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).

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.

A green thread links the cherry blossoms in Japan to the gum trees of Malaysia, the botanical gardens of Singapore and the destroyed Perfect Brightness - a green thread that defines the anthropocene and the way nature is plundered, for its immediate utility and to create symbolism in step with current ideologies.
In this volume we look at the stories of our times, seen through the petals of flowers chosen to represent a nation, with the desire to bend a small fragrant corolla to ideologies useful to those in government at the time. They are also the stories of how our poetic images clash against our inability to live without destroying what surrounds us. Through the symbolism of flowers and gardens we talk about politics and history, colonialism and ecology, nationalism and authoritarianism, in an anthropocene short-circuit.

Ilaria Maria Sala is a writer, journalist, poet and ceramist, and has lived in Asia since 1988. She completed her studies in Beijing and London, then moved to Tokyo, and later based in Hong Kong - meanwhile spending long periods in Shanghai, Kathmandu and Dakar. She is the author of four books: the first, Il Dio dell'Asia, religione e politica in Oriente (Il Saggiatore, 2006) won the Brice Chatwin Prize for travel literature; Lettere dalla Cina (Una Città, 2011); Beijing 1989 (Una Città, 2019); L'Eclissi di Hong Kong, topografia di una città in tumulto (ADD Editore, 2022). He contributes to numerous newspapers, both Italian and international, including Il Domani, Internazionale, Il Post, The New York Times, The Guardian, The South China Morning Post, and many others, and is a member of the Lettera 22 association of journalists.

The book Arte contemporanea: Scusi, non capisco ('Contemporary Art: Sorry, I Don't Understand') originates from a famous format of the Merz Foundation in Turin, a series of events during which the public was led to listen to and interact with exceptional guests from different artistic fields. The project, based on an idea by Maria Centonze, aimed to meet the general public's need for a better understanding of the languages and thinking behind contemporary works of art.
Each one of us, if stripped of the many prejudices that hinder openness to any world other than our own, can and must try to understand, even in the way of art.
Costantino D'Orazio, art curator, museum director and cultural popularizer, takes readers on a journey through the ‘Scusi, non capisco’ - among others - of Serena Dandini, Andrea Zalone, Lucia Goracci, Ascanio Celestini and Maria Grazia Cucinotta.

Costantino D'Orazio (Rome, 1974), art historian, is the director of the National Museums of Perugia and the Regional Directorate of National Museums of Umbria. He worked at the Sovrintendenza Capitolina ai Beni Culturali as resident curator at the MACRO in Rome from 2014 to 2018; from 2008 to 2012 he was curator of contemporary art exhibitions at the National Museum of Villa Pisani in Stra. Recently, he curated the initiative 5 minutes with Van Gogh, the exhibition Artemisia Gentileschi. Coraggio e Passione at Palazzo Ducale in Genoa and Amarsi. Love in Art from Guido Reni to Banksy at the Fondazione Cassa di Rispamio di Terni. Since 2014, he has hosted the column AR Frammenti d'Arte on Rainews24 and is the art expert for Unomattina in famiglia and Linea Verde on Rai1, Geo and TG3 Linea Notte on Rai3. He is the author and host of the programmes Wikiradio and Vite che sono la tua on Radio3, as well as collaborating with the programme Radio3 Suite. From 2014 to 2019 he hosted the cultural popularisation programme Bella davvero and in 2021 the programme Due cose on Radio2. His latest publication as an author is Art Detectives. 30 cases to become real experts (Piemme, 2024).