IUNO presents Sorry not Sorry, a performance by Wissal Houbabi, in collaboration with Granata Project and artist and designer Rossana La Verde, as part of IUNO Commission #17 dedicated to the Winter Solstice. The IUNO Commission is an invitation extended to an artist based in or passing through Rome to produce, at each equinox and solstice, a work interpreting the figure of Juno.

Sorry not Sorry is a collective performance that celebrates the female body as a territory of knowledge, contradiction, and freedom, and that, like Juno/IUNO, inheres in its duality. A performative work that has taken on different articulations over time, this new chapter of the action adopts the form of a fashion show: a codified mode of “bodily display” proposed here through a process of subversion. Through the involvement of non-standardized subjectivities, different from those usually associated with the context of haute couture, Sorry not Sorry transforms an elitist ritual into a celebration, if not a game.

Wissal Houbabi recalls the importance of embracing conflict as a form of balance, restoring space as play, complicity, and exposed dignity: bodies parade that do not ask for consent, but instead manifest an alternative beauty, constructed together in the shared time of those who choose to exist within a path of knowledge, acceptance, and belonging. The performance thus gives rise to a space in which forms, bodies, and gestures can continuously renegotiate their boundaries to generate unprecedented, previously unimaginable scenarios.

The event will take place in the first-floor room dedicated to UNAROMA LIVE.
Free admission until capacity is reached.

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From December 18, 2025 to January 7, 2026, the trace of Wissal Houbabi’s intervention produced for IUNO will be on view within the exhibition space.

Rossana La Verde, Mi stringo, mi incastro, giro e cado, 2023
Hand-and machine-sewn fabric assemblage, faux fur, padding, variable dimensions
A body of works worn during the performance Sorry not Sorry, by Wissal Houbabi, conceived and produced with Granata Project

Rossana La Verde’s costumes play a fundamental role in Wissal Houbabi’s performance Sorry not Sorry: they enter into a direct relationship with the bodies, transforming them into a single large form generated by the gestures performed in space. Drawing on the imagery of the children’s circle game Girotondo, the composition is conceived as an open system, a modular device reminiscent of a Tangram – an ancient Chinese puzzle – in which the elements can be recombined to generate ever-changing configurations.

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IUNO is a contemporary art research center founded in 2022 by Cecilia Canziani and Ilaria Gianni, in collaboration with Giulia Gaibisso. IUNO promotes projects that expand the space of imagination, rethinking the relationship between artworks and audiences, between authorship and reception. Its goal is to create time and space for encounters among people, places, and languages. By focusing on processes rather than on projects, IUNO disorganizes knowledge. Exhibitions, seminars, performative paths, educational programs, and editorial formats are the tools through which it pursues a non-systematic and convivial approach to artistic production and its theoretical debate.

WISSAL HOUBABI (Khouribga, 1994) is a performance poet, artist, writer, and the founder and artistic director of Spore. Her work investigates the relationship between languages and dialects, between sound, stigma, and meaning. Her research adopts an explicitly political perspective, linking the search for beauty to dignity and understanding poetic practice as a radical quest for a collective “we.” Her projects explore the epistemology of the diaspora, with a specific focus on oral heritage in relation to colonial history, the voice of the body, muscular memory, dreams in diaspora, and the right to love and to be loved. She collaborates with cultural and artistic institutions, developing practices that genuinely challenge structurally oppressive frameworks. She has worked with institutions including the University of Bologna, the Goethe-Institut, and the Museo delle Civiltà, and collaborates with several universities and organizations across the European cultural landscape, including the Ville de Besançon. Among her most recent works are: La Madelaine de Proust – La Vache qui Rit, published in Visible: Art as Policies for Care. Socially Engaged Art (2010, ongoing project); Una gran puzza di merda nell’aria, a monologue presented at over 40 events including Pirelli HangarBicocca in 2022; phonomuseum_rome at the Museo delle Civiltà in Rome; and Offesissima at Ar/ge Kunst, Bolzano.