Flora Leite
August 7th - September 13th
Galactic Itch (or Pororoca) begins with something remarkably ordinary: whipped egg whites. Observed under a microscope, the delicate network of proteins and air unexpectedly resembles astronomical imagery, opening a chain of associations that moves effortlessly between domestic labour and cosmology, saliva and stardust, cheese and lunar landscapes, confectionery and quantum physics. Leite presents these worlds as different scales through which matter continually reorganises itself. Throughout the exhibition, the microscopic and the cosmic remain inseparable, each offering another way of imagining the other.
Humour is central to Leite's practice. Scientific concepts coexist with supermarket confectionery and medieval cosmologies without hierarchy. The exhibition takes its title from the Milky Way 2 chocolate bar, reportedly a favourite among astronauts for leaving no crumbs in zero gravity. An everyday candy bar becomes a speculative image of our galaxy, while the long-standing belief that the Moon is made of cheese returns not simply as a joke, but as an unexpectedly fertile cosmological proposition: they both have calcium in their composition. Humour becomes a method of enquiry, dissolving the boundaries between scientific observation, cultural myth and everyday experience.
The exhibition quietly echoes Carlo Ginzburg's The Cheese and the Worms, in which the sixteenth-century miller Menocchio imagined the universe emerging from fermenting cheese. Rather than opposing scientific knowledge to imagination, Leite similarly allows ordinary materials to become instruments through which the cosmos can be thought. Egg whites, bubbles, cheese and chocolate cease merely to illustrate ideas drawn from quantum physics and astronomy, and instead participate in producing them.
The photographic works originate in the analogue projections used during the lecture-performance, yet they function as autonomous images suspended between scientific observation and abstraction. Enlarged microscope photographs become strangely planetary landscapes, while the embossed print preserves only the fragile relief of the enlarged microscopic bubbles, appearing and disappearing as light grazes their surface. Throughout the exhibition, images never exist independently of the conditions through which they are seen.
The gallery remains deliberately dark, illuminated only by two portable ring lights mounted on tripods. Visitors are invited to move them through the space, bringing light close to the works and continually altering what becomes visible. The lights function as instruments of observation, recalling microscopes, photographic enlargers and scientific examination. Looking becomes an embodied act of enquiry. Images emerge gradually, reflections shift, embossed surfaces reveal themselves only under grazing light, and vision itself becomes contingent upon the movement of the body.
Architectural interventions continue this investigation into perception and material transformation. A small maintenance door concealing the gallery's water supply and the service hatch connecting Under the Spell to Moonstruck, the café above, are transformed into illuminated perforated "cheese slices", turning concealed infrastructure into sculptural apertures. The hatch acquires an additional resonance: in architecture it conceals services, while in maritime and aerospace engineering a hatch is a threshold between enclosed environments. Here, it literally connects the exhibition to the café upstairs, allowing light, sound and the awareness of another space to circulate through the work, transforming hidden infrastructure into another porous body within the exhibition.
Bubbles, lunar craters, holes in cheese and the cavities hidden within the building begin to echo one another, suggesting that emptiness can itself be a generative form through which relations become possible. This logic extends to the analogue slide projector. Rather than projecting a fixed image, photographs and objects are placed directly onto its illuminated surface, so that the projected image is composed not only of transparencies but also of the shadows cast by physical objects. Image and object coexist within the same projection, allowing light, matter and shadow to occupy the same visual field.
The accompanying artist's book extends this movement once again, allowing the lecture-performance to circulate in yet another material form. Rather than privileging one medium over another, the exhibition understands images, texts, performances, objects and architecture as successive translations of the same speculative enquiry.
Throughout Milky Way 2, Leite resists the separation of scientific observation from everyday experience. Knowledge emerges through proximity, touch, curiosity and play. Microscopes resemble telescopes; egg whites resemble galaxies; a chocolate bar gets its name from the cosmos; a service hatch becomes a cheese slice, a lunar crater, or a portal between dimensions. Scales collapse, categories loosen, and familiar materials begin to propose unfamiliar worlds.
From the foam of an egg white to the Milky Way, Milky Way 2 quietly proposes another way of measuring the universe. Distance is no longer measured only in kilometres or light years, but in bubbles, calcium and slices of cheese. According to Galactic Itch (or Pororoca), if we stacked 104 billion slices of cheese, we would already be 80% of the way to the Moon.
Jéssica Varrichio
August 2026
August 2026