HOLD. RELEASE. REPEAT.

DAILY LIFE WITH SCLERODERMA
 

Nicola Fornoni’s life is structured through repetition. Not symbolic, but practical. Daily. Living here is not an abstract condition, but an ongoing discipline made of gestures: measuring, stretching, washing, applying, holding, pausing, beginning again.

 

A performer and visual artist, Fornoni does not separate art from the physical reality that shapes his days. His practice begins where effort is least visible: in the kitchen, in the bathroom, in the slow preparation of the morning, in the repeated actions required to keep the body moving, functioning, present. Diagnosed in childhood with leukemia, he underwent a bone marrow transplant whose complications led to scleroderma, a chronic autoimmune condition that progressively alters the body’s connective tissues. There is no clear border between care and performance, between endurance and form. The gesture belongs to both.

 

Effort resides in ordinary actions, resistance in simple movements, tension that never fully releases. A strip pulled and held. The same gesture returns, without emphasis. There is no climax, no resolution. What repeats is not the image, but the condition.

 

Fornoni’s body is not presented as something to be explained or overcome, but as a system under constant negotiation—a structure that requires continuous adjustment, where control is partial and effort ongoing. If there is strength here, it is not dramatic.

A life sustained through attention, held together by gestures that do not stop.