Pensieri fuggitivi is the title of William Kentridge’s exhibition in the Piano Nobile of Palazzo Collicola, presenting a broad selection of works created over the past twenty-five years by the South African artist. Such an extensive time span makes it possible to grasp the depth, coherence, and evolution of Kentridge’s artistic sensibility, offering the public a wide-ranging and articulated view of his practice. Drawings, sculptures, videos, prints, and notebooks come together to form a rich and multifaceted repertoire, with more than fifty works on display.

The title, Pensieri fuggitivi, refers not only to a video included in the exhibition (Fugitive Words), but also to the artist’s conceptual framework: a mode of thinking in constant motion, where nothing is definitive and everything can give rise to unexpected connections.

Exhibition catalogue, Fugitive Thoughts, Palazzo Collicola, 28 June 2025 – 11 January 2026, curated by Saverio Verini.

A few years after the 1968 earthquake, the Istituto Superiore per l'Edilizia Sociale of Rome sent the plan for the total reconstruction of Gibellina Nuova, inspired by the models of the English New Towns. After an initial phase during which mayor Ludovico Corrao invited international architects and artists to participate in the city redesign, in the late 1970s a group of professors from the University of Palermo organised a series of seminars and workshops to reflect on the reconstruction. At that moment, Oswald Mathias Ungers was called to design the central area of the settle-ment, which was still undefined. His Civic Centre proposal reflected on the relationship between built and public space, between city, monument and history. However, little was real-ised, not really with rigour. The hotel, started on the edge of town, was soon abandoned. The artisanal district was freely adjusted to the needs of local activities. The housing along Viale Belice was built but its public walkway leads nowhere. What remains of the block of houses that was supposed to enclose a garden is a huge dry meadow and a small lake, ironically the element most faithful to the original project, in the centre of the town.

Attraverso una gestualità spontanea e intensa, Montessori esplora visioni interiori, sospese tra realtà e immaginazione, in un dialogo costante con il mondo del sogno. Come nei sogni, l’artista torna ciclicamente su temi ricorrenti: natura, letteratura, arte, riletti attraverso un linguaggio personale e poetico. Simbolo chiave dell’esposizione è il vortice, figura archetipica che incarna trasformazione, rinascita e discesa nelle profondità dell’essere. Una spirale vitale, che per Montessori rappresenta la struttura intima dell’identità umana, una metafora del DNA. Le carte, medium prediletto da Montessori, rivelano la delicatezza e al tempo stesso la densità del suo pensiero. Un materiale “umile” che diventa strumento di introspezione. Le tele, più strutturate e stratificate, esprimono un’urgenza materica, un bisogno di approfondimento e sedimentazione. Segno sogno è dunque un viaggio nella poetica di Elisa Montessori, un invito a immergersi in un universo dove ogni opera è una domanda aperta, un richiamo alla riflessione, una possibilità di riconoscimento.
Catalogo della mostra Segno Sogno, a cura di Stefano Verri, 14 giugno – 28 settembre 2025, Palazzo Bisaccioni, Jesi.

Bolletti/no is a journal of experimental didactics published for each solstice and equinox over a period of 3 years, between 2020 and 2023, for a total of 12 issues + a final extra issue. It was created to give a concrete printed form to a series of practices developed by Virginia Di Lazzaro and Giulia Filippi during their shared workshop activities with children and adults. Over these three years, the artists and authors have reflected on the world around them, accompanied by characters, stories, artistic practices and techniques, materials, matter, the seasons, and all the people and living beings they've encountered. Bolletti/no was created with the intention of being a tool that sparks action and inspiration. Each issue invites the reader to experience the world around them through exercises of observation, experimentation, collection, and storytelling, allowing them to build a small collection of "domestic art". Bolletti/no has experimented not only with content but also with distribution methods over the years: initially distributed individually, then as a subscription sent directly to the homes of those who chose to support the project, it now becomes a box set containing all 12 issues, plus the special issue and the related posters.

This book collects photographs taken by Pietro Perotti – a worker at the Fiat Mirafiori plant in Turin – who, starting in 1985, created protest writings and drawings in the factory toilets to oppose the oppressive policies of the company and of the FIAT boss Agnelli. This widespread and personal form of protest followed years of activism in class struggles and strikes during the previous decade.

Perotti systematically photographed the drawings and writings, secretly bringing a camera into the factory and timing the shutter release with the automated toilet flushes to muffle the sound of the click.

Perotti’s story starts at a precise moment in time, at the beginning of 1985, and in a precise location, the FIAT factory at Torino Mirafiori, transporting the reader back in time. Assembled for the very first time in this volume, here is a working-class story that was first scrawled and scribbled in the large factory’s toilet cubicles, and then docu­mented on photographic paper.

