Jacopo Mandich & Eric Oder | SHADOW CRACKERS
Art News Milan
20/04/2026On the occasion of Fuorisalone 2026, Sogimi Holding, in collaboration with Raffaella De Chirico Arte Contemporanea and Superstudio Design, presents Shadow Crackers, an exhibition project that creates a dialogue between the sculptures of Jacopo Mandich and the audiovisual and sound practice of Eric Oder.
From April 20 to 26, within the spaces of Via Tortona 27 — the beating heart of Milan Design Week — the exhibition unfolds as an immersive experience in which matter, sound, and light interpenetrate, generating a sensory and conceptual environment that transcends disciplinary boundaries.
The Sogimi Holding venue is divided into three environments that function as a single living organism: a central interactive core and two lateral chambers representing its subconscious offshoots. This is not a mere succession of rooms, but a dynamic system in which each space is part of a fluid, almost initiatory narrative.
The journey unfolds as a continuous flow between matter and spirit, physical presence and digital transfiguration. The visitor is not a passive spectator but an activator of processes: their passage generates vibration, triggers transformations, and turns the artwork into an event.
Everything begins in the dim light of the Quantum Cloud (Nuvola Quantica). Here, iron — a primary, heavy, ancestral material — presents itself in a state of apparent stillness. Jacopo Mandich’s sculptures impose themselves through their lean and rigorous physicality: structures that seem to hold energy. It is the audience’s intervention that awakens the matter; through stimulation and interaction, they activate a response system that dissolves the object's static nature. The work is no longer a finished form, but a field of forces.
This interaction amplifies and translates into a visual flow on a LED wall, where physical reality dematerializes into pure digital energy. The sound frequencies elaborated by Eric Oder become luminous architectures, abstract landscapes, and perceptual interferences.
The dialogue between sculpture and sound is not illustrative but structural: sound does not merely accompany matter, it traverses it; the image does not represent the sculpture, it extends it into another dimension. In this transition, the fracture evoked by the title Shadow Crackers takes place: a crack in perception, a rift between the visible and the invisible.
The descent continues into the darkness of the Jackals (Sciacalli), an environment configured as a brutal and archetypal confrontation with the unconscious and primordial matter. Here, the sculptures take on animal-like presences, recalling the Dantean Cerberus; guardians of a dark threshold, symbols of a primordial instinct that simultaneously separates and connects the visible world to that of the unconscious. Meanwhile, the sound becomes deeper, pulsating, and layered.
It is a space of tension and resonance, where the visitor is called to confront the shadow that remains on the margins of design and rational consciousness. Art becomes a liminal experience: a crossing that challenges the categories of form, function, and stability.
The journey culminates in the Return to Light (Ritorno alla luce). After the immersion in shadow and raw matter, form is recomposed into a new awareness. Matter becomes a project; the artistic gesture translates into vision.
Within the SOGIMI world, this synthesis reveals a possible convergence between contemporary art and future design: a common ground where aesthetics, technology, and thought intertwine, suggesting new ways of inhabiting space and conceiving the environment.
Shadow Crackers stems from the collaboration between a sculptor and a sound artist, yet it establishes itself as a broader investigation into the relationship between body and system, object and flow, presence and data.
In the context of Design Week, the exhibition serves as a critical reflection on the potential of interdisciplinarity: not a mere blending of languages, but the construction of a perceptual ecosystem in which art and technology co-determine one another.
