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There is a mountain in Piedmont that a single family has been tending for over a century. The hills surrounding Trivero, in the Biella foothills of northern Italy, were reforested, road-built, and gradually returned to wilderness by Ermenegildo Zegna, who founded his wool mill there in 1910 and spent the decades that followed planting hundreds of thousands of trees across the surrounding landscape. He called it the Panoramica Zegna, a scenic road he built with his own resources to give workers and their families access to nature. Today, that territory is known as Oasi Zegna: 100 square kilometres of protected Alpine terrain that the brand maintains as a public ecological park.
It is not a CSR initiative. It predates CSR as a concept by half a century.
This context matters enormously when you try to understand why ZEGNA, a menswear house, a manufacturer of some of the world’s finest wools, is now the main sponsor of the Italian Pavilion at the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia. You won’t find the answer in a boardroom strategy or a luxury-brand pivot toward cultural capital. It’s found in the soil.
The Italian Pavilion this year presents Con te con tutto (With You, With Everything), a new commission by artist Chiara Camoni, curated by Cecilia Canziani. Camoni works in sculpture, installation, and performance, drawing on collective ritual, organic material, and the kind of slow, attentive looking that tends to make press releases nervous. Zegna’s relationship with Camoni and Canziani began in 2014 through ZEGNART, the brand’s curatorial platform, which has operated since its founding on a principle that most corporate art programmes quietly abandon: no acquisitions. Every work is commissioned. Every project emerges from an ongoing conversation between the artist, a specific place, and the materials that place makes possible. That decade of collaboration now arrives, almost inevitably, at the Biennale.
What makes Zegna’s involvement in Con te con tutto genuinely interesting is the nature of the contribution itself. Earth, ash, and minerals sourced directly from Oasi Zegna have been incorporated into Camoni’s sculptures. Yarns from the Lanificio Ermenegildo Zegna, the historic wool mill that has operated in Trivero since the brand’s founding, form textile elements woven into the pieces.
Camoni’s practice is built around a non-hierarchical relationship between forms of life — the idea that matter, time, and process are as much agents in a work as the human hand that shapes them. In that framework, the choice to use volcanic minerals from an Alpine oasis and fibres from a century-old mill is structurally coherent with the artist’s own logic.
The Venice chapter of this story extends, almost immediately, into a second one. From May 24 to November 22, 2026, Fondazione Zegna will present a companion exhibition with Camoni at Oasi Zegna itself, curated by Ilaria Bonacossa. The work moves from the Giardini to the mountain. The ideas developed in the controlled environment of the Pavilion will be tested against the terrain that generated their raw materials.
“For over a century, we have invested in territory, craftsmanship, and Italian culture, fostering an ongoingdialogue between business and art,” said Gildo Zegna, Executive Chairman of the Ermenegildo Zegna Group, in a statement. “Oasi Zegna represents its most authentic expression: a project born from the Founder’s vision that continues to generate value over time. With Chiara Camoni, we share a dialogue that has lasted for more than ten years. Her work reflects this attention to material, landscape, and evolving tradition. Seeing her today, together with Cecilia Canziani, at the ItalianP avilion represents an important recognition of their journey and the coherence of their research—one we are proud to support.”
In an art world increasingly saturated with corporate spectacle and pavilions-as-activations, the Italian Pavilion at Venice 2026 makes a quieter case. That the most interesting things take decades to grow. That the land remembers what it has given.
Con te con tutto by Chiara Camoni, curated by Cecilia Canziani, is on view at the Italian Pavilion, Giardini, as part of the 61st International Art Exhibition — La Biennale di Venezia, through November 2026. A companion exhibition at Oasi Zegna, curated by Ilaria Bonacossa, runs May 24 – November 22, 2026.
