In Bologna, Aldo Giannotti's solo exhibition "Safe and Sound" subverts the concept of a museum

Safe and Sound at MAMbo in Bologna is not so much an exhibition as a statement of intent. The one I tell you about is just one of the possible exhibitions to visit because there is more to becoming, acting, and interacting than what is on display. But let’s go in order. The project (a true writer ’s project made of drawings and words) comes to us already at the ticket office where four interventions have invaded the usual reception spaces: on the walls sketches of ideas ever realized for this exhibition (worthy of MoRE. A Museum of refused and unrealised art projects), two neon lights from Continuous Cycles and the first games: if you are an artist (but even if you are not) you can leave your artwork in the lockers, in Lockers, for the duration of the exhibition, then (the artist tells us) “write it in your cv”; if you want to leave you can do so (without having paid the ticket) through the Safe/Dangerous Exit installation, bar door or passageway drawn on the wall. The statement of intent is made: there are ways, choices, sliding doors, in everyone’s freedom to write (or undo) new rules.

With map in hand (drawn in his own hand by the artist to help us not to get lost) we enter the Sala delle Ciminiere and activate, as in a big escape room, all Giannotti’s short circuits: linguistic, visual (always present in his work) but, in this case, also spatial, perceptual and semantic. The Others is the antechamber of the exhibition that instead came true: on a cinema screen you see ’others’ in a situation similar to yours, in another ’anti exhibition’, you do not understand, but you trust. You go on. And boom! Here comes the subversion, total, of the concept of the museum institution, of what is safe and what is not, of what is allowed or not allowed to be done in an exhibition. But also on the street, in Bologna, in the world. Rules are questioned, the very same rules so much hinged on museums.

Visitors come into contact with a reality where they are free to exercise potential behavioral alternatives, where accompanying them are caretakers/performers who, quite simply, do things we are not used to. They do a lot of them, always new, always different. And maybe we like the museum better.

Participate. You draw on the wall the passing exhibition time. You become familiar with the place. Get to know Aldo (who by the way is not even named Aldo but Giosia Rinaldo) in Things That Hurt Me and looking around. If for some strange reason you have a chainsaw with you, you can cut through the drywall and take a work home(it happened last May 9).

Suggested path to visit the exhibition

Lockers

Safe/Dangerous Exit

Things that hurt me

The chainsaw

The theft-performance on May 9

The chainsaw

You finally feel confident. You feel like finding out more. You have already seen for a while that there is a hole, high up in the wall that connects you through The Passage. After Aldo Rossi directly to the permanent collection rooms. But wait until you go up; there is still so much to experience.

A few past works anticipate Giannotti’s ’discarded’ figure; in Mutual Surveillance you connect (in an action of mutual aid between museums) with the rooms of MAMbo in Bogota. Museums should do this, too: watch each other (when I visited the exhibition, the connection was interrupted because of the street protests taking place in the Colombian capital. True or not, I didn’t mind it at all. In fact, the installation was working anyway).

In the next room with Mobile Staircase we enter a symbolic installation of the project where museum rules are skipped and in order to see the works, visitors must move escalators and climb up them at their own risk. You enjoy it because you like the sense of the absurd and novel. A large space is devoted to Satellite Events, for now it is a white space with a few strings on the wall, which will take shape and substance over the course of the summer with the program of events curated by Giannotti himself.

The passage after Aldo Rossi

Mutual surveillance

Mutual surveillance

Mobile staircase

Mobile staircase

Satellite events

Off you go, and now up you go. You walk through a scaffold-installation with works placed in an uphill gallery, and you find yourself in the (in)touchable halls of the permanent collection where Aldo does not stop and in twelve stations (thanks to his instructions) performs the museum playing hide-and-seek, clapping, dancing, inventing stories, folding postcards that make up a collective intervention.

As you descend you feel happy (because this is an exhibition that gives joy) you look around some more and take the exit. And there you are, in the concluding room, you are ’the others’ (or “the others are us” as a song by Umberto Tozzi goes) there in front of a twin mega-screen watching who is about to begin this exhibition experience. Everything comes together, the palindrome exhibition makes sense, and the big neon light Welcome and Goodbye explains everything in two words.

Back on the street, on Don Minzoni Street, and the small sign The Column (which you hadn’t given too much thought to before) now pulls you in. In the Chimney Hall it’s just inaccessible sheetrock, out here it’s the passage that connects ’the inside’ with ’the outside,’ the museum’s specialist audience with the people passing by on the street. There are no more barriers; after all, even the tunnel that plunges you into the permanent collections (a glass trace of Giannotti’s intervention will remain at the end of the exhibition) or the artistic forays into the foyer had already challenged museum customs. It is a political, social, participatory project that, by triggering new decision-making processes, outlines new cultural geographies. There is irony, study, thought and vision. We come out safe and sound.

Performing the museum

Performing the museum

The Column

The Others

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