recalls the rhetorical figure of synesthesia. Paper mimics plastic, sequins become buttons, and the wooden stick transforms into a flexible, shifting surface. These are at once objects and surfaces, forms and suggestions.

Contrappunto is an ambiguous space—one that welcomes what, by its nature, evades clear identification. The sculptural elements resist being fixed in place. They evoke the rotating figures of pinwheels: shoes that shine and deflect attention, shoes that remain motionless because they are bound to one another, a round dance anchored to an unstable, swaying base. Shoes that are still, yet moved by the context in which they are placed.

This approach ties into a central aspect of Alice’s research: the concept of mimesis—as a survival strategy in the animal world, but also as a form of social resistance in the human world. Through mimicry and transformation, her work explores themes of camouflage, adaptation, and the subversive potential of materials which, like the figures they suggest, refuse to remain still.

• Alessia Delli Rocioli, in close dialogue with the artist.

A case of ordinary shuffle is a site-specific installation by Alice Peach for Contrappunto, curated by Alessia Delli Rocioli.

Alice Peach (b. 1996) is an Anglo-Italian artist based in Milan. Her multidisciplinary practice moves across painting, drawing, sculpture and printmaking, in a process that uses mostly modular elements, textile patterns, and scale-modelling materials. After earning a BA in Fine Art and Textiles from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam in 2020, she continued developing her practice in Berlin from 2021 to 2022, before returning to Italy. Through “craft”, understood as both manual labor and constructed illusion, Alice Peach’s work explores the tension between function and decoration, clarity and ambiguity, control and play.

Alessia Delli Rocioli (b. 1998) is a researcher in artistic and cultural practices. Her work spans curating, crafting spaces for dialogue and shared imagination, and fiction writing. She holds a degree in Art History with a thesis focused on the intersection of poetic and political action in 1970s Italy. Her practice engages with performance, publishing, and collaborative formats. She has worked as freelance curator and art producer with institutions and independent projects as Cripta 747, EKA (Estonian Academy of Arts), Hpo, Fondazione Elpis, Gallerie d’Italia, SPRINT - Independent Art Book Fair, A sud, Art Verona and archives. Since 2021, she has been curator of Unpae, a non-profit artist platform connecting artists, curators, and researchers through inclusive dialogue and collective inquiry in Abruzzo, Italy.

CONTRAPPUNTO is the project space of VIN VIN. The works here displayed  get unveiled after each inauguration. The programming of CONTRAPPUNTO follows its own development, independently from the programming of the main gallery space. CONTRAPPUNTO, realized by Martin Hotter, is structurally incorporated in VIN VIN's main gallery space.