The GAMeC in Bergamo promotes the first cycle of the 2020 Public Program, the platform of meetings open to the public closely linked to the museum’s exhibition calendar.

The program devised on the occasion of the exhibition Il suono del becco del picchio (The Sound of the Woodpecker Bill), a solo show by Antonio Rovaldi on view in the Vitali Wing of the Carrara Academy of Bergamo from February 13 to May 17, includes workshops, excursions, workshops, screenings, conferences and events involving artists, architects, critics, musicians, and performers.

A precious opportunity to further consolidated collaborations with major institutions of the territory—including the G. Carrara Academy of Fine Arts, Bergamo Film Meeting, ORLANDO. Identità, relazioni, possibilità and Festival Danza Estate—presenting a diverse cultural offer, targeted at various audiences.

The common thread of the programme will be the concept of the margin, interpreted on the basis of various definitions: understood as a physical and mental limit; social prejudice; a real or imaginary threshold to cross, or a geographical boundary to be mapped.

The events will touch transversally on major and current themes such as social inclusion, gender issues, popular traditions and cultures on the edges of the world, to transform Antonio Rovaldi’s experience in New York into a model of investigation of the border, promoting a new awareness of peripheral spaces as “places in which to inscribe tomorrow.”

SCHEDULED EVENTS

Wednesday February 26th 2020 at 7.00 pm at the Fondazione Sozzani, Antonio Rovaldi, in conversation with Francesca Benedetto and Lorenzo Giusti, will present the book “The Sound of the Woodpecker Bill: New York City” published by Humboldt Books. Hosted by Davide Rapp, video-artist, director and cinephile. Antonio Rovaldi, winner of the fifth edition (2019) of the Italian Council, walked in New York City through all five of its symbolic boroughs (Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, The Bronx, Staten Island) exploring their outermost edges.
From that experience came the exhibition promoted by the GAMeC, in Bergamo – The Sound of the Woodpecker Bill – curated by Lorenzo Giusti, Steven Handel and Francesca Benedetto, and the book, which gives us the image of a complex, marginal and unknown New York.
In the book, the exploration with the images of Rovaldi is accompanied by the maps created by Francesca Benedetto and by the contributions of Francesca Berardi, Cecilia Canziani, Anna de Manincor, Claudia Durastanti, Lorenzo Giusti, Steven N. Handel and Mario Maffi.
The Sound of the Woodpecker Bill: New York City is part of Antonio Rovaldi’s project End. Words from the Margins, New York City, with which the artist was awarded the support of the fifth call of the Italian Council, the program promoting Italian contemporary art around the world, held by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity and Urban Regeneration of the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism. The program is promoted by the GAMeC in partnership with Harvard University (Graduate School of Design), the Kunstmuseum of St Gallen, and Magazzino Italian Art in Cold Spring (NY).

On Sunday March 8, on the occasion of International Women’s Day, GAMeC’s Educational Services will promote the event Io non sono margine, io sono confine, which concludes a project led by museum educator and artist Camilla Marinoni. From 10.30 am to 12.30 pm and from 3 pm to 5 pm, seven girls hosted by the Associazione Agathà of Bergamo, which since 2010 has been welcoming teenagers from backgrounds of social hardship, will present visitors to the exhibition Il suono del becco del picchio with an original reading of the photographs on display, based on their personal experiences.

Two appointments are scheduled on the occasion of the 38th edition of the Bergamo Film Meeting, at the Cinema San Marco in Bergamo: on Sunday, March 8, at 3.30 pm, the cinema will host Yes, but remember that the city is a funny place, a film afternoon dedicated to the city of New York, in which the sounds of It’s Just a Brooken Fork, a video by Antonio Rovaldi made up of a montage of photographic images collected by the artist during the many walks carried out between 2015 and 2019, will extend into the live performance Safari by sound designer and musician Massimo Carozzi, creating a sound image of a city which is elastic, interstitial, and both far from and semi-submerged by water.

On Saturday, March 14 at 5.30 pm, there will be a screening of Picó: Un parlante de Africa en America, a documentary by the collective Invernomuto and Jim C. Nedd on the tradition of the Picos: colorful sound systems that animate the festivals of the Atlantic Coast of Colombia. A focus on the role of Colombian port cities, once strategic in the slave trade routes, and which, since the 1960s, have played a key role in the diffusion of cultural products—including West African music—and technological devices that laid the foundations for the culture of the Picos. Through a series of interviews, the protagonists of this tradition explore a multi-faceted phenomenon with dazzling musical and visual aspects, which continues the original path of revolt against colonization.

On Wednesday April 1 at 6 pm, in the Spazio ParolaImmagine at the GAMeC, curator, essayist, and expert lecturer in contemporary photography Francesco Zanot will lead an encounter entitled SUBURBIA: fotografia e margini. Immagini delle periferie e dei sobborghi. Lo spazio dove la città finisce nei progetti dei fotografi contemporanei, in conversation with Alessandra Pioselli, critic, curator and Director of the G. Carrara Academy of Fine Arts.

On April 20, 21 and 24, April Antonio Rovaldi will lead a workshop for the students of the G. Carrara Academy of Fine Arts and open to the public, which will include theoretical insights and excursions to discover territories around the edges of the city of Bergamo and its suburbs. The path as an esthetic practice and the journey around of the margin will therefore be the central themes of the workshop.

On Saturday 9 May, Alessandro Sciarroni, Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement for Dance at the Venice Biennale 2019, will converse with GAMeC Director Lorenzo Giusti during a public meeting to be held at 6.30 pm at the Spazio Servizi Educativi in the GAMeC.

That same day, thanks to the collaboration with the festival ORLANDO. Identità, relazioni, possibilità, now at its seventh edition, and with Festival Danza Estate, in the hall hosting Antonio Rovaldi’s exhibition, the performer will present Save the last dance for me, his latest production. The starting point of the performance is the reappraisal of the ‘polka chinata’, an endangered Emilian dance performed by pairs of men, setting off a whirling journey on the transmission of memory, on the edge between the traditional and the contemporary; a dance on the giddiness of the embrace, evoking the circular movements made by Antonio Rovaldi around the margins of New York. The show will be held in two performances, at 5:30 pm and 8:30 pm.

Collaboration with the ORLANDO festival continues on Sunday, May 17, as part of the celebrations of the Giornata Internazionale dei Musei, which this year revolves around Museums for Equality: Diversity and Inclusion and aims not only to celebrate the diversity of perspectives of which communities and museums are bearers, but to promote tools capable of recognizing and overcoming prejudices related to exhibition choices and stories to tell. On the occasion of the last day of opening, which coincides with the International Day against Homophobia, Transphobia, and Biphobia, the Educational Service of the museum proposes a new way to visit Il suono del becco del picchio, as an exhibition linked to the border as a place of life, resilience, and discovery. Two exceptional guided tours, at 10 am and 11.30 am, will present the exhibition from a point of view that expresses diversity, sexual orientation, and gender identity, capable of activating new reflections and emphasizing how the museum is a polyphonic, inclusive place where each visitor is called upon to take part.