Fall 2019 Program

The Pecci Center opens the new exhibition season with three projects which address the central sociopolitical issues

“With the program we are announcing today, Centro Pecci confirms its mission as a place of research open to contamination, multiple views and dialogue among several parties. Creation, knowledge and innovation are the objectives our museum has set from the outset. The intention is now to pursue them with a particular focus on the big issues of the day, the ‘seismic forces of contemporaneity,’ in the conviction that art can provide an enlightening reading of them.” –Cristiana Perrella, Director of Centro Pecci

The Missing Planet. Visions and re-visions of “Soviet Times” from the Pecci Center’s and other collections
The Missing Planet is the first of a series of re-stagings of the museum collection, conceived to make it available to the public through theme-based routes, structured as real exhibitions, that further explore its main cores. The guest curator of this chapter is Marco Scotini, who has put together with Stefano Pezzato a “galaxy” of the main artistic researches developed in the former Soviet republics, from Russia to the Baltic, Caucasian and Central Asian provinces, from the 70s to the present day. The project, featuring over 100 artworks of which 50 are from the museum’s collection, starts with the vast corpus of works acquired for the Centro Pecci collection during the seminal exhibitions Contemporary Russian Artists (1990) Progressive Nostalgia (2007) and The End of the World (2016).

The original exhibition design is by the artist Can Altay (Ankara, 1975), employing methods of “appropriation” and the reconfiguration of other people’s work through the use of architectural devices that direct the typical vision of his artistic practice.

Mario Rizzi: Bayt
Bayt (“home” in Arabic) is the first retrospective of the filmmaker Mario Rizzi (Barletta, 1962), which revolves around the trilogy from which the exhibition takes its name. The three films in the trilogy help to provide a sensitive, deep and complex vision of issues such as female identity in the Arab world, the concept of home and uprooting, and the driving forces between innovation and conservation that have traversed and traverse the Mediterranean. Starting with Al Intithar (“The Wait”) in 2013, and continuing with Kauther a year later, the trilogy concluded in 2019 with The Little Lantern.

In addition to the trilogy, the exhibition includes other photo and film productions by Mario Rizzi which trace a path through his career of over 20 years. The project fits in with the Centro Pecci’s attention to topics and artistic practices capable of understanding the current historical moment in its complexity, offering a critical voice that can help to interpret today’s global socio-cultural dynamics, starting with those that run through the city of Prato itself.

Luca Vitone: Romanistan
Romanistan is the story of the journey undertaken by Luca Vitone (Genoa, 1964) to retrace, from Bologna to Chandigar, the route taken by the Roma and Sinti people from northwest India to Italy. Tracing a migration that occurred between the 8th and 14th centuries, the artist explores an interest, namely the Romani culture, which has featured in his work since the 90s.

The journey behind the Romanistan project, which lasted six weeks, started in the city of Bologna, where the presence of Roma people was officially documented for the first time in 1422, and ended in the city of Chandigar in India, passing through Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Greece, Turkey, Georgia, Armenia, Iran, and Pakistan.

25 years after the seminal exhibition linked to this topic at the Galerie Christian Nagel and 42 years after a car journey with his parents from Genoa to the Persian Gulf, Luca Vitone completed an epic and impressive journey in which once again personal memories formed connections with history.

Romanistan and Bayt are winning projects of the 4th edition of the Italian Council (2018), program to promote Italian contemporary art in the world by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity and Urban Regeneration of the Italian Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism.

The Missing Planet was realized thanks to the support of PECCI FILATI spa and PUBLIACQUA spa.