Chiharu Shiota at MAO Turin

The archaeology of silence and the glich memory.

Chiharu Shiota's monumental retrospective The Soul Trembles, currently on view at MAO (Museum of Oriental Art) in Turin, is far more than an exhibition. It is an act of spatial reprogramming: an emotional and architectural hack that transforms the museum itself into a vast piece of living hardware, where memory, absence and consciousness become physically tangible.

Walking through its galleries, camera in hand, desperately trying to focus on the three-dimensional fog of intertwined threads, one quickly realizes that Shiota is not exhibiting objects. She is exhibiting absence. She reveals the spectral residue of what remains after life has passed through us.

The first encounter feels like a sensory glitch. The museum's central hall is entirely consumed by an immense storm of red threads. The experience is not that of looking at a sculpture, but of being reduced to microscopic scale and injected into an oversized circulatory system - or perhaps inside the exposed copper wiring of a biological data centre.

Within this dense neural network, dozens of suitcases float weightlessly. Suspended in impossible positions, frozen somewhere beyond the laws of ordinary physics, they carry the weight of an archaeology of everyday life. They are not simply found objects; they are black boxes of human existence, each preserving the echo of a departure, a migration, a displacement or an escape.

Photographing this installation means confronting a density that stands in striking contrast to the quiet stillness of the museum's permanent collection. Where MAO's Buddhist sculptures celebrate emptiness, contemplation and detachment from matter, Shiota's red labyrinth evokes a visceral horror vacui: an obsessive network of human connections, intertwined destinies and invisible bonds that both sustain and imprison us.

The floating suitcases resemble particles trapped inside an emotional accelerator, endlessly oscillating between the desire to belong and the inevitability of loss.

If the red threads embody life, blood and interconnectedness, the rooms dominated by black threads mark the point of no return—the entropic collapse of space and time.

At the centre lies the charred skeleton of a grand piano, surrounded by chairs reduced to silent remains. Above and around it stretches an oppressive web of black threads that saturates the air until it almost feels impossible to breathe.

Shiota has spoken about the childhood trauma of witnessing her neighbours' house burn during the night, yet here that personal memory expands into a universal meditation on silence. The burnt piano has permanently lost its ability to produce sound, and yet its presence resonates with extraordinary intensity.

The black thread is never decorative. It becomes condensed smoke, the materialisation of grief, visual noise replacing a melody that can no longer be heard. Looking at the fire-scarred instrument suspended inside this dark network, one almost hears the ghostly ambience of William Basinski's The Disintegration Loops. The music has not disappeared; it has merely changed state, solidifying into an eternal instant of destruction.

Perhaps the exhibition's greatest achievement lies in its dialogue with MAO itself. Installed by Shiota's Berlin studio together with students from the Albertina Academy of Fine Arts, these monumental thread structures occupy a museum dedicated to Asian art, creating a remarkable temporal short circuit.

On one side stands the millennia-old cultural heritage that informs Shiota's work—the Shinto belief that objects possess spirit, the legend of the red thread of fate, the acceptance of impermanence. On the other stands the fragmented, hyperconnected and emotionally vulnerable condition of the twenty-first century.

The Soul Trembles is not an exhibition to consume through the screen of a smartphone, despite its extraordinary photogenic quality. It demands slowness. It asks visitors to walk beneath kilometres of woven thread, to breathe the scent of burnt wood, and to accept that sometimes the only way to see the invisible is to allow oneself to become entangled within it.