GAMeC – Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo will hold the At Home Everywhere solo exhibition of Luca Vitone.
This show will be the last stage of a three-part tour planned by GAMeC and the two institutions where the exhibition has previously been held: the Casino Luxembourg and the O.K. Centrum für Gegenwartskunst in Linz. Curated by the directors of the institutions involved – Enrico Lunghi, Martin Sturm and Giacinto Di Pietrantonio – the exhibition is the first of a series of initiatives to raise appreciation of GAMeC’s permanent collection through the mounting of solo shows of the works of artists of the latest generation in the museum’s collection.

The title of the show was given by the artist’s claim that he feels at home wherever he is, in contrast to any existing sentiments of nationalism or xenophobia, whilst his frequent use of maps and plans generates a form of aesthetic anthropology that interweaves culture, sentiment and politics.

The exhibition offers an overview of Vitone’s work since the 1980s from three different angles in each of the three sites it is shown, and illustrates the variety of the means he uses: video, installations, photography, sound and performance. Thirteen works are presented at GAMeC that investigate the idea of belonging in all its aspects: from the standpoints of geography, culture and identity. The concept of place has always been at the centre of Vitone’s poetics and continues to be the object of his analysis that brings together conceptual rigour, poetry, folklore and history. The places present in his art are specific to art – an example of which is given by Galleria Pinta(1988), in which he replicates on a 1:1 scale the gallery in Genoa where his works were exhibited for the first time – or places from his personal past, the formation of his personal identity, or places of cultural nomadism. This is the case for the work Der Umbestimmte Ort, an installation he made on the culture of the Rom people in 1994. In Vitone’s work all the symbols of belonging and sharing – from flags to popular songs – are mingled with examples of material culture, such as cooking, to form a symbolic geography.

The show at GAMeC includes an unusual work commissioned from Vitone for the public spaces in the city of Bergamo. The work is a collage of interviews with migrants who live in Bergamo, and was realized with the collaboration of GAMeC’s Mediatori Museali. During the last week of the exhibition – which coincides with the World Museum Day promoted by ICOM, whose theme this year is “Museums as agents of social change and development” – various points of the city will be animated by a sound installation in which people from various parts of the world describe how they imagine their eventual return home will be. The result is a polyphony of accents like in a modern Odyssey, filled with hopes, memories and notions of the future.

A monograph in three languages (English, German and Italian) will accompany the exhibition, with texts written by Roberto Pinto, Jimena Blázquez, Emanuela De Cecco, Luca Lo Pinto, Alessandro Rabottini and Astrid Wege, as well as by the three curators. The book will also include a conversation between Luca Vitone and Andrea Lissoni.