Satine is an exhibition space opened in 2025 on Calle dei Avvocati, in the Sestiere of San Marco, near Campo Sant'Angelo. Directed by Silvia Cipriani and Camilla Pagliano, it is conceived as a place of work and research into contemporary practices, with a programmatic focus on female voices, the calendar features just a few exhibitions a year, each tailored to the space.

"Why I am not a poet", open from 31 May to 27 July 2025, was the gallery's inaugural exhibition. Its protagonist is Sofia Stevi, a painter who also works with installations, books and works on paper.

Her background includes significant independent ventures. In 2010 she founded the poetry publishing house Friary Road House in London, dedicated to unpublished authors, and in 2013, with the artist Bobby Dowler, the space Fokidos, carved out of her own Athens apartment.

She has exhibited at, among other venues, the Onassis Stegi in Athens, and in 2022 she received the Artist Fellowship of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation.

Her imagery blends literature, philosophy and everyday life: female figures, symbolic objects and autonomous limbs compose deliberately fragmentary narratives.

The Venetian exhibition, accompanied by a text by Agnieszka Polska, revolved around the figure of the spectre.

The title of one of the paintings, "Why am I not a ghost", provided the key to the whole: presences neither living nor dead, suspended between the real and the imaginary, echoing Derrida's "hauntology".

The paintings lined up a repertoire of symbols with a medieval flavour but stripped of their code: a guitar played by spectral hands, snakes knotted by their tails, a royal mantle of red velvet and ermine draped over a naked body.

The central work, "Feed me", staged an unsettling intimacy a man sucking the breast of a sleeping or dead woman offering a private rereading of plate 39 of Goya's "Disasters of War" and the iconographic tradition of the Roman Charity, in which the female body is rendered as nourishment.

The exhibition, with its dreamlike juxtapositions, proceeded like a sleepwalk between joy and mourning, entrusting its meaning not to a legible code but to the pure affective density of the images.