On October 3, 2024 in Casnigo and on October 5 in Bergamo and Vertova, the new projects of Thinking Like a Mountain, the two-year exhibition program promoted by GAMeC, will open to the public. The museum is engaged in the implementation of art projects throughout the Province of Bergamo with a view to creating new paths of sharing aimed at reflecting on the themes of sustainability and community.
The new cycle of events this fall features Marta Cuscunà, Gabriel Chaile, Yesmine Ben Khelil, and Agostino Iacurci together with the communities of Casnigo, Vertova, and Bergamo.
MARTA CUSCUNÀ
Casnigo, Teatro Circolo Fratellanza
Alleanze multispecie. Fantascienza, femminismi e creature più-che-umane
Performative account
October 3, 2024
The theater of Casnigo, founded in the 1920s, will host the performative account by Marta Cuscunà (Monfalcone, 1982), an auteur and performer of visual theater, known for her research that combines environmental and social activism with figure dramaturgy.
The performance brings together the reflections presented in Cuscunà’s recent work on the future of planet Earth exploring the links between species and environments, highlighting the relationships between natural forces and human actions; it chronicles the artist’s imaginary journey across the increasingly blurred boundary separating the natural from the anthropic, through individuality and symbiosis, leading to the end and a possible new beginning.
GABRIEL CHAILE
Vertova, Ex convento – Circolo degli anziani
Festa del pane / Bread Baking Party
October 5, 2024
The Argentinean artist Gabriel Chaile (San Miguel de Tucumán, 1985) explores his country’s pre-Columbian traditions, interweaving them with the experiences and narratives of the various communities he encounters, resulting in works that celebrate collective memory and visual storytelling, letting them address issues such as sustainability, cooperativism, and decolonization.
In Val Seriana, presso il Circolo degli anziani di Vertova, l’artista ha raccolto testimonianze delle tradizioni locali legate alla produzione del pane e della pasta, con il fine di creare un’opera-forno capace di celebrare e riattualizzare queste usanze. In occasione di un Bread Baking Party, la festa del pane che animerà il circolo degli anziani del paese, nel forno verranno cotti i “Michini di San Patrizio”, pane benedetto e distribuito ai fedeli di Vertova fino alla Prima Guerra Mondiale. La tradizione dei “Michini” è stata recentemente recuperata, con la produzione affidata a un forno locale e la distribuzione presso il Santuario di Colzate dedicato a San Patrizio.
In Val Seriana, at the Circolo degli anziani in Vertova, the artist collected testimonies of the traditions linked locally to the production of bread and pasta, with the aim of creating a work-cum-oven capable of celebrating and updating these customs. On the occasion of a “Bread Baking Party”, the bread feast that will enliven the village’s seniors and pensioners’ club, the “Michini di San Patrizio”: bread blessed and handed out to the faithful of Vertova until World War I, will be baked in the oven. This “miracle bread” was kept in homes and consumed in case of illness, by people and animals alike. The tradition of the “Michini” has recently been revived, with production entrusted to a local bakery and distribution at the Sanctuary of Colzate, dedicated to St. Patrick.
Making bread, as well as once more kneading Teedèi—typical noodles from Vertova—takes on a special significance today. It is not just about evoking ancient customs but generating relationships that are rebuilt through shared practices.
At the end of the opening event, Gabriel Chaile’s work-oven will be exhibited at GAMeC for the entire fall cycle of the Thinking Like a Mountain project.
YESMINE BEN KHELIL
Bergamo, Orto Botanico Lorenzo Rota / Giardino d’inverno
Rien ne pourra nous separer / Nothing will separate us
Site-specific installation
October 6, 2024 – January 19, 2025
Nel corso di un periodo di residenza a Bergamo, l’artista Yesmine Ben Khelil (Tunisi, 1986) ha avuto l’opportunità di esplorare il patrimonio naturale e culturale della città, e conoscere l’Orto Botanico di Città Alta. Tra le specie qui presenti e profondamente radicate nel paesaggio urbano bergamasco, l’artista ha riconosciuto l’Acanto, pianta erbacea perenne, al contempo seducente e “aggressiva”, coltivabile ma difficile da controllare, che cresce spontaneamente anche a Tunisi, sua città natale.
During a residency period in Bergamo, Yesmine Ben Khelil (Tunis, 1986) had the chance to explore the city’s natural and cultural heritage, and learn about the Botanical Gardens of the Città Alta. Among the species found here and deeply rooted in Bergamo’s urban landscape, the artist recognized the acanthus: a perennial herbaceous plant, at the same time seductive and “fierce,” that also grows wild in Tunis, her hometown.
