In his artistic practice, Elia Castino explores living spaces and engages with an expanded notion of dwelling, uncoupled from the physical boundaries and conventions of the house. His inspiration is drawn from the northern Italian Piedmont, his home region, its rural traditions, its vernacular architecture and the geological character of the area. Craft and intellectual reflection are tightly interwoven in his work, placing materials, everyday objects and furniture in new contexts.

In Silvan and the Cave, Elia Castino turns to the circular relations between nature and culture. He brings sedimentary deposits into dialogue with cultural products such as agricultural produce and ornamental reliefs, and religious practices into dialogue with prehistoric dwellings. Castino’s engagement with this idea of a cycle and of mutual reference is enriched by myths, stories and both profane and sacred rites.

In Roman mythology, Silvanus is venerated as a god of the woods, as the deity of the agrarian world and the inventor of cultivation. As an embodiment of the forces of nature and of growth, he was depicted in iconography as a bearded hermit clad in an animal skin. The story Elia Castino tells us adapts this figure of the god Silvanus and transposes him into the profane shape of a donkey, a beast of burden and faithful companion of the rural world. Silvan, the donkey, becomes the starting point and pivot of a narrative that brings together urban constellations, regional identities and a retrospective view of the entwinement of nature and culture.

Elia Castino (b. 1992 in Asti, Italy) works at the intersection of art, architecture and design, examining expanded forms of dwelling beyond traditional notions of space. His focus lies on contemporary lived realities, such as the housing conditions of international students in Amsterdam, as well as the shifts in everyday life and cohabitation under precarious circumstances. He understands ‚home‘ as a fluid, temporary constellation of actions within space. His work has been shown at Buda Burda in Brussels (2025), Green Corridor in Brussels (2023), Spazio Martín in Milan (2023) and RENEENEE in Amsterdam (2022), among others. He lives and works between Amsterdam, Brussels and Agliano Terme.