From March 11, 2022 to January 8, 2023, the rooms of the GAMeC will host the third project in the cycle La Collezione Impermanente (The Impermanent Collection): the research, exhibitive and curatorial platform that has valorized the multifaceted nature of the museum’s collection of works since 2018, reflecting on its dynamic and sometimes contradictory character, and endeavoring to use it as tool for triggering memories and engaging the public through the use of innovative exhibition formats.

While the first chapter recounted the constitution and evolution of the Collection, presenting a selection of the main nuclei, and the second placed the museum’s works in dialogue with a group of prestigious works confiscated in Lombardy and managed by the National Agency for the Administration of Confiscated Assets, La Collezione Impermanente #3.0—curated by Sara Fumagalli, Valentina Gervasoni, and A. Fabrizia Previtali—marks the celebrations dedicated to the 30th anniversary of the GAMeC (which opened in 1991) by providing the public with a rich selection of works from the museum’s heritage, created by artists from various generations, from the 1990s up to the present day.

The exhibition constitutes a fluid display which, on the one hand, aims to explore themes that have characterized art history over the last thirty years, starting with works from the Collection organized in a series of thematic displays, with the intention of creating new connections and revealing unexpected contrasts and resonances; while on the other hand, it intends to emphasize impermanence, understood as an opening to new possibilities and future perspectives.

The exhibition also works on temporariness, underlining the non-definitive character of its narratives thanks to cyclical rearrangements of the display throughout the exhibition period, alongside new presentations and interventions by young artists called upon to dialogue with the works to be found in the museum.

In an attempt to rethink the Collection’s organizational policies and in consideration of the project for the new GAMeC that will see the conversion of Bergamo’s Palazzetto dello Sport into new exhibition spaces, La Collezione Impermanente #3.0 starts out from a number of questions that place the role of the visitor and his or her relationship with the museum at the center of the reflection: what kind of dialogue does the museum intend to establish with the public around the collections, understood as a common good and heritage? What experience should be offered and for what purposes? What role should be given to visitors in the presentation and construction of the museum collection?

In order to conceive the museum as a public place of experience and exchange, the exhibition will open a dialogue with visitors, who will be asked to interact with the exhibition project and to play an active role. In fact, visitors will be asked to express their preferences in reference to the works on display: which work they would like to see again and why. Their choices, accompanied by the reasonings made public within the exhibition, will serve as guidelines for the final reorganization of the Collection, before the exhibition closes, in keeping with a shared approach to curatorship that takes the public’s preferences into account.

Along the exhibition path, visitors will be able to stop in areas where they will find literary, musical or cinematographic suggestions evoked by the works on display. Dedicated notebooks will allow the public to enrich the interdisciplinary links through thoughts and suggestions, displayed in order to generate a collective memory that will be absorbed by the museum and restored, in its entirety, at the end of the exhibition.

Therefore, La Collezione Impermanente #3.0 is not just a repository of memories but a living, dynamic, constantly enriching place, open to many new narratives. To this end, four artists from the Italian scene born between the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s—Ruth Beraha, Iva Lulashi, Nicola Martini, and Federico Tosi—will dialogue with the works of GAMeC as witnesses of the present, creating new levels of interaction and contributing to enhance the future of the Collection with newly produced works.

The opening of the exhibition will also provide the first opportunity to present to the visitors of GAMeC four video works by Roberto Fassone, Beatrice Favaretto, Riccardo Giacconi, and Caterina Erica Shanta that are now being added to the Collection.
An edition of the works by the winning artists of the Artists’ Film Italia Recovery Fund has been donated to the museum in order to support an institution in the area most affected in Italy during the early phase of the pandemic. The project Artists’ Film Italia Recovery Fund, conceived and curated by Leonardo Bigazzi and promoted by Lo schermo dell’arte, in fact emerged during the first lockdown to support young artists; financed through a crowdfunding campaign; it has since seen institutions, curators and collectors working in synergy to support the initiative.
The video projections will be hosted in the rooms of GAMeC from March 11 to 20, 2022.

to know more about the exhibition:
latifa echakhch

image:
latifa echakhch
Frame
2010
frame of traditional carpet
photo: Jacopo Menzani