From the Bourbon Bath to theImago Museum. Arte Povera and beyond
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By Miriam Di Francesco
The art world in the 1970s is pervaded by the climate of vitalistic energy, in Italy and around the world. Italy's major city centers become fertile ground for hosting a considerable number of interdisciplinary art events: film screenings, experimental theater, happenings and performances. Parallel to political struggles and youth protests, artists engage in a "field struggle," where gallery owners and critics assume the role of facilitators and promoters of their demands.
The city of Pescara and province is very young. Born only politically in 1927, it knows no cumbersome history behind it to immobilize it. It is full of enthusiasm and eager to grow. Her geographical proximity to Rome, then, allows her a proximity also of media, cultural exchanges, even a sharing in the events of the capital. On the thread of the effervescence of those years, on the one hand, the yearning for emancipation, on the other, such an extraordinary period of an ordinary provincial town can be interpreted.
1967 is the landmark year of Arte Povera. Germano Celant gathers around him a large group of artists1 curating the Arte Povera Im-Spazio exhibition in Genoa's La Bertesca gallery from Sept. 27 to Oct. 20. In the following months, Celant signs in "Flash Art" the framework of the movement with the article Arte Povera. Notes for a Guerrilla: "First comes man then the system, in ancient times it was like that. Today it is society that produces and man that consumes."2 From these premises, the artist breaks into the consumer system with the freedom to design, overturns his own condition from exploited by the system to guerrilla, is intolerant of any label, presents himself as unforeseen with respect to social expectations and "strained to find the factual meaning of the emerging sense of man's living." With respect to the idea of giving a systematic and definitive vision to the movement, Celant reiterates the difficulty of establishing a fixity to works or events characterized by their making from time to time in relation to context. Rather than calling itself a system, Arte Povera affirms a tension, an attitude, a fusion that keeps alive a dialectic between emerging contradictions.

Carla Tatò performa inside Luciano Fabro's cube during the opening of the exhibition at Michub in Pescara
In 1970 in Pescara, a young Mario Pieroni picked up the family legacy. The business founded by his grandfather, which later became "Coen and Pieroni" with his uncle Giampaolo Coen and father Daniele Pieroni, is located in a building in the historic center. Antiques and furniture are the main activities of the company that Pieroni runs embodying the rupture of those years in the tension between ideals and business, utopia and market, past and future. Two projects - in partnership with his cousin Federica Coen - mark the beginning of a new personal season that affects the city's fortunes: the reproduction of furniture and tapestries (produced by Fernando Di Nicola's Arazzeria Pennese) by Giacomo Balla and, upon Getulio Alviani's conception under the impetus of an everyday life lived with Ettore Spalletti and Mario Ceroli, Dal mondo delle idee, the production of art furniture prototypes, is born3. "The intention," Pieroni says, "was to create artistic spaces in which it was possible to live, a discourse then probably premature that I have recently taken up again."4.
It was with the establishment of Bagno Borbonico in 1975, a former prison on Via delle Caserme used as an exhibition space, that the first step in the affirmation of art and life can be said to have been taken. The opening day of Bagno Borbonico coincides with the vernissage of Luciano Fabro 's exhibition with Allestimento teatrale. The invitation to the event refers to Bagno Borbonico as a "foundation in the process of recognition," a foundation that, it is known, will never see the light of day. Luciano Fabro is followed by Jannis Kounellis, Ettore Spalletti, Mario Merz, Francesco Lo Savio, and Vettor Pisani.
Although Bagno Borbonico never managed to change into a foundation for technical reasons, I believe that the needs that started it have remained unchanged in the times to come. Revised and corrected, partly converted to different venues, augmented with transdisciplinary perspectives accrued by time and with time, in 2017 on the idea of Yona Friedman the No Man's Land Foundation was born with similar attitudes of artists in the late 1960s and the unchanged enthusiasm of a red-hot season of initiatives, that of the 1970s in Pescara. Pieroni's meeting - joined by Dora Stiefelmeier - with Friedman and his realizable utopias rekindled the desire for a current, concrete, possible model to make a simple piece of land a place of the imagination dedicated to art as an instrument of ethical and social change, to unite, once again, thought-art-nature-life with attention to future generations.
The No Man's Land Foundation's latest project, recently opened on Oct. 29, 2024 in the MicHub building on Michelangelo Street in Pescara, sees the collaboration with the Pescarabruzzo Foundation open a new home for the installations that have arisen in the Bagno Borbonico. Imago Museum / Arte Povera and Beyond places a series of temporary exhibitions alongside the permanent works. Today it houses works by Jimmie Durham, Alberto Garutti, Fabrice Hyber, Gülsün Karamustafa, Felice Levini, H. H. Lim, Donatella Spaziani and Leonid Tishkov. In addition to the Arte Povera works, the No Man's Land Foundation delivers to the city part of its history in a polyphony of differences that invites us to look beyond the present, toward the future, as only artists are able to show us, then and now.
- Artists in Arte Povera: Alighiero Boetti, Luciano Fabro, Jannis Kounellis, Giulio Paolini, Pino Pascali, Emilio Prini. Artists in Im-Space: Umberto Bignardi, Mario Ceroli, Paolo Icaro, Renato Mambor, Eliseo Mattiacci, Cesare Tacchi. ︎
- G. Celant, Arte Povera. Appunti per una guerriglia, in "Flash Art," 5, Rome, November-December 1967. ︎
- Laura Grisi, Enrico Job, Concetto Pozzati and Paolo Scheggi join the project. ︎
- M. Pieroni, D. Stiefelmeier (eds.), Pieroni Gallery 1970-1992, Di Paolo Edizioni, cit. p. 12. ︎