Four contemporary artworks in the Cuneo area for 30 years of Fondazione CRC

Four public art works created by four international artists will be placed in four locations in the Cuneo area, in Alba, Bra, Cuneo and Mondovì, as part of the project A Cielo Aperto 2022. 4 Works of Contemporary Art for the 30th Anniversary of the CRC Foundation. Fondazione CRC’s public art commissioning project is carried out in collaboration with Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea and is curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev with the collaboration of Marcella Beccaria and Marianna Vecellio. It is also part of the program The Idea Generation, implemented by the CRC Foundation, with which the latter is celebrating its 30th anniversary.

The initiative intends to establish a new balance between local communities, history, international artistic life and nature, with a focus on ecological issues that in contemporary times include a focus on slowing climate change, seeking quality and sustainable food production, as well as in the cultural memory that constitutes the identity of places. The project’s combination of art and territory aims to enhance gastronomic and particularly wine culture in relation to contemporary art.

A Cielo Aperto 2022 involves four internationally renowned artists: Olafur Eliasson (Copenhagen, 1967), Michelangelo Pistoletto (Biella, 1933), Otobong Nkanga (Kano, 1974) and Susan Philipsz (Glasgow, 1965), whose works have been acquired by the CRC Foundation and will be placed at Grinzane Cavour Castle (Alba), in Cuneo, Bra and Mondovì.

“The project, which renews the long and fruitful collaboration built over the years with Rivoli Castle, gives us the opportunity to bring the works of four great international artists to the province of Cuneo. This is a unique cultural operation, promoted to celebrate the 30th anniversary of our institution, which will leave a mark in four places emblematic for the history of Fondazione CRC,” said Fondazione CRC President Ezio Raviola.

“After two and a half years of pandemic,” added director of the Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, “it’s time to get out in the open air. A project like this, strongly supported by the CRC Foundation, reminds us how art has healing and beneficial effects on the public, and also calls us to our responsibility to the environment, which is so rich in aesthetic stimuli and so open to receiving works of art.”

The works

A CIELO APERTO 2022 is being developed in four phases, the first of which will kick off on Saturday, June 25, 2022, with the presentation of the work The presence of absence pavilion, 2019-2020, by Olafur Eliasson set up at Grinzane Cavour Castle (Alba). Eliasson’s work, which consists of a sculpture formed by a bronze parallelepiped hollowed out on the inside to represent the void produced by the melting of a glacier, a clear reference to the ecological crisis and global warming, was created by the melting of a block of ice from the Nuup Kangerlua fjord off the coast of Greenland, formed over millions of years with layers of compressed snow. The sculpture hints at the melting of the ice sheet in Greenland, which is losing tens of thousands of such blocks every minute due to global warming. In The Presence of Absence Pavilion, the now melted ice is present only as an absence or memory. The work will be placed on the lawn at the side of Grinzane Cavour Castle, not far from the vineyard belonging to the CRC Foundation, creating a dialogue between the action of water erosion on the hills that created the valley, and the melting of the glaciers. The presence of absence pavilion evokes both the artist’s Your waste of time exhibition held in 2006 at neugerriemschneider, in which blocks of Icelandic ice were displayed in the cooled exhibition space, and the public art work Ice Watch, in which twelve immense blocks of ice collected from a fjord outside Nuuk, Greenland, were placed in the shape of a clock in public spaces in Copenhagen, Paris, and London between 2014 and 2019, and remained for several days to slowly melt. Eliasson’s works are created to re-propose the power of natural elements as well as to produce high quality perceptual and aesthetic phenomena.

A new work by Michelangelo Pistoletto is scheduled to be unveiled in Cuneo in September 2022. Open to exchange, Pistoletto’s art is the encounter and dialogue of multiple voices, an aesthetic founded on relationship and participation through the ability to step outside the boundaries of the work to bring art back into social life and life into art. The monumental work represents the symbol of the Third Paradise and promotes the idea of community participation, youth talent and collective work. It was created with input from local communities and in particular through the combination of 122 drawings made by children and collected by the Education Department of the Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art in synergy with various actors in the City of Cuneo including the Third Paradise Embassy.

Between next September and October, Otobong Nkanga’s new work Of Sundials, Lines and Weights, 2022, will be unveiled in Bra. For the public art project, the artist has designed a landscape in which curved lines in relation to a sundial connect sculptural elements with organic, almost anthropomorphic forms, potential containers for food, agricultural materials and earth products. Nkanga’s artistic research addresses urgent issues related to the ecological crisis, resource exploitation and sustainability, in line with the philosophy of Slow Food, the international nonprofit association founded in Bra in 1986 by the intuition of Carlo Petrini, whose intent is to restore the proper value of food in respect of those who produce it, in harmony with the environment and ecosystems, preserving the knowledge of which local territories and traditions are custodians. In this context, the relationship with the African continent and Nigeria, where the artist comes from, represents a nodal point as it allows the expansion of the imaginary of a sustainable future, where Piedmont relates happily with locations in the Global South. Nkanga’s empathetic relationship with the earth and the environment produces in those who experience his works an unprecedented cosmogony for the future.

In November, at the Ex Collegio delle Orfane in Mondovi, The Lost Partbook, 2022, a new sound installation specially created by Susan Philipsz, among the leading international artists creating sound artworks, will be presented. The eight-channel sound installation is created through the use of the artist’s voice and will be placed at the entrance to the garden and outdoor areas of the Former College. The Lost Partbook draws inspiration from one of the five-voice madrigals by Maddalena Casulana (1544-1590), the first female composer to have an entire book of her music printed and published in the history of music. The first book of Casulana’s five-voice madrigals appeared in 1583. In the 15th and 16th centuries, polyphonic music was handwritten or printed in notebooks, with each part appearing separately. One of these, the Alto or upper portion of Casulana’s madrigal book, had disappeared for years, leaving the composition fragmented and incomplete. This portion of the book was only recently found in the State Library in Moscow, after it had been considered lost for years following a looting of the Gdansk Library in Poland during World War II. With this work, Philipsz evokes the history of the women’s orphanage convent that now houses the Printing Museum and refers to the period of the birth of letterpress printing and in particular to the figure of Antonio Mathias, a Flemish printer originally from Antwerp who moved to Mondovì from Genoa to escape the plague. In 1472 he founded in Mondovì, in collaboration with Baldassarre Cordero, the first printing house in Piedmont and one of the first in Italy. Philipsz proposes to record the high parts separately and scatter the recordings at different points along the route leading to the Ex Collegio delle Orfane. The ascending and descending voices express the heights and depths of human emotions by imitating the movement of stairs as they descend and ascend, leading the visitor down or up, to also evoke the themes of movement, separation and displacement. Through his sound installation, Philipsz wistfully alludes to the disappearance of traditional typography in favor of digital typography and also to the history of women who, like Maddalena Casulana, had to struggle to gain access to the art world.

Image: Michelangelo Pistoletto, Third Paradise (2022; rendering of the work). Courtesy of the artist

Four contemporary artworks in the Cuneo area for 30 years of Fondazione CRC

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