Panspermia Vol. 1

“Panspermia vol.1” (2026): collage on painted wood, paper, pencils, gold leaf, epoxy resin, 13,5 x 22,5 cm.

Created as a site-specific work for RomaDiffusa, this piece emerges in dialogue with the San Lorenzo neighborhood and the legacy of Maria Montessori, who opened her first Casa dei Bambini at 58 Via dei Marsi in 1907. The project weaves together cosmology, childhood, and pedagogical imagination.

The title refers to the “panspermia” hypothesis: the idea that the seeds of life may travel through space carried by comets and cosmic dust. In this work, the concept serves as a poetic and speculative device where childhood becomes a symbolic site of origin, possibility, and evolution.

At the center of this visual constellation is comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, studied by the ESA’s Rosetta mission. Scientific images are transformed into mythological landscapes, blending actual ESA photographs with those regenerated through AI training on authentic mission data. Figures of children from the Montessori archive inhabit these cometary territories as primordial presences: exploring, building, and naming.

The work also features a sign-based language originating from an imaginary alphabet created in my childhood. Much like the Rosetta Stone, which allowed for the deciphering of ancient scripts, these collages offer a lexicon of origin suspended between personal memory, pedagogy, and cosmic imagination.