Passo Dopo Passo

Passo Dopo Passo seeks to examine diverse—both historical and contemporary—artworks and artistic practices that reflect on the status of movement, openness and enclosure, fear and expectations. The exhibition is linked to an Italian perspective—that of a country with an intrinsic relationship to questions of migration.

Considering historical precedents, the exhibition draws on several books by Fortunato Depero (b. 1892), an artist and designer affiliated with the Futurist movement. Personal notebooks, manuscripts, and published books reveal the artist’s optimism associated with modernism, his personal transatlantic ambitions, as well as the potential of new social order despite crippling violence within the systemic socio-political ruptures of the 1930s and ’40s.

Shifting ahead to the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s, works by a later generation of Italian artists further the engagement with alternate realities and social spaces. For instance, Salvo’s collection of drawings on stationary paper from different hotels resonates with his research on the Mediterranean landscape as both a place of idealization and refuge, while simultaneously recording the artist’s own movement.

Contemporary practices included in the exhibition advance the engagement with social space, movement and locality. In relation to issues of migration, the vision of the horizon continues to play a central role. The view of the ocean or the mountains in paintings, photographs, and videos, is a visual symbol rich with cultural connotations, revealing the hopes projected by the individual and society, as well as the limits.

Other works point to the constructed limits and borders of space. For instance, Vanessa Alessi’s W-HOLE (2014–ongoing), demarcates the site of the exhibition with a transparent flag fixed atop the roof of the institution—presenting the attempt to delineate space while revoking personal and spatial identities.

While the exhibition is not presented chronologically, it instead promotes these objects in their autonomy and reflects, in part, upon the brief journey of three curatorial residents at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo through Italy.

Artists: Carla Accardi, Vanessa Alessi, Elisa Caldana, Nicoló Degiorgis, Collettivo Fernweh, Fortunato Depero, Cady Noland, Luigi Ontani, Turi Rapisarda, Salvo

Passo Dopo Passo is curated by Tenzing Barshee, Molly Everett, and Dorota Michalska, participants in the 2016 edition of the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Young Curators’ Residency Programme, coordinated by Lorenzo Balbi.

Young Curators’ Residency Programme aims to develop young curators’ intellectual and professional capabilities and to promote Italian contemporary art worldwide. Every year three young foreign curators are invited to Italy for a four-month residency that culminates with an exhibition at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin.

Celebrating 10 years of its Residency for Young Curators, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo promotes the international symposium “Building Bridges: Curatorial Education and Professional Paths” on curatorial practices, training programmes and career opportunities for new generations of curators. The event is organised in collaboration with Compagnia di San Paolo, who supports the Residency programme since its first edition in 2007.

Full programme here.