Laurina Paperina

Illustrations, comics, and contemporary art are taking over the streets, squares, and historic gardens of Rovereto during the “Nuvolette” festival, organized by Superflùo through June 14.

Four days of exhibitions, performances, live drawing sessions, comics, and urban interventions, all inspired by the theme “Fuori!”—an invitation to break down the barriers of everyday life and restore the power of imagination. And throughout the summer, until September, visitors will be able to explore exhibitions and installations across the city.

Among the many projects, Trentino artist Laurina Paperina’s Brain Drain (Fuga di cervelli) transforms the underpass at Rovereto’s Piazzale Orsi railway station into a space animated by moving presences. The installation is based on a character that has accompanied Paperina’s work for years: an anthropomorphic brain with eyes, a beak, legs, and wings—an alter ego in constant transformation. The constellation of suspended brains crossing the underpass carries irony and lightness, while also expressing a deeper condition: the contrast between the immediacy of images and the complexity of what they conceal. These small flying brains speak of fragility, movement, and identity.

Superflùo’s Creative Director, Dalia Macii, explains:
“The theme ‘Fuori!’ emerged from a sense of urgency we felt as boundaries continue to multiply, shift, and inhabit bodies and cities in new ways. Creating conscious culture means bringing all of this into the spaces we live in.”

The work, in the words of Laurina Paperina:
“I am interested in giving form to something immaterial like thought: the brain becomes an autonomous figure, capable of moving, escaping, migrating. It is a character that carries with it a sense of irony and lightness, yet it also speaks to a deeper condition: instability, the need for change, the difficulty of remaining still within a system that expects us to be productive, rational, and efficient. The installation in the underpass brings together this entire journey: a constellation of suspended brains, as if they were crossing a place of transition. The idea of escape can be interpreted in many ways: as a social and cultural phenomenon, but also in a more intimate sense—the mind that cannot remain still, that is constantly searching for something else, that sometimes loses its way. The language remains close to that of comics, an aesthetic I use to create a contrast between the apparent lightness of the image and the complexity of what lies beneath it. Immediate, almost playful images that conceal a more restless dimension. These flying brains are small attempts to speak about fragility, movement, and identity in a way that is simple, but not superficial.”