MOUNTAIN LABORATORY

In collaboration with:
A Pick Gallery / Galleria Franco Noero / Mucho Mas! / Noire Gallery / Norma Mangione Gallery / Peola Simondi Arte Contemporanea /
Giorgio Persano / Photo & Contemporary / Societé Interludio / Tucci Russo Studio per l’Arte Contemporanea

The Laboratorio Montagna exhibition is part of a process of observation and representation of contemporary mountains that the museum initiated in 2018. A process that has taken shape through the use of languages, tools and interlocutors from multidisciplinary fields, as a response to the complexity that characterizes the mountain territories of the present.

The project – set up on the ground floor and on the panoramic terrace – moves around the dimension of becoming, in which museum, city and mountain areas are configured as entities linked by an increasingly evident relationship of interdependence.

A dynamic that ties in with what happens in the macro place we define as mountain, which is also a mosaic and a workshop, an emblem of opportunity and criticality, a place sensitive to the social, economic and environmental changes of the time, which in parallel changes “from periphery to laboratory for development models that aspire to combine environmental sustainability and social well-being […] which becomes the center again, the fulcrum of a series of return processes that question the idea that it is […] always and necessarily a disadvantaged area” (M. Varotto).

The word laboratory that appears in the title describes the approach taken by the museum in interpreting the process of transforming its identity and vision.  A museum that goes out of its boundaries, as a choice to build its future, relationship with the city, communities and collective instances.

The exhibition project springs from a dialogue with the Turin art scene. The construction of the narrative, born as a result of a path of interaction with ten galleries in Turin, presents the works of eleven artists whose research explores the universe of mountains according to different formal modes and conceptual approaches.

A modality experimented on the occasion of the exhibition Ecophilia. Exploring Otherness, Developing Empathy – presented at the Museum between 2021 and 2022 – when the choice of the six artists involved stemmed from a preliminary mapping of the creative figures active in the city.

Thanks to the involvement of Annibale Salsa, anthropologist, and Andrea Membretti, sociologist, the exhibition narrative is accompanied by textual content and insights that offer a multifocal account of the mountain of the present.

A series of video contributions – made with the involvement of Dario Castellino, Valeria Cottino, Luca Mercalli, Maria Molinari, Daniele Regis, and Opher Thomson – expands the geography of references to mountain themes on the social, environmental, anthropological, and architectural levels.