Five exhibitions in Italy not to be missed this week and why go see them: in Rome, Milan, Bergamo and Turin

Exercising the gaze is an operation necessary both for the project and for the artistic expression. Because looking becomes a tool for interpreting reality and trying to transform it. It serves to understand and imagine. It serves to design and to revolutionize.

Thus from the archives of the architectural studios BBPR, Dardi, Monaco - Luccichenti and Moretti an artistic element emerges, essential to their idea of architecture, as demonstrated by the exhibition dedicated to them at the Maxxi in Rome.

Also in the capital, he has inaugurated a sort of open-air street art museum thanks to the redevelopment of the abandoned traffic policemen's huts: small art installations that modify the vision of the urban fabric to (perhaps) give it a view of the future.

An exhibition at MuFoCo in Cinisello Balsamo is dealing with the landscape understood in the broadest possible way, bringing together new photographic visions of the Italian tradition.

But the Castello di Miradolo is also dealing with it with a beautiful retrospective dedicated to Christo and Jeanne-Claude between experiments and works of land art. Finally, the void in an exhibition near Bergamo: how do you represent the void? First of all, you need to be visionaries.

Why see them: to exercise your gaze, first of all. To reflect on the present and reconsider space as a place to live in, but also as a void necessary to define the landscape, to think of architecture as an artistic form (and vice versa).

Architecture in a workmanlike manner. the poetic and creative relationship between architects and artists in the projects of BBPR, Costantino Dardi, Monaco - Luccichenti, Luigi Moretti, Maxxi, Rome, until October 15

Entering the archives has something of a fairy tale: there are manuscripts, drawings, sketches, thoughts and everything that serves to reveal something about whoever produced the preserved materials, as if a greater dose of intimacy were suddenly allowed in those places.

Thus this exhibition: over 400 pieces including models, documents and drawings, projects, installations, photos and letters tell the worlds of some great architects of the 1900s: the BBPR group, Costantino Dardi, the Vincenzo Monaco - Amedeo Luccichenti studio and Luigi Moretti.

The common thread is the relationship that each of them has established with art, as if to present an inseparable relationship between the two disciplines, indeed, a constant dialogue between architects and artists.

Many names of collaborations: Saul Steinberg, Costantino Nivola, Daniel Buren, Giuseppe Capogrossi, Pietro Consagra, Antonio Corpora, Nino Franchina, Giulio Paolini, Gino Severini, Giuseppe Uncini, and others.

And then with the giants. One example above all: the project by BBPR to exhibit Michelangelo's Pietà Rondanini. At stake were the restoration of the Castello Sforzesco in Milan, damaged by bombing, and Michelangelo's work.

The exhibition itinerary starts from here and winds through four rooms, one for each studio, and concludes again with Michelangelo, this time narrated in a film by Luigi Moretti. Thus an exciting journey is composed in the discovery of a creative and significant working method with respect to the historical context.

Who will like it: dreamers, poets and anyone who believes that architecture rhymes with optimism.

Useful information: Maxxi, via G. Reni 4A, Rome, from Tuesday to Sunday from 11am to 7pm.

Cabin Art - urban regeneration in Rome

There are six artistic interventions involving as many decommissioned local police cages scattered throughout the city, with the aim of regenerating abandoned architecture.

Art and architecture also meet in this open-air exhibition, which proposes the result of an interesting project: reuse.

Reusing urban elements in an artistic key, redesigning boundaries determined by social habits and behaviors, redefining the spaces of the relationship between living and designing, between private and public, between different generations and the stories of the city itself.

Which is told in its changes, using the most disparate means of expression, like a garrison of the forces of order that becomes an installation.

Who will like it: lovers of urban trekking, those who believe in reuse and creative regeneration.

Useful information: there are six works located in different areas of the city. On the website of the municipality of Roma all indications.

Leap into the void. Art beyond matter, Gamec, Bergamo, until May 28

The representation of the void has to do with the dematerialization of matter.

