It all began in September 364 AD, with what the Greek governess Baubo dared to tell the Roman emperor Flavius Valentinianus before going to sleep. Between imperial Milan and the mysteries of Eleusis, while the Germans were being fought off at the border, in the feverish emperor's room, stories dedicated to the mysteries of the goddess Demeter and Persephone, Mother and Daughter, stories that are still unknown, were whispered. Francesca Sensini, opting for the ancestral tone that moves the act of laughter, brings its resonances to deeply sabotage our vision of the Western epochal transition from paganism to Christianity, helping us to see our cultural and anthropological continuity with the primordial world of myths from a different perspective. The combination of the feminine generative principle, universal fertility, and the tension that emerges between the darkness of power and the brightness of laughter are actions that the author performs with skilful simplicity and lightness, masterfully suggesting a fundamental and very complex shift with far-reaching emotional and cultural effects.

Francesca Sensini, writer, lecturer and researcher, is currently an associate professor of Italian Studies at the Université Côte d'Azur in Nice. Trained as a classicist, she devotes most of her research to Italian literature between the 19th and 20th centuries, studies of classical reception and gender studies in literature. Born in Genoa in 1974, after graduating in Classical Literature, she moved to France, where she continued her studies, obtaining a PhD in Italian Studies at the Paris-Sorbonne University and teaching at various universities, living first in Paris for ten years and then in Nice. Her publications include La guerra è stupida (Gammarò, 2020), Pascoli maledetto (Il Nuovo Melangolo, 2020), La lingua degli dei. L'amore per il greco antico e moderno (Il Nuovo Melangolo, 2021), La Trama di Elena (Ponte alle Grazie, 2023) and Afrodite viaggia leggera (Ponte alle Grazie, 2024).

The volume originates from the exhibition of the same name that the Fondazione Merz, in collaboration with the MAO Museum of Oriental Art in Turin, dedicated to the Franco-Moroccan artist Yto Barrada, winner of the fourth edition of the Mario Merz Prize. The exhibition, which ran from 20 February to 18 May 2025, curated by Davide Quadrio with Giulia Turconi, referred in its title to the agricultural practice of removing wilted flowers from a plant to stimulate its growth. Taking up the metaphor of a return to the essential in order to release new energies, the exhibition featured the most representative works of Yto Barrada's artistic research, including films, sculptures, installations, textiles and prints, some of which were created especially for the occasion. The book includes an introduction by Beatrice Merz, texts by the exhibition curators and an essay by Myriam Ben Salah, independent curator who will curate the French Pavilion at the next Venice Art Biennale dedicated to Yto Barrada. The volume contains a rich collection of images of the exhibition.

Yto Barrada, born in Paris in 1971, lives and works between Tangier and New York. Through an archival approach and connected to public actions, Barrada's installations reveal lesser-known stories, reveal the prevalence of fiction in institutionalised narratives, and celebrate everyday forms of claiming autonomy. Her work includes different media such as photography, film, sculpture, installation, and engraving. She is the founder of the Cinémathèque de Tanger, a cultural centre that has become a historic institution bringing together the Moroccan community to celebrate local and international cinema. Yto Barrada has won numerous awards including the 2019 Roy R. Neuberger Prize, the 2016 Tiger Award and a nomination for the 2016 Prix Marcel Duchamp in Paris, the 2015 Abraaj Group Art Prize and the 2011 Deutsche Guggenheim Artist of the Year award. Barrada's work is included in the collections of major museums around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum (New York), Tate Modern (London), MoMA (New York), Guggenheim (Berlin), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Museo de Sao Paolo and the Venice Biennales 2007 and 2011.

Luigi Mainolfi (Rotondi, Feb. 16, 1948) is an Italian sculptor who is internationally known as one of the main representatives of the so-called post-conceptual sculpture, which was imposed at the beginning of the 1980s.

Over twenty sculptures by Luigi Mainolfi, created between 1978 and 2020, were housed in the Court of Honor, the Grand Parterre of the Gardens of the Reggia di Venaria and the Chapel of St. Hubert in the summer of 2024.

From the zoomorphic-themed sculptures comes the title, Bestiary, which refers to medieval illuminated codices illustrated with real and imaginary animals, but also to the fantastic zoology of Jorge Luis Borges. This is a recurring theme in Mainolfi, already the author of Bestiario del Sole with its polychrome metamorphic creatures between myth and fairy tale. Mainolfi's Bestiary settles into the architecture, invades the green geometries of the gardens and comes into contact with the living presence of fawns and other wildlife in the park and surrounding forest. Fantastic and mutant creatures, in dialogue with the fairy tales and modeled and painted animals of the Reggia di Venaria, entirely dedicated in the 17th century to the myth of Diana, goddess of the moon and the hunt.

Luigi Mainolfi (1948) practices sculpture made with natural materials such as terracotta, plaster, wood, lava stone, or bronze castings, elaborating his own personal language through which he evokes the popular cultures of our country.

Exhibition: Mainolfi. Sculptures. Bestiary
La Venaria Reale, Venaria, Turin, 21th June 2024 - 10th November 2024

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

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.

Approximately where the 44th parallel North intersects the 8th meridian East, there is a place of memory that Marco Drago brings to life on the page with masterly skill. Drago summons his human beings into a kind of living nativity scene that has a Brewery instead of the Child. As much as this author's writing has an immediate grasp on the reader, skimming in its snappy journeys, concrete to the point of being decoded first by bodies and only later by minds, the outcome of each of his texts contains a compressed and compact worldview and a vision of life that is painful but amused, desolate but sumptuous, sarcastic but passionate - desperate and mystical.

Drago (like all those with a pure talent for writing) is inimitable in many ways. In particular, he has a mysterious ability that allows him to totally overturn the relationship between what we mean by ‘person’ and what we mean by ‘character’, i.e. between his pages live and meet people who everything suggests were in real life (beautiful) characters. Each one with a tic, or a fantasy, or an unmentionable disappointment, or a weakness, or a stigma, or an identity adherence to transient social roles, or an invincible drive, an artistic talent to dissipate, a falling in love.

In his nativity scene, people of beautiful interiority coexist with the more drifting outcasts. All in the bowl of life and time shredder. All loved and mocked in a single gesture by the author. We readers also converge around the brewery, because we feel that there is a buried pulsation there and perceive that only a writer like Marco Drago can make it so immediate.

Dry, poignant, definitive is the finale of this small and universal Bohème.

Marco Drago is a writer, translator and radio presenter. He has published: L'amico del pazzo e altri racconti (Feltrinelli, 1998), Cronache da chissà dove (Minimum Fax, 2000), Domenica sera (Feltrinelli, 2001), Zolle (Feltrinelli, 2005), La vita moderna è rumenta (Feltrinelli, 2012), La prigione grande quanto un paese (Barbera Editore, 2013), Baladin, la birra artigianale è tutta colpa di Teo, with Teo Musso (Feltrinelli, 2013), Sesso calcio e rock and roll (Feltrinelli, 2014) and Innamorato (Bollati Boringhieri, 2023). He has translated many books from English for major Italian publishers. Between 2000 and 2025 he wrote and hosted radio programmes with Gaetano Cappa for RadioRai, Radio24 and RSI. He is part of the artistic factory Istituto Barlumen.