In person / Exhibition / Wrapping
"In conjunction with New York Textile Month and New York’s September art and design calendar, Scavolini SoHo Gallery, in collaboration with The CAMP Gallery, presents The Way Words Turn, an exhibition-event by Federica Patera & Andrea Sbra Perego.
Federica Patera & Andrea Sbra Perego are an Italian artist duo based in New York. Their practice brings together textile art, language, sculpture, installation, and research into verbal roots, exploring how words, materials, and spatial relationships shape the way we understand and inhabit the world.
Conceived specifically for the Scavolini SoHo showroom, the project brings together a selection of works from the artists’ ongoing Roots series, dedicated to verbal roots and to the relationship between language, matter, and the construction of reality. Rather than approaching the showroom as a neutral exhibition space, the artists respond to its architecture, surfaces, materials, and points of visibility through site-responsive interventions developed in dialogue with the space.
As often happens in Patera & Sbra Perego’s practice, the project began with a text: Elémire Zolla’s essay “Language and Cosmogony,” which reflects on the story of Creation in relation to the development of languages across the world, both ancient and modern. For the artists, Roots is a cosmogony: an inquiry into beginnings, into how something comes into being, how it starts, and according to what order."
Opening Reception
Thursday, September 17, 2026
6:00 PM - 8:00 PM
Exhibition
Through Tuesday, October 13, 2026
Monday to Saturday, 11:00 AM to 5:00 PM
No registration required!
We are Federica Patera and Andrea Sbra Perego, an Italian artist duo based in Brooklyn, New York. Federica comes from literature and publishing; Andrea from street art and painting. In 2017, our different worlds merged into a shared practice. Our collaboration intertwines textile- and text-based processes, often incorporating recycled materials. We consider language and writing as porous, living systems, generating layered meanings and narratives that explore how multiple points of view can reveal unexpected forms of universality. From wall-mounted pieces to sculptural objects, immersive installations, and sound- integrated environments, we use scale, calligraphy, and materiality to shape the relationship between viewer, work, and space. By isolating a detail or multiplying it infinitely, we question hierarchical relationships between humans, the environment, and the role of perception.