Serena Scapagnini discusses Saliency, La Memoria Cangiante, the permanent installation created for the Wu Tsai Institute at Yale: a journey through neuroscience, memory, and perception to explore how the brain continuously selects, modifies and recreates our memories.
Saliency, La Memoria Cangiante is Serena Scapagnini’s new permanent installation, inaugurated on June 4th and conceived for the Wu Tsai Institute at Yale University. The artist’s work draws on studies in perception and neuroscience, exploring how our brains rework lived experiences and continually selecting and modifying stored memories.
What role does memory play in our perception of time and space, and in our identity? The constant fluctuations of memory alter the image we have of the world and of ourselves; what we choose to focus on, to nurture in our minds as memories to be cultivated, impacts the quality of our existence. And if the madeleine tasted by the protagonist of À la recherche du temps perdu has the power to reawaken his childhood memories, it is no coincidence. Something has remained attached to that flavor and the trace of what has been resurfaces like a wave, launching itself onto the shore of consciousness only to then retreat and resurface with new fragments of salt and shell.
What did the one-year interdisciplinary residency (2025–26) at the Wu Tsai Institute consist of, and how did it come about?
My research on memory is the origin of the inspiration for a collaboration with the Yale Wu Tsai Institute, the primary institute at Yale dedicated to the exploration of neuroscience and cognitive psychology. I was invited to work in their Artist-in-Residency program, following my collaborative project with the Yale Quantum Institute (YQI), which in turn grew out of more than 13 years of shared work with Dr. Michael Higley, Professor of Neuroscience at Yale. At the YQI, my dialogue with the quantum physics researchers shaped a project, Superposition, that is structured as a cycle of works. Through drawings, engravings, painting, and installations, it explores quantum superposition, the ability of a particle to exist in multiple states simultaneously. This concept also serves as a metaphor for identity, memory, and perception. Indeed, quantum memory continues to exist at the center of my research, with works focusing primarily on liminal spaces—between memories and their dissolution through contact with the external environment, blending with the rest of the universe.
How did you interact with neuroscientists and cognitive researchers?
My work at the WTI developed in profound synergy with the Director and Professor of Psychology, Dr. Nick Turk-Browne, unfolding through a deep immersion into the institute’s ecosystem. This experience ranged from sophisticated research laboratories studying robotics, cellular engineering, neural development and perception, to numerous scientific discourses on the nature of memories and the phenomena of saliency. Together, we explored the mechanics of what mental information we retain and the underlying processes of selecting memories to preserve or discard. In particular, my creative inquiry focused on the specific roles that emotions and the body play within these neurological systems, investigating what ultimately clings to the walls of our memory and what slips away, re-emerges, resurfaces, and disappears. It is from this rich environment, following 13 years of creative dialogue with the Higley Lab and the AiR program at the Quantum Institute curated by Florian Carle, that Saliency – La Memoria Cangiante was born: a project that celebrates and embraces these various stages of the journey.
Salience refers to the cognitive process by which certain details emerge while others recede into the perceptual background. What struck you about this process, and what did you discover from your interactions with researchers?
My time alongside the researchers at the WTI allowed me to study the phenomena of saliency in relation to the processes of the mind, discovering that it possesses a nature that is mutable and reflects the significant biological plasticity that exists; a fluid reality that echoes a historical, intuitive human awareness. When Pablo Picasso stood before the Paleolithic cave paintings of Altamira, he observed that tens of thousands of years before scientific theories of perception emerged, early humans had already developed sophisticated strategies to make the intrinsic spirit of the image visible. The bison, shaped by the curvature of the stone, intensified through mineral pigment, and positioned to guide the viewer’s gaze, demonstrate an intuitive understanding of visual attention by the artist. The study of the phenomenological tradition teaches us that the eye is not merely a receptor of light; it is a creator of worlds. The paintings of Altamira represent one of the earliest human expressions of saliency—the distinctive perceptual quality that allows certain forms and ideas to rise to prominence. Observing the dynamics of memory, we discover how its retrieval inexorably modifies and selects certain details, completes missing links, and creates a continuum between what is revealed, what is hidden, and what appears lost. Hence, images from our memories are always imperfect and potentially mutable, like the artwork that derived from these reflections. At the center of the installation is a painting that embodies a shared reflection on how the brain selects, transforms, and reconstructs experience over time.
