Via San Tomaso, 53
24121 Bergamo
Italy
On October 3, and on October 5, 2024, the new projects of Thinking Like a Mountain, the two-year exhibition program promoted by GAMeC, will open to the public.
The new cycle of events this fall features Marta Cuscunà, Gabriel Chaile, Yesmine Ben Khelil, and Agostino Iacurci together with the communities of Casnigo, Vertova, and Bergamo.
Marta Cuscunà: Multispecies Alliances. Science Fiction, Feminisms, and More-Than-Human Creatures
Casnigo, Teatro Circolo Fratellanza
October 3, 2024, 9pm
The Art Nouveau theatre in Casnigo will host the performance by Marta Cuscunà (Monfalcone, 1982), an auteur and performer of visual theatre, known for her research that combines environmental and social activism with figure dramaturgy.
The performance brings together the reflections presented in Cuscunà’s recent work on the future of planet Earth exploring the links between species and environments, highlighting the relationships between natural forces and human actions; it chronicles the artist’s imaginary journey across the increasingly blurred boundary separating the natural from the anthropic, through individuality and symbiosis, leading to the end and a possible new beginning.
Gabriel Chaile: Bread Baking Party
Vertova, Ex convento—Circolo degli anziani
October 5, 2024
In Val Seriana, at the Circolo degli anziani in Vertova, the Argentinean artist Gabriel Chaile (San Miguel de Tucumán, 1985) collected testimonies of the traditions linked locally to the production of bread and pasta, with the aim of creating a work-cum-oven capable of celebrating and updating these customs.
On the occasion of a “Bread Baking Party”, the “Michini di San Patrizio”: bread blessed and handed out to the faithful of Vertova until World War I, will be baked in the oven. The tradition of the “Michini” has recently been revived, with production entrusted to a local bakery and distribution at the Sanctuary of Colzate, dedicated to St. Patrick.
Making bread, as well as once more kneading Teedèi—typical noodles from Vertova—takes on a special significance today. It is not just about evoking ancient customs but generating relationships that are rebuilt through shared practices.
At the end of the opening event, Gabriel Chaile’s work-oven will be exhibited at GAMeC for the fall cycle of Thinking Like a Mountain.
Yesmine Ben Khelil: Rien ne pourra nous separer / Nothing will separate us
Bergamo, Botanical Garden
October 6, 2024–January 19, 2025
During a residency period in Bergamo, Yesmine Ben Khelil (Tunis, 1986) had the chance to explore the city’s natural and cultural heritage, and learn about the Botanical Garden of the Città Alta. Among the species found here and deeply rooted in Bergamo’s urban landscape, the artist recognized the acanthus: a perennial herbaceous plant, at the same time seductive and “fierce,” that also grows wild in Tunis, her hometown.
In the Botanical Winter Garden, the artist will create a pictorial installation that reflects on the symbolic meanings attributed to the plant, mixing past and present, reality and fiction, history and stories, as well as only apparently distant geographies.
Agostino Iacurci: Dry Days, Tropical Nights
Bergamo, Botanical Garden
October 6, 2024–January 19, 2025
Agostino Iacurci’s (Foggia, 1986) increasing focus on environments and the management of space in relation to exhibition staging encounters on this occasion the volumes of the Polveriera Superiore, the late-sixteenth-century war architecture with a rigorous form, now part of the Botanical Garden in Bergamo.
The installation constitutes a site-specific adaptation of the project presented in 2023 at the historic Largo Treves tower in Milan. Made up of several luminous sculptural elements, the work—produced by glo™ for art—offers a reflection on landscape and its constant transformation over time.
Completing the installation is a sound intervention designed especially for the work by Uruguayan DJ and producer Lechuga Zafiro.
The installation will become part of GAMeC’s Collection.
The program will be promoted and narrated in the online magazine that accompanies Thinking Like a Mountain, which brings together interviews with the artists along with critical texts and in-depth content related to the themes addressed by the projects.
Simultaneously, the video work En Ausencia by Caterina Erica Shanta, selected by GAMeC for the sixteenth edition of the Artists’ Film International—the traveling film program curated and presented collectively by fifteen international contemporary art institutions—will be presented. For this edition, GAMeC and the other partners have commissioned or selected recent films by filmmakers who have responded to the theme of “solidarity.”
Furthermore, GAMeC’s Spazio Zero will host a selection of works exhibited as part of the ninth edition of the Biennale Gherdëina / The Parliament of Marmots—curated by Lorenzo Giusti—which explored the themes of the wild, multispeciesism, and mountains through the participation of artists from various geographical areas of continental Europe and the Mediterranean, particularly from North Africa and the Middle East. Produced over the past few years, the works presented in Bergamo lead us into an extended geological and metamorphic time, in which geographic boundaries are lost and where seas, deserts and mountains rediscover their common origin, while ancient narratives, projected into the reality of our time, define new trajectories of meaning, interweaving reflection on origins with considerations on possible new forms of existence and cohabitation.
Artists on show: Talar Aghbashian, Alex Ayed, Ismaïl Bahri, Yesmine Ben Khelil, Nadim Choufi, Elmas Deniz, Esraa Elfeky, Andro Eradze, Marianne Fahmy, Daniele Genadry, Shuruq Harb, Katia Kameli, Laurent Le Deunff, Janis Rafa.
“Thinking Like a Mountain” is a project by the GAMeC
Artistic Director: Lorenzo Giusti
Associate Curators: Sara Fumagalli, Marta Papini
Head of Magazine: Valentina Gervasoni
