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THE CODE OF THE SUBTLE

Works, Research and Dialogues on the Metaphysical Territories of Consciousness

THE CODE OF THE SUBTLE | IL CODICE DEL SOTTILE is the first exhibition activation of THE SPIRITUAL IN ART COLLECTIVE, promoted and coordinated by Nellimya Arthouse, a curatorial and research platform active since 2007 and now based in Aranno, Switzerland, dedicated to the spiritual and perceptual dimensions of contemporary art.

What does it mean today to work from a place of inner coherence? What artistic languages can emerge when the spiritual is not simply a subject to be represented, but enters the method, process, practice and perception of art?

These questions gave rise in 2026 to an international Open Call and, from it, to THE SPIRITUAL IN ART COLLECTIVE, bringing together fifteen artists from different geographical, cultural and disciplinary contexts:

Patrick Altes · Daniela Bozzetto · Jorge Cañete · Séverine Christen · Emilio Ferro

Vasudha Kapadia · Agnieszka-Rose Kuntzmann · Mya Lurgo · Pól McLernon · Luiza Milewicz

Catrin O’Hara · Luca Serasini · Oli Sorenson · Vincent van Oss · Anna Walker

The Collective is not founded on a common aesthetic or on a predetermined definition of the spiritual. Instead, the coming twelve months are conceived as a living alchemical vessel: a period of brainstorming, exchange, and cross-pollination in which autonomous practices, intuitions, and questions are brought into contact — not to fuse them into a single vision, but to observe what resonates, what transforms, and what crystallises. If shared coordinates emerge from this process, they may become the basis for a future Manifesto on the spiritual in contemporary art.

THE CODE OF THE SUBTLE is the first shared territory in which this plurality takes as a polycentric geography of works, places and connections.. Each artist activates a work in their own country, choosing a location that can enter into relation with it. Each intervention thus maintains a direct relationship with its own context while also generating a geographical coordinate. The 15 GPS coordinates of the works — one for each artist — are translated into an equal number of points and connected according to a single mathematical rule: the minimum network required to connect them all. This creates a real geography: the Collective’s first drawing/sign — a form not predetermined in advance, but produced by the actual positions of the works and the distances between them.

The project is therefore defined not by geographical dispersion, but by what moves through it and brings it into relation: the desire to collaborate around a shared field of inquiry — the spiritual in art — transforming distance into a possibility for connection. On the occasion of the opening on Sunday 13 September 2026, Nellimya Arthouse in Aranno became the network’s temporary point of convergence. The works remain in the places where they were activated; in Aranno, videos of the works and interventions realised in different countries are presented, offering the public the possibility of simultaneously perceiving a constellation of experiences that are geographically distant yet conceptually connected.

Alongside the geography of the works unfolds a more intimate cartography, entrusted to Mail Art/Postal Art. Each artist sends a letter-work dedicated to their relationship with THE SPIRITUAL IN ART, sharing values, questions and keywords from their research. These works form an initial archive of Letters of Intent: individual traces from which, over the first year of exchange, shared coordinates may emerge and, only if the process calls for it, the possibility of a future Manifesto.

The catalogue of works brings together the artists’ reflections on their practices, while also presenting a historical study by Nellimya Arthouse, The Spiritual in Art from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Century. Across the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the research highlights a significant continuity within constant transformation: the spiritual has never produced a single style or recognisable language. It has moved through abstraction, geometry, colour, matter, light, the body, landscape, ritual, silence, time and technology, changing alongside art and the world in which art is made.

In the contemporary field, this enquiry becomes increasingly polycentric. Ecology, memory, cosmologies, digital technologies, ritual, ancestral knowledge and different systems of thought can coexist without being reduced to a universal synthesis. What emerges is less a single language of the spiritual than a constellation of practices in which connection and difference remain equally significant.

The project therefore begins not with a Manifesto, but with a process.
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THE CODE OF THE SUBTLE is its first activation: an invitation to observe what fifteen autonomous practices may generate when they enter a shared field of enquiry, and whether twelve months of creative alchemy can bring into focus the coordinates from which a Manifesto might eventually emerge.

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Download the digital catalogue of THE CODE OF THE SUBTLE

https://www.nellimya-arthouse.ch/en/arthouse/the-spiritual-in-art/

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