An installation by Botto&Bruno on the theme of memory and time enters the collections of the Royal Museums of Turin

A new work enters the collections of the Royal Museums of Turin: it is theinstallation The ballad of forgotten places. The project, winner of the third edition of the Italian Council competition in 2018, was created by artists Botto&Bruno and is promoted by the Merz Foundation.

The work was placed in the Hall of Mirrors, on the second floor of the Sabauda Gallery, and aims to propose a new reflection on the theme of memory and the care of the traces of time. Indeed, the traces and signs of time and the cultures that shaped and built it appear in the installation. For Botto&Bruno, “marginal places need to be protected and cared for, and above all they need people to take action to preserve their memory.” From this and inspired by the words of French anthropologist and philosopher Marc Augé that “our time no longer produces ruins because it has no time for them,” a structure was born that evokes a contemporary ruin, whose outer walls are the remnants of a modernist architecture and the utopia it represents.

The ballad of forgotten places is conceived as a large-scale practicable structure within which, from the walls to the floor, the image of a suburban landscape rich in oxidation, stains and relics unfolds, transformed into a kind of daguerreotype by the action of time. In the center, on a plinth, is a three-hundred-page artist’s book of photographs taken by the artists over twenty years of work, modified pictorially with the same technique as the wall images, bearing witness to vanished, altered and forgotten places.

“The idea of a house that although fragile, crumbling, chooses to protect the memory of these lost places seems to us the only way to be able to build the basis for a new and more constructive approach to addressing issues on the environment,” said Botto&Bruno.

Moreover, the work is intended to lead to a reflection on contemporaneity and the role of art as a tool, not only for reading society, but also for the aesthetic transformation of the present.

The project was carried out in close collaboration with the Regional Secretariat for Piedmont of the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism and with Fondazione Merz, and the Royal Museums of Turin was envisioned as the work’s final destination in order to increase the contemporary art collection.

Image: Botto & Bruno, The ballad of forgotten places (Turin, Galleria Sabauda) Photo Renato Ghiazza

An installation by Botto&Bruno on the theme of memory and time enters the collections of the Royal Museums of Turin

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