Life is something else

CARLA ACCARDI, MIRELLA BENTIVOGLIO, JOSEPH BEUYS, DANIEL BUREN, GEA CASOLARO, MAURIZIO CATTELAN, GIUSEPPE CHIARI, DANIELA COMANI, CLAIRE FONTAINE, KETTY LA ROCCA, LUCIA MARCUCCI, ELISA MONTESSORI, YOKO ONO, CESARE PIETROIUSTI, LAMBERTO PIGNOTTI, VETTOR PISANI, CLOTI RICCIARDI, LUCA VITONE

A selection from Gianni e Giuseppe Garrera’s collection
Curated by Simone Ciglia

Life is something else presents a distinctive focal point of research within Gianni and Giuseppe Garrera’s collection: art when it develops into poetic struggle, need for freedom, disobedience, social intervention and participation.

This exhibition displays a varied set of media, such as posters, flyers, photographs, postcards, books and records realized from the late 1960s to present by Italian or Italy-based artists. Often extra-aesthetic, fast, fragile, light, able to slip through the net of control, these forms allow artists to perform a more profound and courageous action as part of the collective consciousness and awareness about global issues. Operations that are mainly conceived as gifts, not meant for commercial purposes, indifferent to Economy and Accounting.

The exhibition focuses in particular on 1970’s decade, as the phase when change do happen, bearer of revolutionary instances such as feminism and ecologism, and on its legacy in art over the last twenty years.

The urge to give voice to these ideal strains leads to the experimentation of various operational strategies to be applied on public spaces which include leafleting, putting up posters and infiltrating in commercial systems: “Special exemplars of art, poetic acts, many a time on the sidelines, off the comforting and shielding network of museums, exhibitions and galleries, led among men and things, to draw attention, to speak out about their obstinacy to speak, to intensify listening, to spot every form of power and every abuse of power, or just to feel free.

Traces then, signs and signals of freedom, where art becomes able to unravel certainties and conventions, possibly reporting neglected realities of disadvantage.” (Gianni and Giuseppe Garrera)