UNA and CASTIGLIONI are pleased to announce Coming Soon, a joint exhibition at their Milan
venue opening on Thursday, March 19, featuring Josep Maynou (b.1980, Barcelona), presented by UNA, and Bianca Millan (b.1992, Milan), presented by CASTIGLIONI. As the title suggests, the exhibition unfolds as a fictional narrative in which the boundaries between
reality and imagination blur. Josep Maynou’s multidisciplinary practice moves between performance and object making. It takes shape as a form of contemporary storytelling: a fictional take on everyday life, articulated through humorous ideas that extend into objects and props, each carrying both individual and collective
narratives. For the exhibition, Maynou presents a series of his Movie Posters. The collaborative dimension of his practice is central to these works: produced during his travels and in dialogue with artists and friends, the posters are inspired by an archive of unrealised films. Maynou shares the plots with invited collaborators, who are free to interpret the stories as they wish, adding new layers, nuances, and unexpected content to each “film” through their own visual language. The resulting works depend on context, long-term exchange, and the gradual formation of relationships within a community elements that are fundamental to Maynou’s practice. Titles such as Gladiator, Morocco Stories, Wet Suit Couture, and Le Chat qui fume reflect his movements, encounters, and lived experiences. Like many of the objects and props he produces, these posters often become protagonists in Maynou’s largely improvised live performance, where stories are performed in direct contact with the audience. Listening to Maynou, one might recall childhood bedtime stories or tales told by parents and grandparents, drifting into a space where it becomes difficult to locate the point at which real life ends and fiction begins.
Maynou’s posters enter into dialogue with Bianca Millan’s large-scale installation, Performing Productions presents. The work emerges at the intersection of artistic research and creative labour, exploring the invisible infrastructures that sustain both. Sculpture, performance, and sound converge to render tangible what usually escapes representation: psychophysical states, the uninterrupted flow of communication, and the submerged logistics of making. The installation operates as a real-time transmission device. Physically elsewhere for the entire duration of the exhibition, the artist continues to work while her voice, files, and everyday communications enter the space as artistic material. The script the audience encounters is built day by day, from opening to closing an archive unfolding live, incomplete by definition. Beneath the surface literally years of notes and annotations are carved into the wood. What appears industrial is made by hand. What seems absent is everywhere.
Bianca Millan’s work constantly operates in a tension between presence and absence, between what is visible and what remains hidden at the margins of production. In her practice, the archive is never merely a repository of memory: it is a living material, a continuously transforming organism in which data, voices, and annotations accumulate over time and space, generating new possibilities for interpretation.