In Bergamo, Rachel Whiteread's unpublished installation for the Palazzo della Ragione

GAMeC - Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo returns for the sixth consecutive year inside Palazzo della Ragione with a new exhibition. In the year of Bergamo Brescia Capitale Italiana della Cultura, Rachel Whiteread (London, 1963), an internationally renowned British artist, will present from June 23 to October 29, 2023, thepreviously unseen installation And the Animals Were Sold, curated by Lorenzo Giusti and Sara Fumagalli, conceived in relation to the city and in conversation with the architecture and history of the Palazzo della Ragione.

Always interested in the spaces that belong to our daily lives but are often forgotten, Whiteread creates for the Sala delle Capriate an environmentalinstallation composed of sixty chairs, which are intended to be the materialization of the empty space between the legs of two different models of seats.

The sculptures are made of different types of stones that are found in the building materials of both the Palazzo della Ragione and Piazza Vecchia, as in the case of Sarnico stone in the facade of the Palazzo della Ragione and Zandobbio marble in the Contarini Fountain, and that are still extracted from quarries in the Bergamo area. The artist thus wanted to create a close relationship with the territory and its history, as well as with the very architecture of the place hosting the exhibition.

The title of the installation is evocative both of the pandemic(And the Animals Were Sold brings to mind the image of Asian markets where animals of all sorts are sold and which many scholars claim to be at the origin of the Coronavirus mutation) and of any conversation whose words can be caught almost inadvertently. Indeed, the exhibition constitutes Whiteread’s first opportunity to express himself artistically about the dramatic and alienating experience of the pandemic. Bergamo was, for the artist, one of the first experiences of returning to pre-pandemic life, when traveling was a perfectly normal condition. And the experience the artist had on her first visit to the city struck her to the point that she began to think of her intervention as related to the infamous events of the uncontrolled spread of the pandemic in Bergamo.

The sixty chairs that make up the installation are meant to evoke the presence and at the same time the absence of as many people. As with many of his works, the emptiness that becomes full in these sculptures “stands in place of something else”: in this case, specifically, of a person or a multitude of people. When the chairs are placed two meters apart, emphasizing the silent dimension of the void, the arrangement studied by the artist refers to the obligation of social distancing; the arrangement, on the other hand, refers to people in conversation when the chairs are placed more loosely, forming small groups, alluding to a newfound proximity. With these considerations as a starting point, Rachel Whiteread conceived an installation intended to bring attention to the history of the Palazzo della Ragione, which in the past constituted a place where representatives of the municipality met to discuss, confront and legislate. But also on the present, where the Sala delle Capriate overlooks the Piazza Vecchia, which, particularly in the summertime , becomes a meeting and gathering place for both city residents and tourists.

The sixty sessions ultimately constitute an invitation addressed to visitors to pause to animate this Hall and experience it as a place of exchange and relationship, of closeness and sharing.

A short film, made by director Joe Juanne Piras, will document the creative process that led the artist to the conception of the exhibition project for the Palazzo della Ragione. The film is produced as part of MADE IN, the creative residency program of MADE, a project sponsored by the Bergamo Chamber of Commerce and produced by Lab 80 film in collaboration with GAMeC, Museo delle Storie di Bergamo and Fondazione Legler for the economic and social history of Bergamo.

Image: Rachel Whiteread, Installation view, 2010, Davies Street, London, September 7-October 2, 2010 ©Rachel Whiteread. Photo by Mike Bruce. Courtesy of Gagosian.

In Bergamo, Rachel Whiteread's unpublished installation for the Palazzo della Ragione

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