Rabbits` Choice: The Courage of Vulnerability as a Practice of Freedom

Author

Simone Piva – IT MONDO Founder and Curator

In Rabbits' Choice, the figure of the rabbit departs from its conventional associations with

innocence and fertility to become a critical lens for reading contemporary existence. A

deterritorialised, universal creature present across cosmologies, it appears as a metaphor for lives shaped by fear, repetition, and social conditioning. Yet within this fragility lies the opening of choice.

Emerging during the pandemic isolation, the project arose from the experience of confinement and its exposure of everyday structures of discipline. The rabbit becomes an expanded self-portrait: a vulnerable being shaped by external narratives, yet still capable of imagining other worlds. From this tension, the project reframes freedom not as escape, but as an ethics of responsibility—the courage to construct meaning from within conditions rather than outside them.

Within this framework, artistic practice becomes a form of thought. For Maria Cohen, drawing, painting, and repetition function as rituals that organise experience and hold uncertainty. Recurrent gestures operate like an intimate liturgy, generating clarity and giving form to affect. The work emerges less as representation than as a record of negotiation between control and surrender. This practice carries an expressionist intensity, though stripped of heroic gesture. Emotion is not performed but metabolised through vulnerability. Error, stain, and the autonomy of materials – especially ink and water – become co-authors of the image. Painting thus shifts from assertion of mastery to attentive listening to what precedes language.

Watercolour and ink reinforce this ethic of unpredictability: water dissolves intention, extends

thought beyond control, and paper becomes a porous skin that registers pressure, memory, and transformation. Matter and body, support and subjectivity, are no longer separable.

This material inquiry is inseparable from a reflection on institutional structures of artistic validation. The artist’s trajectory—from Russian academic training to philosophical inquiry in London—reveals the tensions between creative practice and systems of recognition. The contemporary artist appears as a paradoxical figure: visible yet structurally unsupported.

From this realisation, Rabbits' Choice expands from artistic inquiry into a platform for collaboration, education, and shared production. Rather than relying on external validation, it proposes the construction of alternative ecosystems of exchange. Workshops, mentorship, and collaborative projects form a network grounded not in hierarchy, but in responsibility toward one’s own creative potential.

Belonging to this space means understanding creation as an ethical practice in continuous

transformation. Freedom remains a complex condition: we are social beings, “rabbits among

rabbits,” shaped by systems and relations we cannot exit entirely. Freedom therefore becomes inner fidelity—an ongoing effort to remain attentive to one’s own voice amid external determination.

By treating fear, shame, and fragility as materials rather than limitations, the project inverts

dominant logics of productivity and performance. Vulnerability becomes not lack, but force. The aim is not transcendence, but full inhabitation of the human condition.

Across gesture, language, and community, Rabbits' Choice ultimately frames creation as trust: in process, in mistakes, and in what is not yet formed. It offers no final answers, but a space of attention, asking instead: how does one choose oneself in a world continuously determined to choose on our behalf?

London, July 2026