AIDS-related art in Italy didn't exist. This exhibition finds it, house by house

A necessary exhibition. It is not little. They almost never are. A huge, old-fashioned, house-to-house search. To open the drawers and see what comes up, after so much pain: of everything.

Vivono. Art and Affects, HIV-AIDS in Italy 1982-1996, curated by the impressive skill of Michele Bartolino, investigates the hidden forms of expression in Italian art (let’s call it that) in the two decades of the 1980s and 1990s. We were apparently not able to produce militant art during that period like that of Nan Goldin or David Wojnarowicz. Or of Hervé Guibert in Paris. Or of course Derek Jarman, in London (and in the house with the garden). 

This was said in the face of the enormity of AIDS deaths in our parts. There was only Pier Vittorio Tondelli’s literary masterpiece, Separate Rooms, there, in the bookstore, to remind us of that endless martyrdom, and that’s it.

Bartolino – who is in his thirties and looks at things from the right distance and is a real LGBTQ+ activist – really went from door to door (also well directed by a few people giving tips, digging into his own meanwhile knowingly asleep memory). And what resulted was an excavation, a coring that brought out of the earth fragments, notebooks, drawings, portraits left there, but not rotten, indeed full of life. Hence, the title.

Mostly poetry, beautiful poetry recited in every way, even visualized ad hoc in Roberto Ortu’s megawall video work that opens the exhibition. Turning behind the wall, and its exposed cables, we understand that we are in front of an exhibition machine of a new kind.

 The signature is Giuseppe Ricupero, who had already worked very well with Bartolino for the Lina Pallotta exhibition two years ago in the same museum. And who is the author of some of the most astonishing installations in recent years (we cite for all the admirable transparent plexiglass solutions imagined for the exhibition of Patrizia Re Rebaudengo’s jewelry at the Braidense Library, last fall).

Ricupero draws a white universe of tripod-board mounts to house the magma of press clippings, magazine covers, micro-reviews themselves, fanzines, flyers, dispatches from desperate associations of relatives, personal notes. An enormity of life bubbling up. And even grief feels as if it is finally evaporating. There are soft, lived-in couches to sit on. Obviously white.  In the whiteness – natural though, almost raw, not synthetic – stand out, as if they were excellent pieces by say Bertrand Lavier, the red fire extinguishers, the cables, the defibrillator box. And nearby we see each time, in the exhibition itinerary, the works of international artists classically related to the AIDS theme (see above), and they are like “footnotes,” as Ricupero says. 

And there is also a whimsical mirror microdiscotheque built for Patrizia Vicinelli’s poems on video.


The collaboration between Bartolino and Ricupero leads to a white magic (not coincidentally) that manages to whisk everything up and shoot it into the sky, purified of the oppression and censorship that shame, generated by a family and collective Catholic unconscious, had produced. One comes out not bent but invigorated. What greater result can we imagine?

 By the way, spinning is further emphasized by the ingenious presence of the Candy washing machine as a sponsor. But it is neither a “washing” nor a washing up. If anything, it is an admirable and often highly amused emulsion.

Respectful but also fascinated by the subjects themselves, which when put all together – still fresh, yet to be discovered (there are too many to list) – remind us of a kind of freedom of path out of the tracks, out of the boxes that intangible capital was preparing for us and into which we would end up hands and feet. This capacity for relief, for sagacious lightening is surely one of the specialties of the host, the director of the Luigi Pecci Center for Contemporary Art, Stefano Collicelli Cagol, as it is felt everywhere and in the permanent collection entrusted to the carpeted hands of Formafantasma. All in the air, as in children’s games, on the trampoline, despite everything. Chapeau.