Sound Chapters: Voices of Sound Experimentation in Italy is a hybrid volume dedicated to the Italian auditory arts scene. Using textuality as an intimate form of sound, the book reflects the texture of the voice in writing. Words function like ventril-oquy, imitating remote vocalities. In the chapters, short stories, essays, research papers, poems, scores and songs sound without hierarchy, emphasising plurality. By weaving together contri-butions that elude conventional modes of writing, the project amplifies a fluid and inclusive bibliography on the subject. Le autrici e gli autori di questo libro sono artiste, ricercatrici, curatrici e organizzatrici culturali che, negli ultimi dieci anni, hanno avuto un ruolo attivo nella scena sperimentale della arti sonore in Italia. The book is not only a theoretical reflection on the Italian soul scene but also a catalogue for Mezz'aria. La strana apertura della ricerca sonora, a collective project that explored sound research within the exhibition setting of the Museo del Novecento e del Contemporaneo di Palazzo Fabroni a Pistoia (20.05-15.08 2023). Artists and researchers: Marco Baldini, Elena Biserna, Luca Boffi, Andrea Borghi, Mattia Capelletti, Francesco Cavaliere, Stefano De Ponti, Nicola Di Croce, Giulia Deval, Alessandra Eramo, Paolo Gabriotti, Giulia Gonfiantini, Renato Grieco, Riccardo La Foresta, Enrico Malatesta, Chiara Pavolucci, Leandro Pisano, Diana Lola Posani, Radio Papesse, Francesco Toninelli.

Senza mai sfiorire. Densità e leggerezza nella scultura italiana contemporanea Without ever fading. Density and lightness in contemporary Italian sculpture) presents to the public a selection of works of artists born in the 1970s. The exhibition path combines different interpretations of sculptural language: a survey of the trends and developments of a medium in continuous transformation, capable of constantly challenging itself and its assumptions, renewing and regenerating itself over time. The set-up, characterised by one work per room, is designed to enhance the singularity of each work and create an intimate dialogue between the works and Palazzo Collicola's Piano Nobile. The age factor, together with the reflection on the plastic dimension, is not the only distinctive element. In fact, all the works exhibited seem to share a specific internal tension: in each work, references to tradition coexist with elements that seem to contradict it, a sense of gravity and lightness, organic materials and others of industrial origin, duration and ephemeral character.

Eternity, her responsive body and other stories, solo show by Petra Feriancová, hosted in the Noble Floor of Palazzo Collicola, already suggests the narrative nature of the project, because of its title. Here, the artist reinterpreting the spaces and the features of this old dwelling, through a series of interventions characterized by an almost mimetic quality, conceived for this occasion. The exhibition design includes a technically heterogeneous selection of works, embracing sculptures, installations and sound works, in order to make them dialogue, in contrast or in harmony, with the rooms composing the noble residence and the historical artefacts preserved there. According to this approach, works belonging to different periods and languages, not caring about chronological or stylistic hierarchies, coexist together, giving rise to new associations of contents and directions of meaning, perceptible just in backlight, emerging thanks to the contribution given by the artist. The result is a unified narrative, dealing, timed along the rooms of the flat, with topics such as metamorphosis, the notion of memory, time, the concept of interpretation and that one of archive, always been the focus of the artistic practice by Feriancová.

The collection on mutual aid societies and workers' associations created by Giovanna Moro (1920-2012) testifies to the fight for decent work and the right to education for all. The birth of these societies was an important milestone in the history of labor movements and a sign of awareness of the power of collective action. The collector's decision to donate the collection to a public institution that ensures its wide accessibility has enriched the existing documentation at the Library of Modern and Contemporary History in Rome.