The contradictions that this plant seems to bring with it and its spread throughout the Mediterranean are the pretext for the artist to draw a parallel with the human dynamics that affect these areas and to reflect on the complex relationship between the southern and northern shores of the Mediterranean Sea.
In the Botanical Winter Garden, along the glazed perimeter of the pavilion, the artist will create a pictorial installation that reflects on the symbolic meanings attributed to the plant, mixing past and present, reality and fiction, history and stories, as well as only apparently distant geographies.
AGOSTINO IACURCI
Bergamo, Orto Botanico Lorenzo Rota / Polveriera Superiore
Dry Days, Tropical Nights
Site-specific installation
October 6, 2024 – January 19, 2025
Agostino Iacurci’s (Foggia, 1986) practice embraces painting, sculpture and drawing: various media that the artist integrates and articulates in layered installations and immersive environments where diverse elements and fragments of reality all come into play.
On this occasion, Iacurci’s increasing focus on environments and the management of space in relation to exhibition staging encounters the volumes of the Polveriera Superiore, the late-sixteenth-century war architecture with a rigorous form to it, now part of the Lorenzo Rota Botanical Gardens in Bergamo. The installation conceived by Iacurci constitutes a site-specific adaptation of the Dry Days, Tropical Nights project presented in 2023 at the historic Largo Treves tower in Milan. Made up of several luminous sculptural elements, the work—produced by glo™ for art—offers a reflection on landscape and its constant transformation over time.
Completing the installation is a sound intervention designed especially for the work by Uruguayan DJ and producer Lechuga Zafiro, whose musical experimentation blends the exploratory essence of club culture with the poetics of sound design, expressing the nuances of Latin American music culture.
At the end of the exhibition period, the installation will become part of GAMeC’s holdings thanks to its donation by the artist.
Works from
The Parliament of Marmots
GAMeC, Spazio Zero
October 6, 2024 – January 19, 2025
GAMeC’s Spazio Zero will host a selection of works exhibited as part of the ninth edition of the Gherdëina Biennial—The Parliament of Marmots—curated by Lorenzo Giusti.
Coming to a close last August 31, the Biennial explored the themes of the wild as a creative dimension, multispeciesism as a trajectory of becoming, and mountains as a meeting ground through the participation of artists from various geographical areas of continental Europe and the Mediterranean, particularly from North Africa and the Middle East.
Through a selection of paintings, sculptures, video works, photographs, and drawings, the GAMeC exhibition path revisits the themes of the exhibition in Val Gardena, focusing in particular on the scope for cultural and political bridging between the Alps and the Mediterranean, deconceptualizing the idea of nature in favor of a narrative, existential dimension of the wild in the age of the “capitalocene.”
Produced over the past few years, the works presented in GAMeC’s Spazio Zero lead us into an extended geological and metamorphic time, in which geographic boundaries are lost and where seas, deserts and mountains rediscover their common origin, while ancient narratives, projected into the reality of our time, define new trajectories of meaning, interweaving reflection on origins with considerations on possible new forms of existence and cohabitation.
Artists on show: Talar Aghbashian, Alex Ayed, Ismaïl Bahri, Yesmine Ben Khelil, Nadim Choufi, Elmas Deniz, Esraa Elfeky, Andro Eradze, Marianne Fahmy, Daniele Genadry, Shuruq Harb, Katia Kameli, Laurent Le Deunff, Janis Rafa.
The program will be promoted and narrated in the online magazine that accompanies Thinking Like a Mountain, which brings together interviews with the artists along with critical texts and in-depth content related to the themes addressed by the projects.
Simultaneously, the video work En Ausencia by Caterina Erica Shanta, selected by GAMeC for the sixteenth edition of the Artists’ Film International—the traveling film program curated and presented collectively by fifteen international contemporary art institutions—will be presented.
The Artists’ Film International 2024 network is dedicated to the work of artists who explore the languages of the moving image. The program will run for 300 days with exhibitions, screenings, and public programs spread over four continents. For this edition, GAMeC and the other partners have commissioned or selected recent films by filmmakers who have responded to the theme of “solidarity.” Viewing solidarity as a collective form of resistance, union and interdependence, the films presented address the ways in which this is sought and enacted on micro and macro scales, and cultivate radical imageries with the potential to transform our broader collective experience.