Gaza Ceramic, shell casing 2025
This project has its roots in the 1990s, when, with the war in Bosnia underway, I collected shell casings I found on the ground. I brought one back to Italy, and later, when I was living in Florence, I discovered it had been manufactured in Tuscany. It was then that I had the idea, never realized, of decorating the long steps of the SS. Annunziata with hundreds of shell casings transformed into angels, as a form of protest against war. The terrible events in Gaza starting October 7, 2023, although it would be more accurate to say starting in 1948, made me dust off this old idea, even though I would have preferred it to remain obsolete, for lack of wars to be protested. The bodies of the angels are shell casings made of ceramic, molded from the original.
Write down!
I am an Arab.
You have stolen the orchards of my ancestors
And the land that I cultivated
Along with my children,
And you left nothing for us
Except for these rocks,
So will the State take them,
As it has been said?
Mahmoud Darwish
(from Zdravko Saveski’s translation in New Democracy, vol. 31, November 2008)
Mihaela Šuman was born in Yugoslavia in 1980. Her work focuses primarily on writing, memory, self-narration, and themes of exile and loss. She experiences art as a need, involving self-absolution, an attempt to re-narrate and re-locate herself, drawing inspiration from disorientation and the blurring of boundaries between worlds. She spent her childhood between Bosnia and Zagreb and, since 1993 has made the Trentino region, Florence, and Turin her home. She is a graduate of the Liceo Artistico LB Alberti in Florence. While in Florence, she studied Italian Sign Language (LIS), created papier-mâché masks with original subjects, and worked in graphic design and illustration. She wrote poetry and short stories, which have been published and exhibited in several publications. From 2022 to 2024, she attended a training course in ceramic techniques in Turin. In 2023, she participated in the group exhibition “Memorie al futuro” at Luoghi Comuni and Associazione País, Turin 2023. In 2024, she participated in the group exhibition “Passaggio a Oriente” at the former Church of Santa Croce in Avigliana. At the Intercultural Center of Turin, she held ceramics workshops for refugees, in collaboration with the Ciac Association of Parma. In 2025, she participated in the ceramics exhibitions: Ceramics in Love in Castellamonte, Terramundi at the Celletta della Sibilla at the Priamar Fortress in Savona, and Le ceramiche del Nord Ovest at the Zauli Museum in Faenza. She is part of the team of illustrators for Disegnami, a storytelling project through drawings of the DIMMI stories of Storie Migranti, promoted by the National Diary Archive of Pieve Santo Stefano (AR).