TERRENO. Tracce del disponibile quotidiano is a multidisciplinary exhibition that relates materiality and memory, bringing together cultural traditions, historical documents and everyday artistic practices, generating new collective imaginaries. The volume brings together a range of images, essays and reprints, offering a unique dialogue between artistic, scientific, and social disciplines. Inspired by Gianni Celati “accessible everyday”, the exhibition takes the visitor on a journey dedicated to the scenes, landscapes, and gestures from the everyday world that often go unnoticed and are rediscovered, grasping their value and revealing new and possible meanings. The rooms of the museum are filled with works of art from the MAXXI Collections, artefacts and photographic documents from the Museum of Civilisations in Rome, editorial materials, design and architectural projects, and a new sound production. This is how fluid and changeable stories and tales are born, joining ordinariness and tradition, historical documentation and invention, in a strong bond with the territory and its artistic and creative community. With: Arjun Appadurai, Franco Assetto, Amedeo Aureli, Yto Barrada, Gianfranco Baruchello and Henry Martin, David Blamey, Diego Carpitella, Luciano Caruso and Giuliano Longone, Cavart, Giorgio Ceretti, Pietro Derossi e Riccardo Rosso, Continuum, Mario Cresci, Enrico Crispolti, Clémentine Deliss, Georges Didi-Huberman, Claudia Durastanti, Francesco De Melis, Formafantasma, Francesco Garnier Valletti, Luigi Ghirri, Ezio Gribaudo, Illustrazione Abruzzese, Tim Ingold, Enzo Mari, Ana Mendieta, Bruno Munari, Ramona Ponzini, Quarto di Santa Giusta Centro Multimediale, Moira Ricci, Annabella Rossi, Bernard Rudofsky, Marco Schiavone, Shimabuku, Alessandra Spranzi, Susan Sontag, Superstudio, Luca Trevisani, Nico Vascellari, Andrea Viliani, Luca Vitone and all the creators of artefacts belonging to the Collections of Popular Arts and Traditions of the Museum of Civilisations. 

He Failed to Save The One he Loved Most is not just the title of an exhibition that opened in the spring of 2021 at the Albumarte space in Rome. Rather, it adds another dimension, bringing greater depth to the original idea of the exhibition itself and Iulia Ghiță's artistic journey as a whole. Through the artist's works and the valuable contributions of the authors invited to write, the publication becomes a reflection on complex themes and archetypal concepts such as sacrifice, humiliation and death, exploring their ambiguous nature and creating a reflection on contrasting aspects of the human experience.

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.

The volume Emerging Collections: The Experience of Giovane Fotografia Italiana | Premio Luigi Ghirri, produced on the occasion of the acquisition of the winning works of the Prize—made possible by funding from Strategia Fotografia 2023—reconstructs the experience of Giovane Fotografia Italiana within a broader perspective that touches on archives, public collections, and support for emerging art. The publication offers an opportunity to reflect on the value of public collections, particularly those of emerging artists, while also providing an overview of other projects, potentials, and best practices in the field.

Over more than ten years, Giovane Fotografia Italiana is re-examined through its archive, which has been developing since the first edition in 2012. This archive presents a wide and composite collection of data, information, artworks, experiences, and exhibition projects—materials that over the years have stimulated further developments. The archival dimension allows not only a reconstruction of the project’s complexity but also highlights the changes that have occurred over time, which have distinguished Giovane Fotografia Italiana for its strong experimental character.

The volume opens with essays by Cristina Baldacci (professor, contemporary art historian and critic) and Elisa Medde (art historian specializing in photography and visual culture), who has repeatedly analyzed the relationship between publishing and museum institutions, between image, communication, and power structures. The second part features essays by Ilaria Campioli and Daniele De Luigi, curators of Giovane Fotografia Italiana, as well as contributions from Roberta Conforti, Monica Leoni, Daniele Meglioli, and Francesca Monti, who examine various aspects of the project and its archive—including the collection, the website, exhibition projects, and exchanges with artists—from different perspectives.

The publication was made possible by funding from Strategia Fotografia 2023, a program promoted by the Directorate General for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture. The same funding allowed for the acquisition of the works of the winners of Giovane Fotografia Italiana (from 2022, Premio Luigi Ghirri), including Marina Caneve (2018), Iacopo Pasqui (2019), Vaste Programme (2021), Giulia Parlato (2022), and Giulia Mangione (2023), whose works are now part of the public collections of the Fototeca at the Biblioteca Panizzi.

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.

La sostanza agitata exhibits the work of eleven artists under age 35 who share an interest in installational and plastic aspects, as well as the interaction between the work and the context in which it is displayed. The title refers to the experimental and hardly classifiable nature of the works on display, the diversity of the materials used, and an approach that declares an explicitly sculptural derivation between lightness and monumentality, irony, and issues that reflect the social changes in place. La sostanza agitata wishes to distinguish itself as a construction site of proposals, some of which are unpublished and made on site, a laboratory open to different perspectives: each artist is assigned a room, allowing the visitor to immerse themselves in the individual poetic, between organic and industrial materials, verticality and horizontality, movement and stillness, works formed from unique pieces and others that tend to spread up to a real multiplication. Catalog of the exhibition La sostanza agitata, a curated by Saverio Verini, artists: Francesco Bendini, Paolo Bufalini, Lucia Cantò, Giovanni de Cataldo, Binta Diaw, Bekhbaatar Enkhtur, Roberta Folliero, Jacopo Martinotti, Lulù Nuti, Giulia Poppi, Davide Sgambaro, 24 June – 16 October2023, Palazzo Collicola, Spoleto (PG).