A different look at Italian contemporary art – Daniele Cassandro

OUT (all caps) is the title of the Rome 2020 Quadrennial of Art. The review of Italian contemporary art was inaugurated at the Palazzo delle Exposition on 30 October 2020 and was closed to the public shortly after, due to the second wave of pandemic. It is now open again (free of charge) until July 18th. While the contagion was rampant and disputed of data, numbers and colored regions, FUORI remained locked inside, behind the gates of the building designed at the end of the nineteenth century by Pio Piacentini.

The curators Sarah Cosulich and Stefano Collicelli Cagol set off from that building, whose marble-clad walls kept the exhibition hidden from the city for months, to rethink the four-year anniversary from the inside.

The Exhibition Center has been the seat of the Quadriennale of art since the first edition in 1931, in the midst of the fascist dictatorship. The idea was to have a review of Italian modern art in the capital of Mussolini’s empire that would act as an “autarchic” counterpart to the Venice Biennale, founded in 1895 and dedicated to international art. In 1932, in the interval between the first two four-year years, the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution was set up at the Exhibition Palace, a gigantic propaganda machine that recounted the magnificent and progressive destinies of Mussolini’s Italy, among modernist scenographies (by Adalberto Libera and Mario De Renzi) and contributions from contemporary artists such as the painter Achille Funi, the designer and advertiser Marcello Nizzoli, the futurist Gerardo Dottori and of course Mario Sironi. In the presentation of the catalog a declaration of intent: “the slogan of the duce clear and precise: to do what today, therefore very modern, and daring, without melancholy memories of the decorative styles of the past”.

The intention of the curators in this Quadrennial 2020 is equally clear: one cannot fail to reckon with one’s cumbersome origins and with one’s own history, made up of memorable editions and others more modest and decidedly provincial.

Starting from the building therefore means facing openly the theme of the relationship between art and power, between artists and the state, between artistic practice (and fruition) and commitment to the contemporary, between past and present. The exhibition catalog, published by Treccani, opens with a series of images of Italy in recent years: No Tav events, the Costa Concordia shipwreck, Ilaria Cucchi exhibiting the photo of her killed brother, the epochal passing of the baton between Pope Francis and the pope emeritus and the ruin of the Morandi bridge… Images presented without captions and comments that give the idea of ​​that “outside” with which everyone, artists, curators and the public, must necessarily confront. And precisely that “outside” is forced to break through “inside” the symbolic palace of power.

“Outside” is a word with a strong revolutionary charge: outside can mean exclusion from a safe and protected inside or the expulsion of an old ruling class; “Police outside the university!”, Was scanned during the demonstrations of ’68 and Fuori! was the name of the first Italian gay association founded in 1971 by Angelo Pezzana. Out!, incidentally, it was also the title of a small documentary exhibition set up in 2011 at the Museo del 900 in Milan, on the artistic experiences between 1968 and the seventies that took place on the street, in the squares, outside the institutional circuits.

In the curatorial approach of this quadrennial, a certain sensitivity of the seventies can be seen in filigree: first of all an eccentric and inclusive point of view on the history of art, an approach open to the most diverse practices (fashion, design, music, theater, documentary cinema, performance) and then a transnational and transgenerational look. FUORI collects the works of 43 Italian artists, artists or collectives from all backgrounds and ages. The works of the youngest (more than half of the artists are under forty years old) dialogue with those of the oldest and make us discover underground influences and surprising similarities. The curators’ goal is to write a parallel history of Italian art, a story made up of unexplored interstices, minority practices or less traveled roads.

Desire is one of the most captivating threads they have chosen: the abstract and erotic sculptures by Lydia Silvestri (1929-2018) are hermaphroditic sexual organs in continuous evolution, a visual and material challenge to the sexual binary, just as sensual and sexual are colossal flowers wide open on the monumental staircase of the building, the work of the artists Petrit Halilaj (1986) and Alvaro Urbano (1983). Breath, the installation of the artist and feminist activist Cloti Ricciardi (1939), a white environment that contracts and expands thanks to the visitor who is invited to pull some cords, refers to the raw but somehow classicizing images of the Part, a series of photos by Lisetta Carmi (1924) commissioned in 1968 by the Genoa hospital. The possibilities that the body, sex and identity have to transform, reinvent and become politicized are at the center of the conceptual work of the queer collective Tomboys don’t cry and the equally infinite seductive possibilities of painting are found in the psychedelic and mythological works of the painter. Lombard Diego Gualandris (1993).

Psichedelica can also be considered the painting by Salvo (1947-2015) exhibited in aristocratic isolation on the upper floor. A rare case of a conceptual artist who has also tried his hand at canvases and brushes, Salvo in his bright and colorful landscapes mixes futurism, metaphysics, magical realism and abstraction in a dizzying and hypertrophic game of hide and seek with the twentieth century. The works of the composer, poet, artist, actor and singer Sylvano Bussotti (1931), on the other hand, are a flight forward into eroticism and desire, in his case markedly homoerotic. In his drawings the line is exuberant and vitalistic, elegant and violent at the same time, tender and pornographic. And the drawing overflows into his musical scores and his stage costumes that seem to materialize from the same sinuous, flickering and elusive line.

In the building which, just before the aforementioned Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution, had also been the seat of the First International Colonial Art Exhibition, the curators of FUORI also wanted to introduce the increasingly urgent theme of decolonization in our country. Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti are the founders of DAAR (Decolonizing Archietcture Art Residency), a collective of artistic research and experimentation interested in the re-appropriation and decolonization of architecture and public spaces. DAAR proposes at the four-year anniversary the creation of a decolonization body, mirroring the colonization body that the fascist regime established in 1940 in Sicily with the same aims as similar bodies in Libya and Eritrea. The colonial villages built in Sicily are today in ruins but the buildings of the regime are still all there, residues of a process of de-fascism left halfway, memories of an era in which Sicily was seen as a territory to be reclaimed and modernized , just like the African colonies. The juxtaposed photos of colonial architecture in Asmara and in the fascist villages in Sicily arouse in the viewer, former colonizers and former colonized, a question: who has the right to preserve, restore and pass on fascist colonial architecture? And above all with what criteria?

The film work of Yervant Giankian (1942) and Angela Ricci Lucchi (1942) is also an attempt to re-appropriate the history of fascist colonialism through the reassembly of old films. Barbarian country is a montage of private images and vintage newsreels that address the representation of fascist power in Libya, Eritrea and Ethiopia. Through the juxtaposition of images from military parades and celebrations in private homes, with particular attention to the texture and materiality of the frames, the film underlines the importance of collective and personal responsibilities in the rise of fascism and its colonial delusions.

With its plurality of voices, even marginal and intersectional, and of multidisciplinary artistic practices, the Rome 2020 art quadrennial succeeds in its intent to offer us an eccentric look at Italian contemporary art. And above all he succeeds in his most political intent: to open the building and force it to come to terms with its history. “Because”, as Stefano Collicelli Cagol concludes in one of the critical texts of the catalog, “no one among those who crossed the threshold of the first four-year period after the king and queen in 1931, could have ever imagined that in 2020 that same institution would welcome all and all those they wanted OUT ”.