my tongue in my friend's mouth
Gaia Di Lorenzo and Francesca Pionati
5 June - 31 August 2025

Gaia Di Lorenzo and Francesca Pionati unveil my tongue in my friend's mouth, a new exhibition and public commission at Forma, 15 Bermondsey Square. Developed during their two-month residency at FormaHQ in autumn 2024, my tongue in my friend’s mouth marks the artists’ first exhibition as a duo, bringing together new work shaped through shared research and dialogue. Though distinct in their approaches, their practices converge around the structures that govern both selfhood and the state — probing the spaces where these structures falter, fracture, or shift, and the personal and societal voids that emerge in their wake.

Installed across Forma’s 15-metre-long window gallery on Bermondsey Square, the exhibition unfolds as a conversation between the bodies of works and the vitrine-like space. Taking advantage of the existing architecture, the artists experiment with layering, transforming the space into a dynamic interplay of material to explore how emotional, architectural, social frameworks can both sustain and estrange us. Di Lorenzo's and Pionati's works meet in this space of rupture, examining how absence, when made visible, can become a site of shared inquiry.

Gaia Di Lorenzo presents a new series of etched glass sculptures that capture fragmentary glimpses of personal histories and emotional states, memories of encounters, and relationships lost to time. Each piece functions as a visual snapshot — poetic and contradictory, fragile yet enduring. Some incorporate embedded stones, floating in space, anchoring memory in physical matter. Light becomes an active participant, shifting what is seen and how, as if mirroring the fluid and unstable nature of recollection and emotional inheritance. These works speak to how personal relationships, even in their absence, continue to shape us — how the echoes of closeness or conflict leave marks that are internalised, refracted, and carried forward.

Meanwhile, Francesca Pionati’s series of layered works and miniatures offer a counterpoint in their examination of how urban architecture — shaped by policy, profit, and exclusion — can displace and unmoor communities and sever social bonds. An analysis of more than a century of policies that have led to the widespread obsolescence of buildings in most contemporary capitals, the absence created is structural, but manifests in the personal and collective realities of those who live in them. Developed with Tommaso Arnaldi, and with support from 3D designer Gaia Lazzaro, Pionati investigates the material and symbolic interventions that allow these buildings to become homes. As acts of resistance, reinvention, or commoning — these reconfigured objects reflect on how inhabiting architectures not designed for living can reshape one’s perception of space and the world.

Through these works, my tongue in my friend's mouth sees individual and collective stories become suspended amongst the fall-out of social and societal disintegration. Further echoed in the whitewashed glass of the 15 meter long gallery space, a technique typically used in empty shop fronts that are closing down or in disrepair, Di Lorenzo and Pionati’s installation creates moments of reflection — literal and metaphorical, to consider how collectively we navigate absence, social uncertainty and transformation.

Gaia and Francesca say:

Working together on “my tongue in my friend’s mouth” meant confronting ruptures — personal, spatial, political — from radically different standpoints, not only in medium but in method. It was both a challenge and a necessity to hold space for our opposing approaches: one more intuitive, the other research-based. What emerged was a tension that allowed each of our works to remain distinct, yet to resonate more deeply through their proximity.

During October and November of 2024, Francesca Pionati and Gaia Di Lorenzo participated in a two-month residency at FormaHQ during which they delved into their shared interest in alternative pedagogies as a tool for social engagement and intervention.

Antonia Shaw, Head of Programmes at Forma, says:

We’re delighted to welcome Gaia and Francesca back to Forma — this time for their first exhibition as a duo, the multidisciplinary installation “my tongue in my friend’s mouth”. Gaia and Francesca’s exhibition invites us to dwell in the aftershocks of social change — the moments of suspension, hesitation, or paralysis. In doing so, they prompt a critical reflection on how communities register, absorb, and respond to the shifting conditions of social transformation.

Forma is committed to working with artists durationally and iteratively, nurturing both momentary projects, and long-term artistic development. The space at Bermondsey Square offers an invaluable opportunity to extend the work we do at FormaHQ, to further the meaningful connections we’ve made in the area, and to keep pushing boundaries with ambitious, thought-provoking art that’s free and accessible to all.

The installation marks the second site specific public intervention at Forma, Bermondsey Square. Curated in connection with the residency space at FormaHQ, the public art initiative advances Forma’s commitment to fostering lasting relationships with artists while spotlighting work that confronts urgent social and political questions — issues that are central to our artistic and local communities in Southwark and beyond.

Through my tongue in my friend's mouth, Di Lorenzo and Pionati ask what happens when the structures we rely on — whether social or societal — no longer hold, and how these cracks, whether in relationships or architecture, shape the ways we remember, rebuild, and reimagine our world.

my tongue in my friend's mouth, will be on view 24/7 at Forma’s Bermondsey Square gallery space from 5 June until 31 August 2025.