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Questo articolo è disponibile anche in: Italiano

Daniela Bigi

I can vividly remember the summer when I met Diego Perrone and Christian Frosi, during the unusual journey they undertook throughout Italy to get to know the many experiences that were independently — and very laboriously — keeping the country’s cultural fabric alive. The result was a work, Eroina (2010), but the experiential results, shared with what Renato Leotta was investigating in the meantime, also converged, the following year, in a successful initiative in Turin’s central Quadrilatero district, Artissima Lido. This was one of the most incisive projects of that season, a snapshot of the complexity and vivacity expressed by Italy’s independent scene. It was not a new phenomenon, of course, but the quantitative data with which it presented itself forced a different reading. It drew the perimeter of a crisis even as it identified the shoots of a new habitat.

It is well-established that crucial moments in art can be traced through the history of spaces self-managed by artists, often shared with critics, poets and philosophers. It sometimes happens, however, that some elements of these events end up in the wastebin of news reporting and lose their value; this happens above all with the places that have hosted them, whose symbolic as well as logistical importance for the process of generating ideas goes forgotten.

Today, with the massive proliferation of spaces founded by artists (which for reasons of synthesis I must, unfortunately, separate from the many founded by curators), these places seem to demand greater attention. They lay claim to the indissolubility that has seen them intertwined with people, territories, and programmes.

We find many significant examples in the recent past, but if we so wished, we could turn back as far as the nineteenth century, if not even before that. Narrowing the field, one can arbitrarily pick out a few of them. I am thinking, for example, of the Gruppo Origine, and how important it was — beyond the controversies that accompanied its birth — that those artists (Ballocco, Burri, Capogrossi and Colla) could count on a space in which to organise exhibitions and publish a magazine (Arti Visive). These were the semi-basement rooms in Via Aurora 41, below Colla’s apartment, for a while also housing the projects of L’Age D’Or by Dorazio, Guerrini and Perilli, who in the meantime had lost their book-gallery in Via del Babuino. But I am also reminded of the famous space in Milan’s Via Clerici, where in 1959 Manzoni and Castellani organised the ardent activity of the Azimut gallery and Azimuth review, fulcrums of radical experimentation and theoretical commitment, as well as crucial links between Italian and European research, with exhibitions that were able to give voice to the ferments and the moments of an international feeling. Leaping forward in time, we can recall experiences that took place in the crucial 1970s, such as the Zona space in Florence, founded in 1974 by Masi, Mariotti and Nannucci; Jartrakor, conceived in 1977 in Lombardo’s studio in Rome together with Homberg and Pietroiusti; the Sant’Agata de’ Goti space, also in Rome, created in 1978 on the initiative of Salvatori, Levini and the poet Claudio Damiani; and the Casa degli Artisti, opened in Milan in the same year by Fabro, Nagasawa, Jole De Sanna and others. Then, in the 1990s there were the Milanese spaces in Via Lazzaro Palazzi and Via Fiuggi, the Base adventure in Florence, Opera Paese in Rome, the digital platform Undo.net, and in the rich season of the 2000s, experiences such as Reload and self-managed situations like Cripta747, Gum Studio, MARS, Brown, C.A.R.S., Progetto Diogene, Codalunga, Flip, Bocs, L’A project space and so many others, including travelling projects such as There is no place like home.

The fact is that the creation of independent spaces by artists has always been a necessity — simultaneously both a private and a collective one. In every era it has responded to specific contextual and ideological factors. If we were to try to list some of these, we would realise that, while there are inevitable differences, certain issues recur over the decades, bringing together artists and projects that may be otherwise out of step on this or that issue. But this proximity does not undermine the power of the hypotheses advanced; far from it, it reaffirms their authenticity and inescapability.

Let’s look at some of them: exclusion from institutional circuits, or difficulty in gaining access to them; the need to express one’s own content, often in opposition to previous generations or the current system; the urge to experiment, risk, freely be able to make mistakes; the desire to overcome geographical barriers and cultural provincialism in order to get to grips with more mobile, more open realities; the need to connect to a real public, reaching it on the level of life itself; criticism of authorship and the formulation of alternative responses; denunciation of the rituals of a system that consumes art and artists; management of the work in all its phases, without mediation, from production to exhibition, communication and sale; interest in a past condemned to oblivion and in unrecognised artists; a relationship with territories, investigation of their history, preservation of their memory, and contribution to the interpretation of their needs and to their transformation; the coincidence of political and/or social visions (sometimes of battles); the sharing of a form of artistic thinking or of a specific research orientation; the reuse of abandoned spaces and redefinition of decayed contexts; the construction of a world to which one wants to belong.

We could go on, but this list already provides elements on which basis we could easily draw up a list of spaces emerging in different eras and geographical settings, into the heart of the present (in no particular order and with different characteristics, we could start by mentioning Mucho Mas! and viadellafucina16 in Turin, Flip Project Space in Naples, Massimo in Milan, Display in Parma, Gelateria Sogni di Ghiaccio and Locale Due in Bologna, Toast Project Space at Manifattura Tabacchi in Florence, zolforosso in Venice, and RAVE in Passariano, near Udine).

