The Animated Archive. The Cirulli Foundation recounts the twentieth century

The Cirulli Foundation in San Lazzaro di Savena (Bologna) proposes from November 23, 2019 to May 17, 2020 The Animated Archive. Work in Progress, a new exhibition concept that aims to present to the public the identity of the Foundation as a place of experimentation between archive and exhibition space. A true laboratory between history and culture of the 20th century to tell the story of the century of modernity through figurative arts, industrial design, advertising, cinema, photography, television, and magazines.

The project has been realized thanks to the collaboration of Jeffrey Schnapp, founder and director of Harvard University’s metaLAB.In the historic Cirulli Foundation building, designed and built in 1960 by Milanese architects and designers Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni for Dino Gavina, a narrative of the short century will be accomplished through the Foundation’s varied and panoramic collection.

Nineteen sections in which the decorative arts, communication, industrial design, and material and visual culture will be intermingled-photographs, drawings, paintings, sculptures, objects, posters, flyers, correspondence, architectural plans, textiles, magazines, and books, for a total of more than 200 works.

The Fabric of Modernity will offer a selection of graphic designs for furnishing fabrics created for the Milan Triennale in the 1950s by the most famous artists, such as Gio Ponti, Ettore Sottsass, Lucio Fontana, Enrico Prampolini, Bice Lazzari, Fede Cheti and many others. Fermo immagine will recount through the faces of 1960s cinema and television the enthusiasms of the economic boom, while Munari, Carboni and the RAI will narrate the graphic innovation of public television by the two artists in the 1950s. Modernity will be told through industrial productions, the photographic documentation of life in the postwar hinterland of Emilia with Enrico Pasquali ’s images and Arturo Ghergo’s glamorous ones. And again, advertising: from the decorative panel made by Xanti Schawinsky, Bauhaus master for the Olivetti store in Turin, to the original billboards from the turn of the last century, from the anonymous design of branded confectionery papers made in the 1930s for the most important bars in Italy, to the evolution of logos through careful documentation.

"We wanted to move away from too rigid museum exhibition formats to venture into a kind of ’no man’s land,’ in which instead of the grand narrative we seek multiplicity, simultaneity and agility, futurist values par excellence (but also entirely contemporary values), through the adoption of hybrid, light and fresh formats. The animated archive, which leverages the diversity and heterogeneity of a panoramic collection such as that of the Cirulli Foundation, does not only propose products and solutions to the public but also advances problems, prompts research, composes puzzles and suggests instances of direct access to often non-canonical materials that tell the story of the Italian 20th century," said curator Jeffrey Schnapp.

Massimo and Sonia Cirulli added, “Throughout the duration of the exhibition, meetings and lectures will be organized with the participation of experts and scholars in the field, to focus on the themes of the various sections, composing a rich proposal of cultural events. In fact, our goal is to open the space of the Foundation to make it a place of content construction, a real permanent laboratory of history and culture of the twentieth century.”

For info: www.fondazionecirulli.org

Tickets: Full 10 euros, reduced 8 and 5 euros.

Image: Arturo Ghergo, Isa Miranda (1936; vintage silver salt print on photographic paper)

The Animated Archive. The Cirulli Foundation recounts the twentieth century

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