Aldo Giannotti : Safe and Sound

Safe and Sound by Aldo Giannotti, conceived for MAMbo, is the artist’s first anthological exhibition in an Italian institution, curated by Lorenzo Balbi with the curatorial assistance of Sabrina Samorì.

Supported by the Italian Council, Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity, Italian Ministry of Culture, the exhibition contemplates notions of safety and security considered from different perspectives.

Ranging from the fundamental, existential aspect of safety, to regulations of the social sphere, to the technological impact on the field of security, the exhibition invites visitors to reflect upon their own position towards these concepts.

Regulations, laws, and given behaviour settings of different social contexts provide the content to Giannotti’s confrontation with said notions.

The exhibition welcomes visitors into a space for exercising potential alternatives and challenges them to bend their perception of regulations and their own behaviour and decision-taking processes within deeply embedded structures.

Security is defined as the freedom of danger. Giannotti asks what freedoms we give up in order to obtain our safety and probes the paradoxical nature of this negotiation between freedom and security. Our current reality turns precisely such questions into a daily practice and forces us to find answers collectively. Investigating these topics, the exhibition merges the museum’s microcosm with the broader social environment.

Drawings lie at the core of Giannotti’s artistic practice. However, the activation or realization of such concepts often take shape in the form of installations, performances, video works or the readaptations of spatial structures.

Safe and Sound is partly set up as an intervention on the architectural structure of MAMbo itself in order to rethink the museum space and the way visitors interact with it. The paths created by Giannotti’s structural interventions within the museum take account of the specific nature of the building whilst producing a completely personalized adaptation, which forced the museum institution itself to participate in the reshaping of norms, both conceptually and literally.

Safe and Sound however is not just an intervention on the spatial structure of the building but also a way to explore the network of relations that define a museum experience as such. Starting from an exercise within the parameters of the museum space as a building but also as a social sphere with its inherent behaviour settings, visitors get to outline an alternative significance of the notion of security, which might differ from the one imposed by mediatic communication and political practices.