New Comics in Museums exhibition opens at Sabauda Gallery, ghost-themed

From May 17 to Sept. 11, 2022, the Sabauda Gallery of the Royal Museums of Turin presents Fantasmi e altri misteri, the new thematic exhibition of Comics in Museums: Sudden apparitions and unexpected encounters, animated works, flesh-and-blood portraits, condemned to death, lost souls, mythological spirits, secular inhabitants, historical colonels, and characters coming from the sea or the land are the protagonists of the stories told in the new exhibition chapter of the Ministry of Culture project created to bring the youngest and not only to the places of culture through the pencils of some of the most famous and promising national comic strip artists.

“The Royal Museums enthusiastically welcome this new exhibition, a bridge between past and present to investigate the collections of cultural heritage,” said Royal Museums Director Enrica Pagella, commenting on the encounter between comics and the museum. “An expression of the contemporary world, comics is a narrative form that is linked to other artistic languages present in secular collections. In addition to drawing as an expressive medium, storytelling through images accumulates the figurative art of all times.”

“Italy has always excelled in the field of protection, becoming an example throughout the world. The time has come to add to this investment a great attention to contemporaneity,” said Culture Minister Dario Franceschini. “This project, in addition to narrating museums with a new language and letting the imagination of some of Italy’s best cartoonists run free, also shows how investing in preservation and the past can be an opportunity to give greater impetus to cultural and creative industries and young artists. This is an innovative project that the Ministry cares a lot about.”

After the first exhibitions at the Istituto Centrale per la Grafica, at the Shrine of Hercules Vincitore in Tivoli, at Lucca Comic & Games 2021, and after the fifty-two self-portraits of comic book authors at the Uffizi, the tale of the contemporaneity of Italian heritage through comicsthus continues.

Curated by Mattia Morandi, Chiara Palmieri, and Simona Cardinali, the exhibition is inspired by Lorena Canottiere’s comic strip entitled Io più fanciullo non sono, set in the Royal Museums and featuring Prince Eugene of Savoy-Soissons.

"What we are inaugurating today is an exhibition that constitutes a further stage of Fumetti nei Musei, the project of the Ministry of Culture, which has strengthened and renewed the relationship between cultural institutions and the Ninth Art," commented Mattia Morandi, MiC press and communications office chief and curator of the exhibition, as well as creator of the Fumetti nei Musei project. "Thanks to the director of the Royal Museums of Turin, Enrica Pagella, and the cartoonist Lorena Canottiere who, from the very beginning, strongly believed in this project and thanks to the many people who worked on it allowing happy and unexpected evolutions. Created as a tool for educational activities, Fumetti nei Musei has over time revealed numerous potentials: after quickly positioning itself as a publishing series, it has allowed the State’s collections to be enriched with the works of a new generation of Italian cartoonists, who have generously donated their works to the Istituto della Grafica in Rome - effectively constituting the first Comics Fund of the public heritage - and to the Uffizi’s collection of self-portraits, which will soon be on public display. The project has also been selected by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to promote the Italian language around the world and has spawned a web series on the comics professions. And finally, the cycle of exhibitions that will slowly arrive all over Italy."

“This exhibition represents an unprecedented experiment,” say Chiara Palmieri and Simona Cardinali. "Until now, the project has always been declined in its entirety, while this time a thematic selection of plates is presented that, while focusing only around the theme of ghosts, conveys the vibrancy and quality of Italian comics."

“The past, in museums, is only the surface,” added cartoonist Lorena Canottiere. “Just beyond exists a space where the past becomes present and future at the same time. The magic was to become Eugene, to be him and thus to experience as present and future an era that continued to be the past with respect to my everyday life. This is the invitation that museums offer us, always.”

New Comics in Museums exhibition opens at Sabauda Gallery, ghost-themed

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