Presented on the occasion of Condo London, this exhibition brings together two bodies of work that belong to different times and generations. Shown alongside one another are a new body of sculptural works by Arlette and a focused presentation of works by Sylvano Bussotti, including a very rare musical score and a collage. Condo’s collaborative format – through which London-based galleries host invited international galleries – creates the conditions for proximity, allowing distinct practices to resonate.

Arlette’s practice approaches fragmentation not as loss but as method. Her new framed metal works – relic-like forms, many cast from melted-down earlier sculptures – retain traces of prior bodies, gestures, and decisions, allowing transformation to remain visible rather than resolved. Through repetition, erosion, and reuse, sculpture becomes a site of material negotiation, where meaning accumulates through touch, resistance, and refusal rather than explanation.

Bussotti’s work unfolds across sound, notation, text, and image, asserting the musical score as a visual and sensorial field as much as a compositional one. His pages gather staves, words, signs, and drawings into dense surfaces where precision coexists with excess, and where notation slips toward image and gesture. As Roland Barthes observed, Bussotti’s scores construct a “homological space,” whose surface seems to yearn to become a scene. Presented here through a score and a collage, the work asserts the page as a charged surface – an unstable script in which notation, text, and image oscillate, and where the score, rigorously coded yet sensuous, seems to incline toward performance and scene. Bussotti’s scores occupy a pivotal position in postwar experimental music: selected by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari as the sole image illustrating A Thousand Plateaus, they mark a radical expansion of musical notation comparable to the innovations of John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Pierre Boulez.

Shown in proximity, the two presentations establish a dialogue across generations, allowing distinct approaches to material, notation, and form to be read in relation without convergence.



Dear Sylvano,

There is an erotism to death, and being aware of it makes me feel I’m growing towards something. I can feel the sky closer and the dirt deeper. Somewhere in my spine or teeth I can feel your presence; you live in a dimension where I can only encounter you by feeling. I know you from intuition. Is there a better way of getting to know someone?

Death is the topic of this letter, and my confession is my recent fascination with it. I think you are an expert on it, and that’s what brings us here.

How many times have you died?

I feel haunted by the idea of disappearing and fascinated by the idea of dying. I’m entertained by how many times I have died in this body of mine. When will my last death be? Will I die as Arlette? Will I come back to this world as her? I hope neither.

I hope I die as someone I never thought I’d be, yet always sang about – further from where I call home but closer to what I felt unknown. Surrounded by everything I felt loved by and finding love in everything I once feared. Contradicting myself fully and experiencing everything I promised I would never try. Accompanied by my biggest belief, freedom, but letting go of everything that I once felt mine. Somewhere where my intuition leads me to death, and what’s playing in the back is your symphony.

Apparently, your mother tongue was Italian, and you learned French and English while working. I think constantly of the beauty of being lost in translation. I find pleasure in it – in the attention, the sound, in the uncertainty and the story we tell each other. Let’s fall in love without the use of words and the company of silence. Let’s create a language only we can understand.

Your scores belong to your hand. Your code. Your body. And I’m drawn to that, to the unapologetic part of it.

Your freedom. I wish that for me – to find myself in different shapes, different rooms, different definitions, different arguments. I find people more convinced of who I am than I am. Their opinions of me feel stronger, louder, heavier than my own understanding of myself. And disappointing them has felt sad, almost cruel but quite funny. How can someone that met me 10 years or even a week ago still be so certain of who I am? I find it inevitable to change. I believe in encountering parts of you. There are parts of myself that remain asleep until another presence unlocks them. If someone were to capture you perfectly in words or an image would it feel like intimacy, exposure, or erasure?

Freedom is not doing everything; sometimes it’s stopping something. Freedom is my religion, my ritual, my repetition, and I’ve sinned enough by obeying. I have teeth. I need to chew on something; everything seems too digestible – sound, words, visuals, pain, trauma, war.

I’m softening, I’m guarding, I’m dissolving, and maybe I’m reappearing. This version of me needs to be encountered. Nothing is about me, and nothing I’ve created is mine, but in me you can find everything. May everything forever stay that way. Everything surrounds me, so what would you expect?

Do I have an audience? I’ll navigate without the validation of visibility. And this letter might serve as a gratitude and a goodbye to all, to myself and maybe even to metal – or whoever really cares, because why would people even care? This new version of me needs to be encountered, not fed. It needs to be chewed and then maybe swallowed, vomited, or spit back at me. Let’s confront each other.

Find me.

Admiration and love,

Arlette