Fantastic Animals in Bologna: Palazzo Albergati transforms into the Garden of Wonders

An art exhibition? A zoo? A dream? Fantastic Animals. The Garden of Wonders, conceived and curated by Gianluca Marziani and Stefano Antonelli, scheduled from Dec. 7, 2023 to May 5, 2024 at Bologna’s Palazzo Albergati, aims to be much more than an exhibition and to represent a new frontier of entertainment, in which animals, art, magic, fun and dreams are merged. The museum is transformed into an immense open space, where animals find their ideal habitat, welcoming everyone, young and old, art experts and the curious.

More than 90 animals will cross the magical threshold of Palazzo Albergati, created by 23 great contemporary artists. It is the first artist’s zoo made in the world, without cages, without distances and animated by paintings, sculptures and installations of animals of all species; a superzoo that will see the noble rooms of the Palace transformed into a new museum habitat, a pedestrian safari where the works accompany the visitor on a walk inside a fairy tale, where animals coexist in the most respectful of artistic ecosystems.

SUPERZOO starts again from the origins of a term (żòo comes from the Greek and means precisely “animal”) that spans all life on the Planet, but it is not about an area intended as a park with cages. SUPERZOO is about, on the contrary, the life of free artistic animals, a parallel world that exists in the suspended time of the exhibition, making the exhibition space a dreamy environment between real life and fantastic worlds where other lives are still possible. With SUPERZOO, one participates in a renewed exhibition idea that becomes a participatory and inclusive place, a parallel world in which works recall movies, novels, streaming series, documentaries, design objects, memes, reels, philosophical theories, and everything else that has so far always fascinated us about the animal world. The evocative atmospheres of the installations create spaces where our animals seem to have lived forever, happy with a vital balance that engages the viewer before the spectacle of Art becoming Nature.

There are 23 hypercontemporary artists, all Italian and chosen among those who have investigated the animal universe with great thematic coherence: Giovanni Albanese, Camilla Ancilotto, Marco Bettio, Chiara Calore, Mario Consiglio, Valentina De Martini, Fulvio Di Piazza, Dario Ghibaudo, Massimo Giacon, Sandro Gorra, Giorgio Lupattelli, Giulio Marchetti, Marco Mazzoni, Andrea Nurcis, Luca Padroni, Max Papeschi, Valeria Petrone, Nicola Pucci, Gherardo Quadrio Curzio, Mario Ricci, Maurizio Savini, Lapo Simeoni, and Velasco Vitali. Heterogeneous authors who touch the languages of plastic volume (sculptures) and two dimensions (drawing and painting) to imagine fantastic bestiaries, medieval games, metamorphic hybrids, science fiction, pop surrealisms, literary quotations, a sort of journey through the centuries that overturns old certainties and invents a new zoology.

The two floors of Palazzo Albergati welcome the different animal species with an arrangement that has eliminated cages, closures or delimitations. Each work breathes into the place with its primordial energy, metaphorical capacity, and interpretive power. All of them together demonstrate the polyphonic value of a homogeneous vision of the world, as if each artist, even in the characters that distinguish him or her, shared the idea of the same action on the world. I becoming We. Us becoming Them. Them encompassing each and every I.

WE ARE is a narrative claim that unites artists and viewers with the goal of narrating a large family with resolved plurality. Author after author, a word has been added to WE ARE... (each for each artist) to evoke emotional and familiar atmospheres, between temperament and new reasons, instinct and evolution, avoiding egocentrism that is not good when you let bright dreams flow freely. The artist stands here as a collective archetype, moral leader of a visual lesson that touches each of us, without distinction or limitation, embodying those words that characterize our emotions and feelings, that produce shared and universal actions, that make us active participants in a new way of inhabiting the world. WE ARE MANY THINGS: because only in common listening do we set great goals, only in common feeling do we set great goals.

“SUPERZOO,” explains curator Gianluca Marizani, “is the perfect metaphor for a world where enormous diversity and linguistic multiplicity melt into a giant extended family, a kind of ideal planet where spaces and resources are shared, without inequalities, confirming Tom Regan’s theorem that considers animal rights identical to human rights. In this ideal world, perhaps utopian but certainly fascinating, the right to pleasure and the perception of pain are the key to considering humans and animals on the same normative plane. Knowing how difficult it is for this to happen in reality, we came up with this exhibition journey with the best of poetic weapons: visual art.”

The exhibition FANTASTIC ANIMALS. The Garden of Wonders, produced and organized by Arthemisia has the patronage of the Municipality of Bologna and features Radio Birikina as media partner and mobility partner Cotabo.

Opening hours Every day from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Tuesday closed (ticket office closes one hour before) Tickets Full € 15.00 Reduced € 14.00 Information and reservations at +39 051 030141.

Fantastic Animals in Bologna: Palazzo Albergati transforms into the Garden of Wonders

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