BARRIERA UNINSTITUTE is the aftershow, a critical inventory of materials documenting the seventeen years of activity at BARRIERA, a contemporary art space founded in 2007 in Turin. This publication seeks to engage with the broader debate surrounding the creation of 'institutional' archives within the fluid practices of contemporary art. How can we envision the future by reflecting on the past? And what role do the archive and the act of archiving play for an institution in this process?
The prefix UN in BARRIERA UNINSTITUTE signifies a re-examination of the status of an entity and a space, evoking the concept of a 'para-institution,' 'quasi-institution,' or 'non-institution.' Its purpose is to encourage the organization to continually recalibrate itself around new projects and programming choices, always moving toward more experimental and dialogical forms.
Rather than emphasizing the artwork, the exhibition as a product, or the collection as heritage, the book focuses on so-called 'printed matter'-ephem-eral, carefully crafted materials that have promoted and supported both exhibition and workshop projects. These include exhibition catalogs, invitations, gallery texts, postcards, leaflets, and booklets. Following this predominantly visual, asynchronous, and 'eccentric' documentary section, the book organizes an index with the events, exhibitions, catalogues, and artists who have passed through BARRIERA's space.

Inizio fine. Rotondo. Tutte le cose del mondo (Beginning, End. Round. All Things of the World) is the exhibition that artist Chiara Camoni conceived for the Piano Nobile of Palazzo Collicola on the occasion of the 67th Festival dei Due Mondi. The title, similar to a lullaby or nursey rhyme, anticipates the course of the exhibition, based on circularity, accumulation and reiteration, with the works accompanying the visitor through the rooms in a dreamy and ancestral atmosphere, populated by spirits, divinities, souls, and animals. References to the natural and plant world-a fixed presence in Camoni’s production-meet with the splendour of the rooms of Palazzo Collicola, in an unprecedented dialogue that also features a conspicuous body of works made especially for the exhibition. The Piano Nobile and the artist’s works thus form a special alliance: the relationship with the architectural space is underlined by a long snake made of different materials and media which, ‘crawling’ in all the rooms, marks the path of the exhibition.

This volume on the publications of Ugo La Pietra begins with a long correspondence between the artist and his associates - (Vico Magistretti, Adolfo Natalini, Franco Vaccari, Enzo Mari...) - and aims at making ideas and thoughts circulate by sharing his books. This collection of books constitutes an infinite shelf that goes from 1965 to the present day. From the catan logues of the early radical exhibitions to the 1970s art and design research and experimentation into 'degrees of freedom', 'design reconversions', 'Interior/Exterior' to which we can add 'Tissural Structures'; physical and telematic journeys into the new territories of living. Then there are the volumes that delve into various themes by gathering experiences as well as specific works based on inhabiting places by using random and disruptive actions. A book is in fact not only the best medium for transcribing design and meta-project proposals, but also the starting point for Ugo La Pietra's radical theories and artistic research. The book concludes with his involvement in magazines, perhaps the most experimental and radical aspect of his work that allowed for the development of collaborations, co-designs and the diffusive distribution of counter-projectual and political thought.

Concerto, Roberto Fassone's first solo exhibi-tion in a public museum was created with the idea of retracing the artist's first fifteen years of activity. The exhibition hosts a selection of works-one per room-representative of his singular artistic practice. Like songs that follow one after the other during a concert, the works of Concerto traverse Fassone's entire artistic production, outlining the salient features - as well as the uniqueness-of his poetics, inviting visitors to embrace his ironic, surreal, psychedelic universe.

This book gather Dino Ignani's Dark Portraits collection, a selection of approximately 200 photographs that are part of a much larger series of shots, mostly portraits, taken over the course of five years, and effectively evoke the spirit of the 1989s in the dynamic city of Rome. Ignani's research is a window on the look of the young adults who animated the clubs of the so-called Dark scene in Rome, a scene that was in fact diverse and multifaceted, presenting a range of unprecedented aesthetic and individual declinations that flowed into other moods and styles of the time.

