Zegna and Martha Atienza explore resilience through underwater perspectives
A new collaboration between the Italian house and the artist investigates how landscapes and communities adapt to profound environmental change, from Philippine islands to European forests.
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There exists a particular grace in the work of those who understand that stewardship requires not resistance but adaptation, a willingness to move with the currents of change rather than against them. The Italian luxury house Zegna, long attuned to the relationship between craft, place and time, continues a meaningful dialogue with artist Martha Atienza that contemplates precisely this philosophy.
The project, titled ‘Learning to Breathe in a Changing World’, extends their shared investigation into how communities navigate transformation. Atienza’s practice, rooted in work with coastal settlements on Bantayan Island in the Philippines, now turns toward the poetic languages of the underwater: perspectives shaped by breathing, by sound, by the resilience that emerges when landscapes themselves are in constant flux.
The juxtaposition is instructive. On Bantayan Island, rising seas and intensifying typhoons rewrite the rhythms of daily life, reshaping the contours of what people have known. Across Europe’s forests, prolonged droughts and wildfires alter landscapes that have been tended with care across generations. Different geographies, yet a shared imperative: the responsibility to continue caring for the places we belong to even as those places transform fundamentally.
Atienza’s visual vocabulary speaks in the language of the body and the natural world. By centering breathing and sound, she invites a kind of intimate attention to environmental change, moving beyond abstract concern into something felt, something embodied. The underwater perspective becomes metaphorical and literal at once: a way of seeing from beneath the surface, of understanding how life persists and adapts in conditions of profound uncertainty.
This collaboration reflects Zegna’s broader engagement with art and culture as vehicles for contemplation. Rather than statements of corporate conscience, such partnerships emerge as genuine exchanges between aligned sensibilities: a house with deep roots in Italian craftsmanship and environmental stewardship, and an artist committed to documenting and reflecting upon how human communities navigate their changing worlds.
The exhibition, produced and curated in partnership with respected collaborators, finds its setting in Paris, a city where contemporary art and luxury heritage continue their enduring conversation. It represents not a conclusion but an opening, an invitation to consider how we might learn, quite literally, to breathe within landscapes and systems that demand our continued attention and care.
Imagery courtesy of Zegna (@zegna).