25 years of contemporary art at the Fondazione Querini Stampalia in Venice, 1997–2022
Conserving the Future is a recently published book that bears witness to 25 years of curating contemporary art in the same place: the Fondazione Querini Stampalia in Venice.
Curated and edited by Chiara Bertola.
The project is supported by the Italian Council (10th edition, 2021), program to promote Italian contemporary art in the world by the Directorate General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture.
25 years: a lengthy period in which the curator Chiara Bertola has seen the metamorphoses and rebirth of this ancient palace thanks to the different visions of the artists projected in its spaces, who have each transformed it into multiple places. Conserving the Future is a program and a work method. Its foundation is the relationship with time, with the past and with history because in each project the historical place becomes a subject that asks to be viewed, recognised and listened to, and then open to dialogue with the present.
Chiara Bertola writes about the place and the work in a single text that covers the site-specific exhibitions between 1997 and 2022: the questions, ideas and discoveries made alongside the artists, experiencing the creative process with them. She defines a curatorial line that lies outside of the usual canonical and consolidated confines, focussing on concepts of “precariousness” and “instability.” The perception of a time that is never concluded, the intuition of hidden possibilities behind established meanings, the search for margins of meaning to be revealed beyond the usual confines thus become the key that opens unexpected poetic worlds. The artists act as ferrymen between these worlds, revealing fractures, inventing connections and showing something that otherwise risked being lost or never seen.
In the book, Chiara Bertola writes: “I have frequently read in interviews with young artistic directors that you should only stay in one place for a few seasons in order to sustain your vision. I have been here for 25 years. I have often reflected on this question, asking myself what the best approach would be. There probably isn’t just one because we all start from different perspectives and experiences. For me, it was a matter of showing that the place was important, and that we had to respect it; it was important to bring in new vitality, inviting artists with the right sensitivity. I knew that it would take considerable time to interweave meaningful relationships. Because it was this, and only this, that was at the heart of the work: to re-establish relationships between distant eras and languages to make new life spring from the works.”
The book, in Italian and English, published by bruno (Venice), contains essays by Chiara Bertola, Boris Groys and Marta Savaris, a wide selection of photos and in-depth analyses related to each of the site-specific exhibitions that have seen 30 artists involved in the past 25 years: Joseph Kosuth, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Giuseppe Caccavale, Lothar Baumgarten, Mauro Sambo, Ilya & Emilia Kabakov, Giulio Paolini, Margarita Andreu, Elisabetta Di Maggio, Remo Salvadori, Kiki Smith, Georges Adéagbo, Stefano Arienti, Maria Morganti, Mariateresa Sartori, Mona Hatoum, Anita Sieff, Marisa Merz, Qiu Zhijie, Haris Epaminonda, Jimmie Durham, Giovanni Anselmo, Roman Opałka, Danh Vō, Isamu Noguchi, Park Seo-Bo. For the Fondo Luigi Ghirri: Yona Friedman/Jean-Baptiste Decavèle, Paolo Icaro, Andrea Zanzotto, Giuseppe Caccavale.
The publishing project is promoted by Fondazione Querini Stampalia (Venice) in collaboration with CCC OD Centre de Création Contemporaine Olivier Debré (Tours) and ifa Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen (Berlin). The project is supported by the Italian Council (10th edition, 2021), program to promote Italian contemporary art in the world by the Directorate General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture.