But it is not so interesting to draw up indexes. Far from it. It is much more important to live all these experiences, today’s as well as the others more remote in time, as they are present, reciprocal, intersecting, probably inextricable. We are in a living, exuberant scene, which self-determines, self-promotes, discusses, in which the past and present find new forms of coexistence and reciprocity. It ought not to be caged, it should not be labelled, tarnished, absorbed…, normalised, institutionalised, codified. One can take a few notes, stop for a few instants, while also being aware that its strength lies precisely in its impregnability, its instability.

One cannot fail to emphasise that in the situation of global disarray in which we find ourselves, signs of life, of provocation, of visionary or raw insight into critical issues once again come from the independent scene. There is a pulsating, pressing, quantitatively surprising landscape of associative forms, collective identities, itinerant projects, research platforms, and educational and exhibition programmes, which is compelled to autonomously make up for the dominant system’s void of meaning. The artists proactively contribute to this landscape with their spaces, contents, groupings, bringing about a transformation that derives from community aggregation, from the assertive repositioning of art in the everyday fabric of existence. In their project-spaces, the artists are responding “creatively” to the tangle of global issues that has precarised consciences and numbed minds, and are simultaneously reacting to the vacuity in which the art world finds itself.

It’s not only that. Let’s think of Rome, where the initiatives of the younger generation have finally started multiplying again. Apart from a few more central spaces (Castro in Trastevere, Panetteria Atomica in Parione, Porto Simpatica in the Portuense district), most have nestled in the eastern part of the city, between historical peripheries (Numero Cromatico and Ombrelloni in San Lorenzo, Paese Fortuna in the former Lanificio Luciani in Via di Pietralata) and later in outer peripheries, often even meaning problematic ones (such as Spazio In Situ in Tor Bella Monaca and Condotto48 in Torre Angela). In many cases there is an explicit search for a relationship with the territory, digging into its history, reinforcing the memory (Off1c1na in Quadraro); other times the connection arises within the artisanal and commercial network that is involved in the production of the works, the staging of exhibitions, and putting events together (Post Ex at Centocelle). Often these are studios shared by several authors (Spaziomensa, but also most other spaces), who choose to reserve an exhibition area, opening it up to a public that they have in the meantime reached and won the loyalty of. Around the design and activity that takes shape in this “public” area of the studio, we experience the possibility of making community, of feeling community, a condition that the neoliberal redesign of the world has gradually expunged from the relational framework.

Issues addressed in the hot years of social revolt are returning to the table, albeit not always in a programmatic way — starting with the emergencies in the peripheries, be they urban, geographical or existential.

The historic centres and urban peripheries are taking on new semantic definitions from below, also embracing the rhythms, forms and modes of artistic work (from MRZB and Bastione in Turin, to Spazio Serra, Edicola Radetzky, Brace Brace in Milan). The battle to overcome the concept, or perhaps we would better say, condition, of the geographical periphery — which, despite the best intentions, the art world has not yet managed to eschew — owes to these spaces and to their interdisciplinary programmes (the Cherimus and Montecristo project in Sardinia; SenzaBagno, Soyuz, Ultrastudio in Pescara; Like a Little Disaster, Progetto, Spazio Su, PIA in Apulia; L’Ascensore, La Siringe, Parentesi Tonde, Spazio Rivoluzione, Von Holden Studio in Palermo). If many areas are regaining a position in the contemporary art scene, it is because these project-spaces are not only working to connect the historical, artistic, artisan and natural heritage of individual territories with the global scene, but also because they are fighting to give the geographical peripheries a credibility that goes beyond the dimension of tourism, aiming at the recognition of the cultural identity of the present.

The spaces mentioned here are just a few of the very many which are active nationwide, and they should be considered simply as a starting point for us to set out some coordinates. The panorama of reference is far broader and richer, and deserves — as is indeed happening, from many quarters — to be explored in all its ins and outs, in its full scope.

In concluding, however, I cannot fail to mention a few experiences that, although not founded by artists — or rather, often founded by curators or other figures, with activities that are not exclusively exhibition-based — are not just closely connected to this scene, but are helping to enhance and strengthen it. Such are the cases of Almanac Inn, Treti Galaxie, Recontemporary and Osservatorio Futura in Turin; Il Colorificio, Spazio Gamma, co_atto, Mega, Siliqoon, Altalena in Milan; Spazio Volta and luogo_e in Bergamo; Condylura and Xing in Bologna; Tarsia in Naples; Istituto Sicilia and Balloon Project in Catania; and Incurva in Favignana.

*The suggestion of the “happy way” comes from one of the interviews (Diego Miguel Mirabella, Paese Fortuna) featured in a book that offers a good documentation of the current Roman scene: VERA. Roma, 8 spazi, 54 studi, with texts by Damiana Leoni, Giuseppe Armogida, Giulio Cederna, Nicola Zingaretti, conversations edited by Emma Rosi, photographs by Eleonora Cerri Pecorella, Mohamed Keita, Salvatore Nuzzi, Marta Scotti, produced by Dli — Damiana Leoni Invita, Quodlibet, 2022.