The installation features a painting at its center. The blue wave embodies a reflection on how the brain selects, transforms, and reconstructs experience over time. Can you explain how you captured this concept in image and color?
Several questions emerged from our dialogues at the WTI, including what role memory plays in our perception of time, space, and identity. We well know that nothing is static and that memory changes over time. In evoking a memory, the observer inexorably interferes with the object of their gaze. They participate in, and therefore influence and “rewrite,” past, present, and future simultaneously. Thus, in the layering of the work – beginning with the hand-making of the paper and building mixed-media pieces that combine oil with ink, pure pigment with the subtle traces of charcoal – I sought to evoke these constant fluctuations of memory, the imperfect profile of its narratives. I attempted to pay homage to that cognitive architecture where attention, memory, environment, and bodily experience converge to structure life.
What inspired the “Blue Wave” ? Why did you start by studying the brain?
My new large-scale artwork Saliency, La Memoria Cangiante was conceived, produced and realized at the WTI; the blue wave is inspired by a coronal section of the brain and the folds of the hippocampus, drawn thanks to imaging contributions and interdisciplinary dialogue with the Institute’s scientists. Within the painting, in the words of the art critic Mario Codognato regarding my work, minute images drawn in ink precipitate spontaneously, akin to the very grain of the matter that, in a sense, gives birth to them. They form an act of exchange between the visible and its matrix, between thought and life, which originates from thought. The transparencies used represent the space where images slumber and perception unfolds into silence, the reaching out of thought toward a moment of transcendence. (Cat. Artem). The wave and the folds of the hippocampus, within the shared visual interplay with researchers regarding the seat of long-term memory, allowed me to select which areas to let the flow of images and my ink drawings emerge. In this work, I also experimented with partial removal techniques using fine files and sandpaper, allowing only the texture and trace of the shapes to remain. Within the visual fabric of the macro-structure, I wanted to create a bridge where perception and matter intertwine, and images transit quickly, without ever being fully captured.
Tell us about the works you've created in the past to visually express memory, synapses, and the changing structures of thought
The visual and conceptual language of Saliency represents a culmination of several of my ongoing projects. Among these, Fugacity draws inspiration from ten stories, focusing on ten people from ten different countries around the world, exploring the effects of Alzheimer’s, Lewy body dementia, and other forms of memory dissipative processes. The project reflects on the essence and process of remembering and its substance within the layered nature of the mind. Fugacity defines both a scientific principle (the tendency of matter to escape, to disperse across different states) and the most intimate condition of human consciousness. This project matured with the scientific support of the Yale School of Medicine and Tufts Medical Center in Boston. My works are born from the encounter: the dissipative processes of memory blend with family histories, migrations, and recollections. I placed the river of memory in a fluid dimension; the soul, rooted in the world, crosses and experiences its different densities of pigment, traces, and light, transforming them into the white space.
Similarly, in the Synapses series, neurons look out onto large white surfaces in a layered work combining painting and drawing on an acid-solution preparation. The models used for the neurons – unreleased material from the Higley Lab at Yale – are created from living brain tissue and subsequently color-reprocessed, bringing their visual rhythm onto paper. Citing Mario Codognato once again, this cycle of works is like a tautology of the artist’s creative aspect; it directly reproduces the creative process through a creative process. (Lo Spazio Oltre; ArteCinema, 2024).
Your ever-expanding body of work seeks to bridge the fields of art, physics, and neuroscience. How?
Reality is unmeasurable. This is a first wonderful paradox that presents itself in both the quantum and neuroscientific discussions and is shared by the vocabulary of art. As a metaphor, this is adjacent to the concept of the collapse of the wave function in quantum theory. The act of measurement bestows a position upon particles that did not have a definite position before, though at the cost of knowing their movement. And our gaze, perception, and attention necessarily interfere with our knowing the observed object, even within our memory. The observer changes the state, creating a meeting point where perception and matter enmesh. By combining art with concepts drawn from neuroscience and quantum mechanics, my work looks out from that edge preceding the precipice of measurement, developing immersive environments through a process in which the observer and the world emerge simultaneously.
