With The Moment the Snow Melts, MUDEC - Museum of Cultures in Milan inaugurates the exhibition program scheduled during the 2026 Winter Olympics by welcoming an unprecedented, monumental, and spectacular installation by the artist Chiharu Shiota (Osaka, 1982), famous worldwide for her fascinating immersive installations, created with intricate networks of threads that transform space into a suspended landscape, where art and memory intertwine.

"The Moment the Snow Melts," as has been the case for three years now in MUDEC's programming, is also the work that anticipates "The Sense of Snow," an exhibition project that will be inaugurated in February 2026 and explores the poetics and materiality of snow from a scientific, anthropological, and historical-artistic perspective, analyzing its role in contemporary culture, also in relation to climate change. The exhibition will be accompanied by the fourth issue of the magazine "MU," the museum's house organ, which will address the theme of snow by going beyond the boundaries of the exhibition with a series of content and insights.

In the site-specific installation "The Moment the Snow Melts," Chiharu Shiota, using the precariousness of snow as a metaphor, reflects on human relationships and how they inevitably begin and end. The artist creates an evanescent landscape composed of threads hanging straight down from the ceiling, amidst which tickets and sheets of paper containing the names of people who have been part of our lives but whom, for various reasons, we can no longer meet, float. It is a metaphorical snowfall, frozen at a precise moment in time, so as not to reach the ground, and represents for the public a space for meditation.

Thus, Shiota narrates the meaning of the threads, connected to the memory of people, to human relationships, to the passage of time, where what remains are traces of connection, fleeting and intangible. By entering the installation space and interacting with it, visitors perceive the tension between connection and separation. 

The ropes crossing the Agora represent how our lives are intertwined with those of others, but also the precariousness of these bonds, while the names written on the paper remind us that once something or someone is lost, it is no longer possible to return to what was: it fades with the passage of time, lost but never forgotten.