Baci Sospesi™ (Suspended Kisses) brings together those who can still feel.
It invites us to recognise one another, come together. And act.
Baci Sospesi is a participatory art project built around empathy as a shared, public practice. Through voices, messages, installations, workshops and collective actions, it creates spaces where people can slow down, listen and encounter another human being before labels and assumptions take over.
There are many ways to participate. You can become what I call a “story donor”, volunteering to tell me your story of encounter or separation, which I will transform into an anonymous audio portrait. You can leave a message in one of the installations or on “The Baci Sospesi Cloud” through the Baci Sospesi website. You can support the creation of a new installation for your community, or join me in the project as an artist or artisan, contributing your own ideas, knowledge and acts of making.
The goal is to strengthen the qualities that keep us human: empathy, hope, sensitivity, courage and responsibility, while countering the sheer madness of a world that wants us divided and afraid.
We are living through a terrifying moment in history, constantly connected through screens and increasingly alone. Baci Sospesi is a flag through which we can recognise one another: warm-hearted human beings who choose to resist.
In our communities, every individual gesture of care reveals and reinforces our shared humanity. Together, these gestures bring hope, attention and responsibility into public space, connect people across different backgrounds and make participation possible outside commercial exchange.
Baci Sospesi gives form to a simple but urgent need: to choose balance, harmony, evolution and discovery. Not destruction.
How it began
Baci Sospesi began in March 2020, while Italy was in lockdown and I was moving through a profound separation from my personal and professional past. Separation was already inside my life when it suddenly became the condition of an entire country.
People sang from balconies and feared losing those they loved. On the same screens, people were dying in the Mediterranean while trying to reach Europe. Our own distance demanded recognition, while their love, grief and separation seemed to belong to another human species. This affective schizophrenia horrified me.
Very early one morning, I was catching some early sun on my balcony, the only place “outside” I was allowed to be. The first image of Baci Sospesi arrived almost complete: irregular red forms, in relationship to one another, carrying messages for unknown fellow humans. I wanted stories to reach us before names, labels and prejudice. That image became a drawing, a refusal and an urgent need to act.
Voices
The audio portraits were the first “body” of Baci Sospesi. I began asking people I knew to donate their story, and I would record the audio. Then, thanks to word of mouth and the web, people I had never met entrusted me with their most precious love/separation stories.
So, today I have created thirty-five audio-portraits, in Italian, English and Spanish. And they can all be listened to for free, online.
Names, professions and nationalities are removed so that the voice can reach the listener from human to human. Every portrait is painted on the sound of water, connecting one human presence to another across places, languages and time.
Forms and water
The forms that I call “baci” are always red, like blood and everything that pulses, feels and loves. Their irregular shapes embody individual human beings in relationship. Never perfect, never the same. This is why they are not circles.
They get close to one another, touch and sometimes overlap slightly, while each remains recognisable as itself. Every installation is made in a way that people can leave paper messages in it, and all of them are located near a body of water, beside a river or the sea.
Places and people
Baci Sospesi changes its body as it travels and meets wonderful humans. It has appeared beside the sea in Passoscuro (Italy); among trees and above the river in Pioraco (Italy again); through a workshop, two exhibitions and a permanent co-created installation in Leiria (Portugal); as a temporary installation during a business retreat in the UK, with the messages collected there later travelling to Passoscuro; and at the Sprouting Lab workshop in Berlin (Germany).
Each place brings its own materials, people and knowledge. Free public access remains a fundamental principle.
Support the project
Baci Sospesi grows through encounters, shared knowledge and the generosity of those who believe in its values. Every contribution, however small, helps create new audio portraits, installations, workshops and public actions, allowing the project to continue travelling while remaining freely accessible.
As a personal gesture of gratitude, ten original screenprints from a limited edition of fifty have been reserved for the first ten patrons who support Baci Sospesi with a contribution of €500 or more.
Created and printed by Barbara Sbrocca and the amazing Abílio Febra, with Tony Palmeira’s magical guidance and support in Leiria, Portugal, each screenprint measures 65.2 × 50 cm and is signed and numbered. Each will be offered as a gift to thank these patrons for helping Baci Sospesi continue to spread humanity and give hope.
The ten patrons will be contacted through the email address associated with their PayPal account to arrange delivery. Availability will be updated on this page.
© Barbara Sbrocca / Abilio FebraThe project continues
Baci Sospesi continues to grow, travel and meet new people. At bacisospesi.com (when ready, it’s in progress now) you will find the project manifesto, the Baci Sospesi flag, photographic documentation of its installations and actions, and news about the forthcoming book.
If you would like to receive updates, share a story, commission a Baci Sospesi installation as a gift to your community, or take part in the project as an artist/artisan, send me a message through the form connected to this button.
Baci Sospesi is an original participatory art project created by Barbara Sbrocca in 2020.
© 2020–2026 Barbara Sbrocca.
All texts, photographs, audio portraits, artworks, visual identity and project documentation are protected by copyright.
All rights reserved.