Piccolo Museion – Cubo Garutti. Un racconto

Twenty years after its inauguration, Piccolo Museion – Cubo Garutti, the artistic-exhibition project for the public space of the peripheral Don Bosco neighborhood, is presented in an exhibition at Museion, curated by Frida Carazzato and conceived by Angelika Burtscher and Daniele Lupo (Lungomare).

The large installation on the ground floor of the museum serves as a resting area where one can listen to and rethink the value of public art in the contemporary world, looking to the past as well as the future of an architecture dedicated to those who pass by, through a narrative of the present that currently lives.

The exhibition 

What is public space, and what meanings does it take on when art activates reflection? This homage exhibition serves as a starting point for reflection on the challenges posed by artistic interventions in public spaces within always specific contexts. The Piccolo Museion – Cubo Garutti – is dedicated, as the artist Alberto Garutti states, to “everyone who, passing by here, even for just a moment, will look at it.”

The installation, developed from materials collected over the years and from numerous contemporary voices specifically for the Museion Passage space, is articulated on different levels or narratives, encompassing visual, auditory, and textual content, with the aim of introducing the Cube to the public of Museion and Bolzano from various perspectives. The first level is visual and consists of a series of large-format photographs taken by Roberta Segata. The photos are presented in a nearly monumental height to showcase the Cube and its neighborhood at different times of the day: the gaze is turned outward from the Cube, focusing on the surrounding architectures, reversing the role of the observer and allowing immersion in the space where the Cube is located.

The second level is auditory. This takes the form of short recordings that tell the story of the Cubo through the voices of the artists, associations and local inhabitants who, over the years, have been directly or indirectly involved in the projects created within it. The sound editing was conducted by the artist, Stefano Bernardi.

In the Don Bosco neighborhood, the installation continues in the Cubo Garutti. On three long sheets of paper hanging from the ceiling, there is a text written specifically for this anniversary by the Bolzano writer Maddalena Fingerle. The text invites passersby to listen and imagine that, after all this time, the Piccolo Museion might have something to tell us.