Betty Danon. Io e gli Altri

Betty Danon—conceptual artist and pioneer of mail art and visual poetry—insightfully probed the elements of writing and speech through the exploration of sign and sound. Collaborating with artists worldwide, her work restored a suspended, poetic dimension to media such as paper and canvas, and to means such as the typewriter, photocopier, and computer. With its visual and musical explorations, relationships with nature and with others, storytelling, and caring, Betty Danon’s artistic oeuvre seems to effortlessly embody the “souls” of Miradolo Castle.

That is why the Cosso Foundation has chosen to stage the major anthological exhibition Betty Danon. Io e gli Altri, open from October 11 to December 8, 2025, bringing together for the first time her work with the vast and varied world of artists she worked with. On show at Miradolo Castle, not far from Turin (Italy), the exhibition will be running throughout Artissima.

Curated by Roberto Galimberti, under the coordination of Paola Eynard and with content advisory provided by Enrica Melossi, the exhibition features more than fifty works spanning Betty Danon’s entire career, many on show for the first time. The works are kindly on loan from major public institutions, including the Historical Archive of Contemporary Arts (ASAC) of La Biennale di Venezia and the MART Rovereto, and leading private collections, in partnership with the Betty Danon Archive and the Tiziana Di Caro Gallery, Naples.

The exhibition unfolds across the castle’s fourteen rooms, retracing the development of Betty Danon’s thought and work, starting with her first collages from the 1960s. It continues with her “asemantic scores” and the artist’s book Punto e Linea (Dot and Line) from 1975, described by Roland Barthes as “perfect.” Then there are her Green Sounds, in which nature becomes musical script on stave lines, and works crafted by typewriter, photocopier, and computer. The exhibition features the collective work Io & gli Altri (Others & I) from 1979; mail art expressing all the free spirit and flourish of the artist’s poetics; and Rainbowland, an “elsewhere” of art and creativity, where the artist withdrew, in a sense, after taking her leave from “the wonderful world of art” in the early 1980s to focus more closely on her direct exchanges with artists worldwide and on cultural and institutional initiatives.

The exhibition includes the section Margin Notes, which creates a counterpoint rhythm, a parallel, thematic track alongside the “others”—the artists who engaged with Betty Danon and her poetics and who contributed to the making of the work Io & gli Altri. They include Mirella Bentivoglio, Tommaso Binga, Irma Blank, Ugo Carrega, Paul De Vree, Amelia Etlinger, Robert Filliou, Elisabetta Gut, Emilio Isgrò, Maria Lai, Sol Le Witt, and Arrigo Lora Totino.

An original sound installation provides a compelling backdrop to the exhibition, created by Avant-dernière pensée, based on two Italian pop songs from the turn of the 1980s, capturing the significance of this period in Betty Danon’s artistic career. Here, an untuned piano, like a faulty photocopier, breaks the two pieces down into their essential elements. Fragments of melodies and chords at ground state—musical dots and lines—engage with the resonances of the instrument, as it creates and layers atmospheres and dissonances in a time which slows and dilates. Forty speakers placed along the visitor journey in turn create echoes and “feedback” that fill space, even when the music appears to have finished.

The exhibition is paired with the One Meter Down tour, an educational experience for visitors of all ages, to learn through play how to observe the art works and the world around us.

Together with Betty Danon. Io e gli Altri, the Cosso Foundation is once again running the exhibit atempo. Limited in time and to just some of Miradolo Castle’s halls, the format pays tribute to artists or moments in art history that show a connection, in their specificities, pursuits, or poetics, with the identity of this place and its different souls.