For ART-O-RAMA 2026, FRENCH PLACE presents With My Heart in Your Hand, a solo booth by Cecilia Mentasti.
Developed within the context of the art fair, the project explores artistic kinship and the forms of exchange through which artworks and the relationships surrounding them circulate. Mentasti engages with the institutional and economic structures of the fair from within, introducing subtle deviations into the mechanisms through which artistic presence, visibility and value are produced and legitimised.
At the core of the project is a continuous movement between presence and absence, visibility and concealment, attachment and separation. Objects, images and documents shift between contexts, while the systems that authorise, protect, exchange or validate them cease to operate as neutral infrastructures and become part of the artistic process itself. Circulation is understood not simply as the movement of artworks, but as a relational condition involving people, histories, institutions, labour and acts of care.
Through these displacements, Mentasti questions the artwork as an autonomous object and approaches it instead as something whose meaning and value are temporarily negotiated within a constellation of relationships. With My Heart in Your Hand ultimately considers exchange not only as an economic transaction, but as a movement through which things and people meet, change position and separate again, never entirely occupying the same place.