The venue is a historic house in Dorsoduro, a building of fifteenth-century origin overlooking the Rio di San Vio, which was, among other things, the home of the painter Ettore Tito.

Since 2024 the space has been the Venetian base of the Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation, a private foundation dedicated to contemporary art that organises exhibition projects and residencies there.

The exhibition To love and devour, curated by Tolia Astakhishvili and Hans Ulrich Obrist, ran from 7 May to 23 November 2025, in parallel with the Venice Biennale.

A site-specific installation spread across some ten rooms of the building, it was conceived by Tolia Astakhishvili during a residency of roughly four months in early 2025, during which the artist lived in the house while working on it directly.

She invited a circle of artists into dialogue with the project, including Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili, Zurab Astakhishvili, Thea Djordjadze, Heike Gallmeier, Rafik Greiss, Dylan Peirce, James Richards and Maka Sanadze.

Astakhishvili's work operates on the boundary between construction and ruin. Plasterboard walls, plasterwork, traces of building work and leftover materials are grafted onto the existing architecture until what belonged to the house becomes indistinguishable from what has been added.

In Venice this method transformed the building into an ambiguous organism, suspended between abandonment and restoration, within which drawings, videos, sounds and minimal interventions by the invited artists were embedded.

More than an exhibition display, the show coincided with the building itself. Visitors moved through rooms that were marked, incised, seemingly in decay, with no imposed route and no hierarchy between work and environment.

The title, To love and devour, condenses the artist's relationship with domestic space, understood as a place of intimacy and, at the same time, of mutual consumption between the inhabitant and the inhabited.