The Garden of Resonances invites visitors to walk among eras that mirror each other, forms that seek each other out, artists separated by centuries yet engaged in intense dialogue, as if history were not a line but an echo, a garden in which every creative gesture still vibrates among the branches of time.

The exhibition offers an innovative dialogue between the works preserved in the storerooms of the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Bologna – many of which are rarely seen by the public – and the research of sixteen contemporary artists active on the Bologna scene. The connections that emerge in the spaces of the Pinacoteca and MAMbo are symbolic and formal resonances, capable of crossing eras, languages and sensibilities.

The “garden” evoked in the title is a cultural and conceptual image: a space of relationships, tensions and harmonies, in which the human and the natural intertwine and mirror each other: ancient bonds that the processes set in motion by the industrial revolution have caused us to lose sight of, but which still echo in our language, starting with the term “culture”, from the Latin colere, “to cultivate”.

An exhibition that invites visitors to question the meaning of the collection, memory and transformation.

Il Giardino delle Risonanze's artists: Josef Albers, Anna Tappari, Giuseppe Maria Crespi, Jean Couy, Cuoghi Corsello, Anton Raphael Mengs, Giorgio Alvise Baffo, Eva Marisaldi, Enrico Serotti, Alessandro Algardi, Francis Bacon, Zapruder, Giorgio De Chirico, Felice Giani, Filippo Scandellari, Daniel Seghers, Erasmus Quellinus Il Giovane, Arianna Zama, Giorgio Morandi, Alessandra Dragoni, Giuseppe De Nittis, Luigi Venturi, Riccardo Baruzzi, Ubaldo Gandolfi, Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Emma Masut, Domenico Maria Viani, Italo Zuffi, Hans Fronius, Fanny & Alexander, Luigi Serra, Paolo Chiasera, Otto Dix, Bruno Munari, Jean Arp, Kurt Regschek, Zimmerfrei, Alessandro Tiarini, Tommaso Silvestroni, Valentino Solmi, Filippo Tappi, Maestro Vpr, Federico Zamboni, Guido Cagnacci, Emidio Clementi, Stefano Pilia, Pablo Picasso, Alberto Savinio, Antonio Muzzi, Enrico Romolo

A particular game is packaged in ‘I due’ (The Two), in which an author and his translator clash and their miserable and admirable deeds are recounted.

An absurd and heated confrontation that germinates and proliferates in a scatological and foul-mouthed mixture: from the outset, they are opposites, yet at the same time inseparable. Two assholes desperately trying to separate, but ending up being each other's shadow, in dizzying duplications and gravitational collapses.

Dedicated by Moresco (with defenceless tenderness) to his French translator Laurent Lombard, the text, as scurrilous as it is metaphysically unrestrained, depicts the two through their relationship, publishing life, life in general and the afterlife, right up to the presence of an unforgettable creator, an arsehole like them, and like them grandiose in the dirty and childishly free setting that stinks and ferments here.

Antonio Moresco was born in Mantua in 1947. He is an internationally renowned author. He has been translated into numerous languages and has established himself as a truly unique author on the national scene. His vast body of work includes novels, essays and plays, notably his trilogy Giochi dell'eternità (Games of Eternity), consisting of Gli esordi (The Beginnings, Feltrinelli, 1998), Canti del caos (Songs of Chaos, Feltrinelli, 2001; 2003; 2009) and Gli increati (Mondadori, 2015). His latest works include Canto di D'Arco (SEM, 2019), Chisciotte (SEM, 2020) and Canto del buio e della luce (Feltrinelli, 2024).

Who were Walter Benjamin and Luigi Pirandello looking for in Sanremo in the 1930s? One took refuge at the Villa Verde guesthouse run by his ex-wife Dora, while the other pursued a dream of love named Marta Abba, owner of a pied-à-terre in the old town. But could Benjamin and Pirandello have met? And what would they have said to each other?

Walter Benjamin, German philosopher, literary critic and sociologist from a Jewish family (Berlin, 1892 – Port Bou, Spain, 1940). His philosophical reflection, marked by a strong anti-systematicity and oriented towards theological themes drawn from the Kabbalistic tradition, was initially focused on language, partly due to his work as a translator. He continued his literary essay writing, but then devoted himself more to aesthetic and sociological issues in art; his most significant contribution in this field is the famous essay Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction) from 1936.

