A valuable selection of Turkestan carpets at Brescia Castle

On the occasion of the events related to Bergamo Brescia Italian Capital of Culture 2023, Fondazione Tassara will make available a part of its priceless collection of carpets, donated by Romain Zaleski, with the aim of making known and appreciated by the general public some artifacts usually destined for display in temporary exhibitions in the world’s major museums. Together with Fondazione Brescia Musei, co-promoter of the project, it has entrusted LETIA - Letizia Cariello and Giovanni Valagussa with the curatorship of the exhibition I nodi dei giardini del Paradiso, which will be open from April 1 to November 5, 2023 at the new spaces, restored and reopened to the public after about fifteen years, in the Great Mile of Brescia Castle, where the Museo del Risorgimento Leonessa d’Italia is also set up on the lower floor.

The exhibition project brings together a valuable selection of thirty-five carpets from theTurkestan area, chosen from within the extensive corpus of the Zaleski collection, which for the first time are being shown to the public alongside a core of contemporary textile-related artworks by international artists, including Alighiero Boetti and Herta Ottolenghi Wedekind, which in an innovative way will be included, together with a multimedia projection on a large sail screen by Wladimir Zaleski, in a unique and unprecedented site-specific installation created by LETIA - Letizia Cariello. A “soft space” made of fabric, threads, taut ropes and carpets hung like banners or gonfalons.

Fondazione Tassara and Fondazione Brescia Musei have decided to make the entrance ticket to the exhibition free of charge in order to involve and allow the general public to discover a world whose art sinks into the centuries from China to Spain without interruption, where not only ancient and contemporary art dialogue, but also produce a new work of art.

Parallel to the exhibition in Brescia, the second edition of Hortus Conclusus has been organized in Bergamo with the opening of three ancient palaces in the upper city, Palazzo Agliardi, Palazzo Terzi, and Castello di Valverde, which are part of the Historic Houses program. Thirteen very rare carpets, dating back to the 16th and 17th centuries, whose types are named after important painters, Ghirlandaio, Lotto and Tintoretto, will be offered inside the palaces. The public will thus be able, during some weekends in April, May and September, to exceptionally admire these ancient works of art inside residences normally inhabited by their owners.

The two initiatives are supported by Fondazione Cariplo and the Fondazione della Comunità Bresciana.

The title of the Brescian exhibition refers to the threads of carpets knotted around the warp and weft, evoking magical, paradisiacal lands, places of the sacred and prayer, warm and comfortable environments, oases in the desert. It is precisely the theme of travel that guided the choice, within the Zaleski collection, among the most comprehensive private collections in the world, consisting of more than 1330 carpets from all parts of Eurasia and North Africa, of the 35 antique carpets, all confined to a specific area. This is the immense expanse of Central Asia, in the territory that is collectively referred to as Turkestan, stretching from the Caspian Sea to western China and including countries that are among the most fascinating in the world for their extraordinary landscapes and unspoiled nature, in which the caravan routes that constituted the ’Silk Road’ used to wind.

As Giovanni Valagussa, curator of the exhibition, points out, it is “an exhibition that wants to remember the millennial link between East and West; to remember mythical cities such as Bukhara, Samarkand, or Tashkent; to remember the mysterious and fascinating culture of the nomads who moved through these borderless areas; but also to remember the women who today in Afghanistan fight for their dignity and for an absurdly denied equality.”

LETIA - Letizia Cariello, curator of the exhibition, says, “the precious carpets are presented not in a traditional museum-inspired alignment, but become in turn constituent parts of a large and articulate work of contemporary art. It is a Gesamtkunstwerk [total work of art], consisting basically of four elements settled into each other to form a kind of Matryoshka offered to the viewer, so as to invite him or her to become an actor and ultimately a constituent part of the overall installation.”

Made especially for the exhibition are the unprecedented Beauceant and Aracne installations by LETIA - Letizia Cariello. The first consists of the carpets themselves mounted on frames supported by pulleys, marine bollards and steel brackets with the help of red sailing ropes that run through the space rolling up on the ceiling beams, in a game of interweaving reminiscent of the latticework of sailboat shrouds. The second is a kind of labyrinth that accompanies the visitors’ path and winds in a sequence of handrails of mirror-polished steel designed by the artist, crossed by a long red cord that guides people as if following the ancient myth of Ariadne’s thread. The orchestration of these elements is ideally inspired by the Church of Santo Stefano dei Cavalieri, next to the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, whose walls, alongside traditional religiously inspired elements, house banners and trophies from the Battle of Lepanto.

Rounding out the itinerary are the large sail screen with evocative color and sound images by videomaker and videoartist Wladimir Zaleski, textile artifacts made by 20th-century artists such as Alighiero Boetti and Herta Ottolenghi Wedekind, and LETIA’s own work, Thinkerbell. This is a large brass cage, placed in the nave, inside which Bach’s music will be played. Thanks also to the collaboration with the Fondazione del Teatro Grande di Brescia, the music will be performed live, in different circumstances, by the Bazzini Consort playing inside the work, in a combination of auditory and visual perception.

A valuable selection of Turkestan carpets at Brescia Castle

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