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Abstract
This article examines the concept of the exhibiting gesture by distinguishing between its intentional and unintentional forms, focusing on its bodily, experiential, and urban dimensions. While exhibition has traditionally been understood as a deliberate curatorial act within institutional contexts, this contribution argues that exhibiting also occurs as an unintentional, embodied practice emerging in public space. Drawing on phenomenology, pragmatist aesthetics, and somaesthetics, the paper conceptualizes the city itself as a display activated through everyday gestures. Three configurations of the unintentional exhibiting gesture are analyzed: walking as an aesthetic and cognitive practice; processes of artification that transform ordinary urban elements into ephemeral aesthetic signs; and collective participation, where relational gestures generate forms of visibility without predefined artistic intent. These dynamics reveal how bodily movement, improvisation, and social interaction produce autonomous modes of exhibition beyond institutional frameworks. The case of Naples is examined as an extreme laboratory of unintentional exhibition, where the historical porosity between public and private life amplifies both the aesthetic potential and the paradoxical effects of such gestures. Here, practices of shared experience risk being captured by processes of hypervisibility, spectacle, and commodification. The article proposes a renewed understanding of exhibition as an emergent, embodied phenomenon that redefines the relationship between art, everyday life, and the public sphere.