Three or four projects at Castello di Rivoli

Metamorphoses - Let Everything Happen to You
An exhibition curated by Chus Martínez
March 5–June 24, 2018

This exhibition presents works by Nicanor Aráoz (Buenos Aires, 1980), Ingela Ihrman (Strängnäs, 1985), Eduardo Navarro (Buenos Aires, 1979), Alexa Karolinski/Ingo Niermann (Berlin, 1984 and Bielefeld, 1969), Reto Pulfer (Bern, 1981), Mathilde Rosier (Paris, 1973), Lin May Saaed (Würzburg, 1973), Ania Soliman (Warsaw, 1970), and includes  I Have Left You The Mountain (a project drafted by Simon Battisti, Leah Whitman-Salkin, Åbäke).

“Language and labor defined for centuries the position of the human, but can you imagine leaving that position to become a flower? Can you imagine that the notion of metamorphosis is nothing else but another way of naming an inexhaustible goodwill? A force that runs through the human and the non-human so as to navigate the many orders that constitute life, avoiding the pests of the Modern project and its insistence on identity, difference, bifurcation of life in the two-systems of nature and culture, the dichotomy between primary and secondary qualities of being? … A Japanese botanist, Kumagusu Minakata wrote 'Things in the universe naturally proceed smoothly without being conscious until one apprehends the reasons for such things… A discovery is nothing but understanding things in the universe, as they are, through encountering tact.' This ability to modify what is perceptible enables us, if only for an instant, to cease being entirely human, entirely 'you,' or 'I.' It enables us to become a mold. Metamorphoses names the exercise of becoming 'tact,' of thinking life without hierarchies.” (Chus Martínez)

The House as Museum, The Museum as House: The Making of Great Collections
A conference on March 6, 2018, 10 am to 5pm

To prepare for the opening of the Cerruti Collection in early 2019, we are holding a conference. The aim is to reflect on the relations between museums and private collections in connection with the legendary book-binder entrepreneur, industrialist and collector of rare sensitivity Francesco Federico Cerruti, who passed away in 2015 at the age of 93. Participants are from J. Paul Getty Trust in Los Angeles, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, the Phillips Collection in Washington D.C., the Judd Foundation in Marfa and New York, Sir John Soane’s Museum in London, the Musée Jacquemart-André in Paris, the Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna, the Villa Borghese in Rome, the Museo Poldi Pezzoli in Milan, the Villa e Collezione Panza in Varese and the Pinacoteca Giovanni e Marella Agnelli in Turin.

“Except for the large blockbuster museums in major urban centers, most art museums we know today were originally founded by collectors and art lovers who decided themselves, or whose heirs decided, to share their collections with the public. Some of them were founded by artists and other intellectuals. Either with a mission of civic society building or in order to create a legacy through which their memory might be preserved by future generations, or both, the modern 'white cube' detached their domestic and private origin from a hygenic sense of the autonomy of the artwork. Today, on the other hand, artists and visitors seek out the personality and domesticity of exhibition spaces as a way of grounding their experiences in life. We are working against the grain of the digital, with tact and becoming tact.” (Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev)

Giorgio de Chirico. Major Works from the Collection of Francesco Federico Cerruti
Drafted by Marcella Beccaria and Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev
March 5–May 27, 2018

In 1911, Giorgio de Chirico spent a few days in Turin where the long shadows of the afternoon and the grid of streets, squares and arcaded galleries gave him the impression that “the city was built for philosophical dissertations.” Featuring works ranging from 1916 to 1927 from the Cerruti Collection, the exhibition offers a glimpse of the metamorphic capacity of de Chirico’s genius, in connection with some of the major contemporary artworks of Castello di Rivoli’s permanent collection. In de Chirico, the rediscovery of classical mythology does not unfold as it did in the Renaissance in order to reconstruct a story of the past, but instead to escape history, the same history that has led us from the Renaissance to that dangerous uncontrollable acceleration that has continued right up to the present day. De Chirico is Nietzschean, anti-modern and against historicism. By renewing the concept of circular time, the artist looks back at mythology and the concept of metamorphosis that characterizes it.

I Have Left You The Mountain
Curated by Simon Battisti, Leah Whitman-Salkin and Åbäke
March 5-June 24, 2018

This is a sound-based project for collective listening based on the idea of transition and migration, first presented in the Albanian Pavilion at the 2016 Venice Biennial of Architecture. Today it has been metabolized by Reto Pulfer into the exhibition Metamorphoses curated by Chus Martínez. I Have Left You The Mountain consists of ten texts on the architecture of displacement by different contemporary thinkers set to music and performed by some of the last surviving practitioners of Albanian iso-polyphony, an art form protected by the UNESCO as part of the intangible cultural heritage. The texts are by Etel Adnan, Mourid Barghouti, Michel Butor, Claire Fontaine, Yona Friedman, Anri Sala, Michael Taussig, Yanis Varoufakis and Finn Williams. It has become part of our Permanent Collection.