Hesitation is a central concept in Bertolo’s work. L'hésitation (15 June – 8 September 2024) is an anthology exhibition of the work of one of the most influential painters of his generation in Italy in two venues, Atelier Maisenthal and CEAAC di Strasbuourg. The exhibition gives an overview of Bertolo's practice through a vast corpus of works from his main series of paintings of the past two decades. The catalogue, with the same title, includes a number of exhibition views, contains an interview and two essays that shed valuable light on the artist's approach to art and on a major work.
On display at CEAAC Strasbuourg and Atelier Meisenthal, the exhibiton has been concieved by GAM Torno and curated by Elena Volpato and Alice Motarduna, director of CEAAC. The project is supported by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture under the Italian Council program (12th edition, 2023).

We tend to consider childhood as a golden age, a period of life that we should look back on with nostalgia, as a carefree and joyful time. Infinita infanzia (Infinite childhood) offers a reading that goes beyond this cliché. underlining the complexity of childhood, and its confusion of discovery and trauma, play and disobedience, lightness of heart and anxiety. Through a succession of rooms, the works of twenty-three artists address some of the key aspects of childhood: these different voices are held together by a theme that does not refer to any historical time, but that crosses all eras and sensitivities.

Caretto/Spagna are precursors of ecologically engaged artistic practices. They see art as a radical experience of openness, undisciplinated research and involvement with the “things” of the world: the earth, seeds, people, stones, the museum, the river, the quarry, the tree, micro-organisms. Bright Ecologies traces and documents twenty years of their work, structured in research involving care, the transformation of matter, and experiments with form, through practices based on encounter, process, parcticipation and co-authorship.

Costruzione dell'Universo: Artists’ Magazines and Publications after Marcel Duchamp is a research project that gathers artists’ magazines and publications by various artists who were active in the realm of “periodical and irregular” printed matter from the 1950s to the present day, beginning with of the work of the visionary artist Marcel Duchamp. This significant and hitherto overlooked sector of artistic production explores the dimension of the newspaper and magazine as an artistic medium. The selection includes extremely rare, a-periodic, and extraordinary printed items, “sensitive” publications in which the artist first handedly draws and designs the cover, the inner pages, the image sequence, or conceives the overall form of the object as a unique, yet replicable work. The publication in this context is sometimes transformed into an open and collective container, capable of engaging and coordinating multiple artists in the same layout or across different issues. The title “Construction of the Universe” points out to the fundamental and pioneering role of the early 20th-century avant-garde movement, referencing the 1915 Manifesto “Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe”, the notorious artistic manifesto that was initially released as a flyer and resembled newspaper layout. The 1950s (when our research for this book began) saw a significant rise of a utopian perspective in which artists, finally liberated from the existential weight of world conflicts, often envisioned the creation of a new society, free of relics and debris, made of travelling architectures and wide open spaces, new languages, and characterized by a deep longing for emptiness, a thrust toward the brightness of the future and the cosmos.

Alessandro Saturno lives the landscape through the body, his memory and his experience, transposing trhough painting the concept of paesagire (landscape-action) that Andrea Zanzotto introduced in his poetry. The poet’s harsh struggle against a progresso scorsoio (‘sliding progress’) shows us the landscape as an essential condition for life and art. The poet described the landscape of his childhood, which reflected his relationship with his father and was a crucial influence in his developement as a man. The same goes for Saturno, with Naples and its sea becoming the ‘threshold’ of his works: a passage to a world that is real and ideal at the same time; a world that serves as both culture and dream; a wordl of the sould after also having been a world of experience; a place you know but do not know what to call. A nameless place.

Da Monterrey a Monteluco, a solo exhibition by Calixto Ramírez, is the result of the Mexican artist’s residency in Spoleto and around monteluco, a hill covered with dense forest that rises to the south-east of the city. During his stay, the artist created a series of works deriving from his direct contact with the natural landscape in this location. The exhibition is a tribute to Monteluco itself: to the strenght of nature – sometimes enveloping or overwhelming, sometimes more calm and measured – and to the relationship between the elements of the landscape and the artist’s ability to interpret it, as he interacts with the natural setting in a visceral way, which is always poetic and at times playful.