Nuoro, exhibition on relations between Sardinia and Piedmont from 1720s to 1960s reopens

It was supposed to open from March 13 to June 14, but the Covid-19 emergency forced the Nuoro Art Museum to suspend it. We are talking about the exhibition The Secret Kingdom. Sardinia-Piedmont: a postcolonial vision reopening May 29 through Nov. 15.

Through the work of artists, musicians and intellectuals, the exhibition represents a broad and articulate historiographical and cultural survey that reveals the relationship between Sardinia and Piedmont from the 1720s to the 1960s, collecting a variety of artworks, documents, artifacts, literary texts, illustrations, ceramics, photographs and musical scores from prestigious Italian institutions.

Completing the exhibition is a section dedicated to animation curated by the Fondazione Sardegna Film Commission, which, in collaboration with MAN, has developed four experimental formats of animated shorts dedicated to Sardinian illustrators active in Piedmont in the 20th century.

The exhibition unveils a previously unseen face of the Kingdom of Sardinia, a secret kingdom full of unexplored stories and made up of prolific encounters and great mobility, narrated mostly in polemical terms by Sardinian historiography and with numerous misunderstandings by Piedmontese historiography.

In fact, the relationship between the two regions began in 1720, when the island became Savoyard, and from then on, cultural exchanges and transactions between the two territories became increasingly intense, leading to an era of movements of people, objects and ideas that profoundly changed the destiny of Sardinia and Piedmont and would contribute to the establishment of the Kingdom of Italy and the development of a national culture. Adopting a postcolonial perspective, the exhibition itinerary illustrates the process of acculturation and mutual influence between Sardinia and Piedmont, even to the point of undoing the stereotypical “dominated and dominant” formula to make room for the free reinvention of signs and styles that continued for more than two centuries.

Luca Scarlini, curator of the exhibition, writes in the text in the catalog, “The exhibition explores, by means of artistic profiles, micro-stories, facts of custom, official events, political situations, biographical anecdotes, stories of love and war, documents, illustrations, and often forgotten, or never clarified, links, the construction of a world of signs between Piedmont and Sardinia, without a preconceived vision, nor theses to be demonstrated. In the rooms of the MAN in Nuoro, the spectacle of a place at once real and imaginary is staged, whose maps are provided, perhaps for the first time, in an organic way, reconstructing at the same time a capital episode, and still largely to be explored, of recent Italian history.”

The exhibition is accompanied by an extensive monographic catalog published by Ilisso that includes specially commissioned unpublished essays by leading Sardinian and Piedmontese authors and writers such as Marcello Fois, writer, playwright and screenwriter; Gianni Farinetti, mystery writer, screenwriter and director; Maria Paola Dettori, art historian; Luciano Marrocu, historian and writer; and Luigi Fassi, director of MAN.

For all information you can visit the official website of MAN Nuoro.

Pictured: Vittorio Accornero for Gucci, Italian Costume Scarf (1960s, silk, 87 x 87 cm) Courtesy Federico Spano

Nuoro, exhibition on relations between Sardinia and Piedmont from 1720s to 1960s reopens

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