Milan rarely experiences Pride as a single, clearly bounded moment; it builds instead through accumulation, quiet at first, then suddenly everywhere at once, in gestures, conversations, and images that begin to inhabit the city’s surfaces. This year, Porta Venezia once again reads less as a neighbourhood than as a proposition: that visibility is not an event but a sustained condition. Within that shifting context, Eravamo notte, ora siamo giorno settles into the PAC with a kind of unforced confidence, as though it has always belonged there.
Ambrosia Fortuna
Installed at PAC – Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea between 13 and 15 June, the exhibition unfolds through the work of Ambrosia Fortuna, under the curatorship of Sabato De Sarno, with the support of Levi’s® and as part of Orgoglio Porta Venezia Milano. Read only through its institutional frame, and something essential slips away: this is not a project built around declared positions or resolved meanings. It behaves more like an atmosphere made visible, assembled across time and now temporarily held inside an exhibition space.
Sabato De Sarno
Fortuna’s imagery stretches across more than a decade between Milan and Naples, yet any linear reading quickly dissolves. Order gives way to proximity. Photographs and moving images appear as fragments of shared time, returning faces and recurring gestures that never need to be explained or justified. The camera does not observe from a distance; it stays inside the relation. Intimacy here is not constructed, it is assumed.
2018, un pomeriggio d’estate con Vicky a Milano by Ambrosia Fortuna
Set against that logic, the exhibition reads less as an archive than as a structure of lived relations. Corridors backstage, private rooms, nocturnal encounters, and pauses between events form a loose but coherent ecosystem held together by trust rather than composition. The people within the images (friends, performers, lovers, chosen family) are not staged into representation; they remain within their own conditions of ease. Nothing feels extracted for display, and nothing asks to be decoded.
2019, Meri La Boum by Ambrosia Fortuna
De Sarno’s curatorial presence runs through the project with rare precision: instinctive, restrained, and deeply attuned to rhythm rather than control. Working from a practice rooted in fashion, he brings an understanding of image as something lived rather than applied, where form is inseparable from behaviour, and meaning emerges through proximity rather than explanation. Here, that sensibility becomes spatial: curatorship as calibration, not authorship. The result is a structure that holds without fixing, that frames without reducing.
2026, Talona Sara e Sasi Napoli, Torre del Greco, by Ambrosia Fortuna
Across the exhibition, the title Eravamo notte, ora siamo giorno (we were night, now we are day) does not trace a clean narrative of transformation. It suggests instead a continuous overlap, where visibility expands without cancelling what came before it. Night and day coexist less as opposites than as shifting registers of the same surface.
The frame around Porta Venezia is no longer contextual backdrop but material presence. Its history as a site of queer life in Milan is not reactivated as memory or symbolism, but as something still unfolding. Fortuna’s work mirrors that refusal of closure: it neither archives experience nor resolves it into nostalgia, but keeps it suspended in an ongoing present.
What remains after the encounter is not explanation, but a kind of afterimage: bodies in relation, time held open, images that resist settling into meaning. One of the most quietly essential exhibitions in Milan right now, not because it declares itself, but because it doesn’t need to.