Luigi Pirandello, playwright and novelist (Agrigento, 1867 – Rome, 1936). A highly regarded writer, he revolutionised 20th-century theatre, becoming one of the greatest playwrights of all time. Although inspired by Sicilian Verismo, his work reveals an anguished, relativistic view of life and the world, anticipating definitively modern themes. However, it was theatre that spread his fame far and wide: from his early bourgeois comedies, in his so-called second manner, the drama of being and appearing rose to become a symbol and allegory of existence.

English artist Tony Cragg exhibits ten sculptures that reconnect with the genius loci of the Reggia in a sort of post-modern redefinition of the Baroque and Rococo styles.

After his installation for the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, Tony Cragg returns to Italy to stage an exhibition at the Reggia di Venaria featuring a selection of ten sculptures created between 1997 and 2021. The sculptures by Cragg, one of the world's most acclaimed contemporary British artists, are set within the permanent exhibition space of the Reggia, starting from the Court of Honour, continuing through the Upper Gardens and ending in the interior hall at the head of the Juvarrian Stables.

These large-scale works, crafted from a variety of materials – from bronze to wood, fibreglass to steel – are all characterised by the artist's signature sinuous, undulating lines, which appear to have been modelled on a giant potter's wheel.

Tony Cragg's work analyses the multiple relationships between human beings and the environment. Using a wide selection of materials and sculptural techniques, the artist explores the complex connection between the figure, the object and the landscape, which for Cragg includes both geological and microbiological systems as well as urban and industrial contexts.

Colonial ambitions generated imperial attitudes, theories and practices that remain embedded in botany and all the life sciences. Banu Subramaniam draws on fields as disparate as queer studies, indigenous studies and the biological sciences to explore the labyrinthine history of how colonialism transformed rich and complex plant worlds into biological knowledge. Botany of Empire demonstrates how fundamental theories and practices of botany were shaped and reinforced in favour of colonial rule and its extractive ambitions. We see how the colonisers erased the deep history of plants to create a reductionist system that imposed a Latin-based naming system, drew on the imagined sex lives of European elites to explain plant sexuality, and discussed foreign plants as foreign human beings. Subramanian thus focuses on imagining a more inclusive and capacious field of botany, untethered and decentralised from its origins in histories of racism, slavery and colonialism. This vision harnesses the power of scientific and feminist thought to chart a course towards more socially just experimental biology practices.

Banu Subramaniam is Professor of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Wellesley College. Trained as a plant evolutionary biologist, she writes about social and cultural aspects of science in relation to experimental biology. She is the author of Ghost Stories for Darwin. The Science of Variation and the Politics of Diversity (University of Illinois Press, 2014), Holy Science. The Biopolitics of Hindu Nationalism (University of Washington Press, 2019), Botany of Empire. Plant Worlds and the Scientific Legacies of Colonialism (University of Washington Press, 2024), his current work focuses on the decolonisation of botany, nativism in plant biology and the relationship between science and religious nationalism in India.

It all begins with a trip to Latvia. An aeroplane, a wait, a very long sentence that does not stop, made of images and sounds, of places and thoughts, of uprooting and taking possession of the alien, this sentence that sings while it tells, that sees while it closes its eyes, that takes us with it and never leaves us alone, never behind, never distracted, that however relieves us from the present and invites us to the fun of the journey, of the unexpected encounter, in a Latvia that like a sphere reflects the whole universe on its chrome surface.

Sara Fruner, born in Riva del Garda, graduated in English and specialised in literary translation. She has lived in New York for the last nine years, where she taught Italian at New York University and the Fashion Institute of Technology. Since 2025, she has been living in Florence, where she continues to teach Italian. Her debut novel, L'istante largo (Bollati Boringhieri, 2020 and 2022), which earned her second place in the 2021 Severino Cesari Opera Prima National Prize, was followed by La notte del bene (Bollati Boringhieri, 2022) and La luce laggiù (Neri Pozza, 2025). In poetry, she alternates between volumes in Italian and English: Bitter Bites from Sugar Hills (Bordighera Press, 2018), Lucciole in palmo alla notte (Supernova, 2019), La rossa goletta (Crocetti, 2024). Her articles on cinema, art and literature have appeared in the magazines La Voce di New York, CinematoGraphie, Magazzino 23 and Brick, and since 2024 she has been writing “Cine-gate”, a film review column on the culture page of Gate. Her translations of prose and poetry include works by Dionne Brand, Monique Truong, Sello Duiker, Raj Rao, Marie-Helene Bertino, Jane Hirshfield, and W. S. Merwin. She has been accepted into numerous residencies for writers and translators, including the Bogliasco Foundation, the Emily Harvey Foundation, The Studios of Key West, the Banff Centre for the Arts, Übersetzerhaus Looren, and Casa delle Traduzioni in Rome.