The installation “Leaves in the wind” consists of a white wall and forty-five leaves, all different in shape and size, just as their origins differ. The leaves, placed side by side, are made of plaster and resin and all painted white to emphasize their homogeneity within diversity. Their proximity is casual and temporary. When the wind arrives, it will scatter them, each to a different place.

The leaf symbolizes the inevitability of change and renewal. Leaves possess healing and protective powers. In this installation, the leaves represent us human beings—each unique, close to one another yet at the mercy of the wind of life that carries us to unknown places.

The white wall symbolizes the space where we ideally live and represents our invisible destiny: it gains depth and materiality through the leaves that seem to emerge from it. The wall, where we are temporarily “hung,” implies the randomness of being in one place rather than another. It depicts a mental space that describes the uncertainty of human destiny. “White strikes us as a great silence that seems absolute,” wrote Kandinsky. White as abstraction and subtraction. White is the wall, and white are the leaves—different in form, like a story of distinct destinies and silences. The certainty of remaining long in a safe place or a comfortable situation does not exist. We all, during the time given to us, travel through the world like leaves, independent of our will. We try to control and choose our path, but forces greater than us determine our journey.

The artist Micaela Legnaioli invites reflection on the involuntary nature and randomness of finding oneself in a certain place due to life’s unpredictability, which, like the wind with the leaves, scatters, moves, and rearranges, determining the fate of each one of us.

Born in 1970 in New Delhi, India, Micaela has lived in several European and South American countries before settling in Rome over the past decade. The installation “Leaves in the Wind” serves as a reflection on her existential journey, marked by life in different cities across the world. Over the years, the artist has experimented with various techniques—painting, sculpture, and ceramics. Her artistic research has always focused on the identity of individuals and couples, and on the traces that every human being leaves, whether consciously or not. Her intellectual and material research—beginning with the physical digital imprint of “Traces,” moving through the symbolic representation of Western historical figures engraved on zinc and copper plates—now, with the site-specific installation “Leaves in the Wind,” contemplates the awareness of the accidental and involuntary factors that can shape one’s life: being physically in one place rather than another, and having certain people/leaves nearby rather than others. Having modeled, engraved, and penetrated the essence of her subjects to express the value of uniqueness, Micaela now turns her gaze to destiny and chance, exploring the existential path of each person. Shifting from the individual to the collective, she investigates humanity’s shared journey. She seems to tell us: we are different, we are unique, we cannot always choose where to be or who to have beside us—but we are not alone. She reaches the core of life’s meaning, offering a consoling embrace to humanity.

Sabrina Consolini