INTRO

Wangechi Mutu (Nairobi, 1972), internationally renowned for her multidisciplinary practice, presents Black Soil Poems, her first solo exhibition in an Italian institution, Galleria Borghese, where her works enter into dialogue with the museum’s architecture and historical collection. The title evokes the dual nature of Mutu’s practice: poetic and material. The soil is both metaphor and substance—a ground from which forms emerge, histories are layered, and meaning is unsettled. These figures draw from East African mythologies, global cosmologies, and speculative futures. They echo lost rituals and oral histories, while imagining new ways of being.

Outdoors, the bronze sculptures introduce hybrid beings – part human, part animal, part spirit – behaving like guardians or visions. Indoors, suspended forms resist the museum’s fixity, floating midair. Through strategies of levitation and mirroring, Mutu transforms the museum from a container of treasures into a space of vibration and potential metamorphosis. 

Black Soil Poems invites us to encounter the museum differently—not as a wonderful archive, but as a shifting field. Nothing here is stable. Everything moves. Her works are thresholds. They do not explain; they expand. Inserted like ghostly presences, these interventions do not aim to illustrate or narrate, but to interrupt, to question, and to gently haunt the visual order of the museum. They propose poetic counterpoints to established narratives and visual canons. 

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