GORA
11 July | 6 PM – 9 PM
Performance 6 – 7 PM Free entry
During Forum Box summer break we have a pleasure to offer the space for GORA, a one-evening exhibition and performance project by Matteo Melotto, de-veloped as the outcome of their artistic residency in Helsinki supported by Culture Moves Europe, the Goethe-Institut and Studio Rö.
Conceived through a period of research, production, and site-responsive experimentation in Finland, GORA brings together performance, video, textile sculpture, sound, drawing, and installation into a single spatial narrative. The project emerges from a post-spiritual reworking of Finno-Ugric traditions, where the figure of the artist is approached as a shamanic threshold between body, landscape, memory, and technological medi-ation.
At the core of the exhibition is the body understood as a portal: a living archive capable of absorbing trau-ma, transforming matter, and opening a passage between physical endurance and symbolic ascent. Melotto’s background in fashion design becomes central to this process. Textile leaves the field of garment construction and evolves into a posthuman and sacred prosthesis, extending the body into space through fabric, tension, weight, and duration.
The project begins with AIHARA, a performance for camera filmed in the natural landscapes surrounding Helsinki. The work follows the performer crawling across the ground while wearing an eleven-meter-long white skirt, progressively stained and transformed through direct contact with soil, moss, vegetation, and the resistance of the terrain. The action stages a first condition of exposure, where the body enters the landscape through slowness, friction, and surrender.
The same eleven-meter garment, marked during the filming of AIHARA and later stabilized through fixation processes, is presented on the floor as a long shroud-like textile sculpture. It preserves the trace of the body’s passage and translates the ephemeral act into a physical archive of contact, memory, and transformation.
HEGRA expands the project into sound. Created from recordings captured during the performance and later edited, distorted, and combined with poems written by the artist and read by artificial intelligences, sampled sounds, drones, synthesizers, and classical fragments, the work produces an alien soundscape where new media become instruments of spiritual displacement and ascent.
The exhibition culminates with GORA, a site-specific durational performance and large-scale textile in-stallation conceived for Forum Box. The performer kneels at the center of a sixteen-meter structure of torn black fabric, ropes, knots, and stretched membranes. The body, painted black and absorbed into the textile system, becomes both anchor and captive force. Through stillness and silence, performance becomes a form of posthuman meditation, where catharsis is produced through immobility, duration, and sensory reduction. The audience is invited into a condition of ritual silence, facing the suspended time of the work and the static presence of the artist as a body transformed into threshold and living architecture.
The entire process unfolds as an open and evolving system, where each work functions as a coordinate within a broader search for meaning between the ancestral and the hyper-contemporary. Across performance, textile, sound, image, and technological mediation, GORA traces a field of transformation in which body
and matter become unstable instruments of orientation, carrying the residue of archaic forms into a present shaped by posthuman perception, silence, and symbolic deconstruction.
Matteo Melotto is a multimedia artist and fashion designer whose transdisciplinary practice unfolds as a layered process of identity regeneration and post-spiritual inquiry. Drawing on performance, fashion design, artificial intelligence, generative projections, 3D modeling, and sound, they create immersive environments that interrogate both individual and collective trauma, translating their echoes into contemporary mytholo-gies charged with psychic, political, and communal tensions.
Their work emerges from a personal history marked by housing precarity and an authoritarian Catholic up-bringing, where the body and identity were confined within rigid, prescriptive norms. Through performance and spatial intervention, they reconfigure religious symbolic codes into queer, fluid forms of sacredness that subvert spiritual binaries and hierarchies. Within an aesthetic language that fuses archaic fabrics and synthet-ic materials, analog ritual and posthuman technology, Melotto constructs affective landscapes where the body becomes a living archive, a threshold of meaning, and a portal for shared transformation.
They have exhibited in cities such as London, Paris, Istanbul, Miami, Rome, Gwangju, Milan, Bern and Bel-grade. They have collaborated with Rick Owens, Jenna Marvin, Scarlett Rouge, Wolford, Aerea, and Guerrilla Spam.
Location: Forum Box, Ruoholahdenranta 3 A, 00180 Helsinki, Finland
11 July | 6 PM – 9 PM
Performance 6 – 7 PM Free entry