And this exhibition, the last stage of the Trilogy of matter inaugurated in 2018, reflects on the connections between the first experiments centered on the void initiated by the historical avant-garde, the research on flow in the first computerization and the use of new languages and simulated realities today.

The investigation is divided into three thematic areas, Empty, Flow and Simulation. In Vuoto the space of the work becomes representative of the immaterial space, in an unsolvable contradiction: the work dedicated to the void is also its opposite, as in the works of Agostino Bonalumi, those extroflections between empty and full.

Perception becomes the fulcrum of Flusso, the next stage also chronologically in the history of the relationship with matter, significantly influenced by computerization, to then reach Simulation, a recent territory, in which the junction between real and virtual is investigated.

Who will like it: whoever thinks that pauses, emptiness in the middle and the single part in the whole are important in music.

Useful information: GaMec, via S. Tomaso 53, Bergamo, from Monday to Friday from 3pm to 7pm; Saturday and Sunday 10 - 19. Closed on Tuesday.

Read also: Which exhibitions to see in 2023 in Bergamo: GAMeC's interdisciplinary proposals

Landscape after landscape, MuFoCo, Cinisello Balsamo (Milan ) until March 26

The decision to extend this exhibition for another two months is significant. It tells of a tradition of Italian photography linked to the landscape that is also deeply felt in the present.

Indeed, it has changed over time, always proving to be tremendously current, gradually widening the concept of landscape.

Natural, man-made, beautiful, well-kept and comfortable, or abandoned and depressing. Large or narrow, peripheral or central…

After all, man is always at the center of the discussion, even when he is not there: he is the one who watches and he is the one who animates those places or is overwhelmed by them. Here then is that the places compose scenarios to be captured in one shot, but always as a civil work and a tool for understanding society.

This is what Andrea Botto, Claudio Gobbi, Stefano Graziani, Giovanni Hänninen, Sabrina Ragucci, Filippo Romano did between 2007 and 2020.

Who will like it: those who travel constantly, those who love to get lost in urban or natural spaces, those who think that art also has a social value.

Useful information: MuFoCo, Villa Ghirlanda, via Frova 10, Ciisello Balsamo - Milan, open from Wednesday to Friday from 4pm to 7pm; Saturday and Sunday 10 - 19.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude. Projects, Castello di Miradolo, Turin, until April 16

Together, Christo and Jeanne-Claude made a revolution. They have revolutionized the concept of a work of art and that of its creation. They have made themselves known to the whole world for their monumental installations in cities, but also in nature: they have transformed the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, but also the waters of Florida, like many other symbols of human history, always in dialogue with the present.

A little over two years after the death of Christo Vladimirov Javacheff, the Cosso Foundation is dedicating an exhibition to Christo and Jeanne-Claude with over 60 works, including drawings, collages and a large section of photos and videos documenting their work.

From the 5,600 Cubicmeteres Package of documenta IV in Kassel (1968), an inflatable structure in polyethylene about 85 meters high, to The London Mastaba (2018), the monumental work on the Serpentine Lake in Hyde Park made up of 7,506 colored barrels stacked one on another to form a floating truncated pyramid; from Valley Curtain (1972) the 380-meter long sheet that colored the Rifle valley in Colorado orange, to The Floating Piers (2016), the 3-kilometer walkway that in 2016 made over 1 million people walk on the waters of the Lake Iseo.

And then again Surrounded Island (1983), which surrounded eleven islands in Biscayne Bay in Miami with a belt of fuchsia polypropylene, up to the packaging of the Reichstag in Berlin (1995) with silver fabric, there are many works on display.

While a section is also dedicated to discussions with other artists belonging to the Nouveau réalisme and the international Land Art movement. An unprecedented sound installation, curated by the Avant-dernière pensée project, completes the exhibition itinerary.

Who will like it: those who love the works of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, those who want to be amazed and those looking for inspiration.

Useful information: Miradolo Castle, via Cardonata 2, San Secondo di Pinerolo, Turin, from 10 am to 6.30 pm