Constantly, through the phenomenon of pareidolia—from the Greek εἴδωλον èidōlon, "image", with the prefix παρά parà, "near"—we identify faces in clouds, noses and mouths in inanimate objects, human profiles in the mineral conglomerates of rocks, animal figures in coffee stains at the bottom of a cup. In what way did you want to harness this phenomenon in your work?
As mentioned, the physical matter of my work is composed of different layered densities: from oil colors to the white space of handmade paper, passing through the rarefied edges of charcoal and ink drawings. Here, fleeting figurations seem to emerge from the very material surface of the work; a pareidolia bridging thought and the world. Through an intimate process of close observation, viewers actively replicate the processes of saliency and mnemonic retrieval. In Saliency, the perceptual quality that allows certain forms to emerge while others recede activates a mechanism that interrogates our remembering and forgetting, our central and peripheral realities. The project entrusts perception to the internal language of painting – not as passive reception, but as an embodied act of world creation, giving form to the neuroscientific insights on perception that ground the work.
The author of the critical essay, Joy Roy Choudhury, writes, "the brain becomes landscape; thought becomes weather." He also writes that the work's blue wave functions like James Joyce's syntax, "fluid, recursive, resistant to closure." Do you recognize yourself in this expression?
I resonate deeply with Joy Roy Choudhury’s reading and thank him for the loftiest comparison to Joyce. My works unfold in a fluid succession of planes and frequencies that evoke zones of passage, thresholds, and tensions. My practice is fundamentally drawn to this blurring of boundaries, to the intimation of a subsequent frequency. In the language of these drawings, as in the painting and installations, the relationship with the image always retains something fragmentary, mutable, and open. A shifting mosaic in which personal and collective memory inexorably meet and intertwine.
Saliency, La Memoria Cangiante is just one step in a larger journey that will include a series of exhibitions and events in New York…what are the next steps?
My work will be presented at the UN Headquarters in New York in an exhibition that extends these reflections on the mutability of memory across art, quantum physics, and neuroscience, announced for the fall. Running in parallel, an exhibition will be dedicated to the work at the Italian Cultural Institute in New York, followed by a project, currently in progress, at Magazzino Italian Art in Cold Spring. Furthermore, my collaboration with the Yale Quantum Institute, the School of Medicine, and the Wu Tsai Institute at Yale continues. In Europe, I am working on a cycle of exhibitions in Switzerland in collaboration with the Swiss Quantum Mission, an exhibition project structured across multiple venues in London, a residency in the spring at the Boghossian Foundation in Belgium, and the presentation of the work in Italy upon my return.
What's your background and studies? When did you take your first artistic steps, and how did you end up in New York from Rome? How did you go from your master's degree in Medieval Art History, Iconography, and Iconology at the University of Siena to your master's degree in Painting and Mixed Media at the School of Visual Arts in New York?
My education took place between Rome and Siena, with a first thesis in Aesthetics and Art Theory, followed by one in Medieval Art History. The elevation of planes, which in Late Antique artworks is articulated within the structural breakdown of the work, evokes different levels of the universe and the progression of the Spirit from one plane to another. Much of these studies—particularly those in semiotics, history of religions, aesthetics, iconography, and art theory—converge and resurface in my work, and generally, I believe, in contemporary art. From the Late Antique era, in particular, I appreciate the cultural syncretism that we find in our own time, which, according to Mircea Eliade, is symbolized in our underground subway networks, roaring with their symbols. I took my first steps in the art world between Rome and Paris, and subsequently in New York between the School of Visual Arts and my first exhibitions in 2007. This bridge with the United States remains open, as is the one with Asia, where I have worked extensively, as well as across Europe. However, I often return to my roots, dedicating myself to artistic creation at my studio in San Lorenzo, Rome.
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- Saliency: how painting reflects on the shaping of memory - July 31, 2026
