Italian Pavilion, Italy at 59th Venice Biennale of Art

The Italian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2022: the artists of the pavilion, the works, the times, the periods, the cost of the tickets and the exhibition venue.

The 59th Biennale Arte will open to the public on 23 April. But on the 20th, 21st and 22nd there will be the various openings and collateral events that always suddenly animate the Venetian artistic life. The awards ceremony will take place on the day of the opening to the public.

The title of the 59th edition of the Biennale d'Arte is Il Latte dei Sogni that means The Milk of Dreams.

The invited artists are 213 from 58 countries. There are 26 Italian artists, 180 the first participations in the International Exhibition, 1433 the works and objects on display, 80 new productions.

In all, 80 nations will participate in the Venice Biennale in the pavilions at the Giardini, the Arsenale and in the historic center of Venice.

Go to the page of the 59th Venice Art Biennale

Italian Pavilion, Italy at 59th Biennale Arte of Venice

Press Release of Italian Pavilion

History of the Night and Destiny of the Comets is the title of the exhibition project of the Italian Pavilion at the 59th International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia (23 April - 27 November 2022), promoted by the Directorate General for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture.

The exhibition, curated by Eugenio Viola, for the first time in the history of the Italian Pavilion, presents the work of a single artist: Gian Maria Tosatti.

The curator chose to propose a project that would function as a powerful statement on contemporaneity, capable of restoring a courageous reading of the present and giving Italy a unique voice.

«A fascinating exhibition project that crosses different artistic languages ​​and investigates the contradictions of contemporaneity and the relationship between man and nature. It will be a pavilion dedicated to creativity and innovation, "said the Minister of Culture, Dario Franceschini.

«As a former film man I would have been happy to produce a film with the title Story of the Night and Destiny of the Comets. It promises mystery, discoveries and the thrill of a very special journey. Gian Maria Tosatti, who refers more to the theatrical story than to the cinematographic one, knows the importance of narration, which will be the raw material of which the works of the Italian Pavilion are made, but also of the "continuous forum", a formula to which The whole Biennale (in the sense of all the arts it represents) wants to make more and more use to redeem the creative action, from the transience of a limited time to the duration of their exhibition in the show », so Roberto Cicutto, President of the Venice Biennale.

«With great conviction we welcomed Eugenio Viola's project, which sees Gian Maria Tosatti as the only artist in the Italian Pavilion at the Biennale Arte 2022 - declares the General Director of Contemporary Creativity of the Minister of Culture and Commissioner of the Italian Pavilion Onofrio Cutaia. - It is an ambitious, immersive project which deals in an original way with the relationship between man and nature, between sustainable development and the territory, metaphorically interpreting the Italian industrial dream ».

Eugenio Viola explains: «There are numerous points of contact between my curatorial research and the artistic one of Gian Maria Tosatti. For both, our work is first of all to confront dialectically with the lacerations and contradictions of contemporaneity, that is, it means taking on a critical responsibility with respect to our uncertain historical present. For both, a project must necessarily express an ethical-political tension and be conceived as a lucid visual essay, part of a broader narrative through images in constant evolution. History of the Night and Destiny of the Comets is for both, to date, the most important chapter that we are preparing to write of this story, in which our stories once again intertwine and confront each other ».

History of the Night and Destiny of the Comets is configured as a large environmental installation designed specifically for the spaces of the Tese delle Vergini, occupying the entire surface, and proposes a vision of the current state of humanity and its future prospects. The work is configured as an intermediary device that contains and blends a plurality of languages ​​as usual in Tosatti's research, from literary references to the visual arts, from theater to music and performance. A complex experiential narrative machine that leads the visitor on a sensitive path, sometimes familiar and partly unsettling, with the aim of offering a new awareness and generating concrete reflections on the possible destiny of human civilization, poised between dreams and errors. of the past and the promises of a future still partly to be written.

History of the Night and Destiny of the Comets tells of the difficult balance between man and nature, between sustainable development and territory, between ethics and profit, proposing an aesthetic reading of this scenario and offering an unprecedented platform in which to develop an inclusive and in-depth debate around them. themes. The exhibition itinerary is structured with a theatrical system that articulates the narration in a prologue and two acts: the Story of the Night and the Destiny of the Comets.

Italy, with its particular historical story as a young nation returning from two world wars affected by extraordinary economic growth, the so-called "Italian miracle", offers the scenario for the construction of this exhibition. The space of the first Tesa is a journey through the beautiful country and coincides with the Story of the Night, or rather the symbolic story of the rise and decline of the Italian industrial dream. A sequence of unsettling scenarios prepares for a final vision in which the imagination is overturned in a real epiphany.

Through a series of spaces, settings follow one another which evoke Ermanno Rea's La Dismissione (Feltrinelli, 2002) and which resemble the expanse of warehouses spread across the landscape between Ragusa and Cremona, the only paradoxically homogeneous panorama of a hypothetical trip to Italy of the province.

Continuing we reach the final vision, the Destiny of the Comets, which recalls how outraged nature, since the time of the flood, does not forgive man. In this image, a powerful and disturbing epilogue, an inversely disturbing element arises, the sign of a possible peace. The exhibition therefore ends with a message of hope about the destiny that awaits this humanity which, like a comet, crossed the universe with a great luminous trail.

"I would give the whole Montedison for a firefly", writes Pier Paolo Pasolini in the close of the famous article "The vacuum of power" (Corriere della Sera, 1 February 1975) on an epochal passage told through the metaphor of the disappearance of fireflies, understood as the last and heinous crime of the new fascism: neocapitalism.

The Italian Pavilion, for the entire duration of the exhibition, will be structured as a continuous forum - face to face and online - thanks to a calendar of scientific-informative meetings that bring together professionals and experts in the ecological-environmental sector and protagonists of the world of culture on the topics covered by the exhibition. The conference program will expand from Venice to the rest of the world, thanks to the involvement of a number of international institutions that will host debates on the issues addressed by the Pavilion, real embassies of the History of the Night and Destiny of the Comets abroad. All the topics covered, the ideas that emerged and the reflections developed will be collected on a website always available to anyone who wants to deepen their research on alternative models of life and development. In parallel, a significant corpus of audio-visual documents of the work will be produced, from its creation to its presentation to the public.

The program of activities open to the public will be communicated subsequently and constantly updated.

Asking itself about the most appropriate ways to return to reflect on the environment, encouraging a public debate on the urban landscape and sustainable ecologies, Storia della Notte e Destino delle Comete expressly refers to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development of the United Nations (signed in September 2015 from 193 UN member countries). The project touches on all the issues explained by the 17 goals signed by the United Nations, related to the health and education of future generations, to the protection of Nature, to sustainable development with respect to the territory and to the rethinking of ethical models of production, consumption and profit.

The Italian Pavilion was also created thanks to the support of Sanlorenzo and Valentino, the main sponsor of the exhibition. Thanks also to the sponsor Xiaomi and to the technical sponsors Bonotto, Folio, Fondazione Morra, Italstage, Laterlite, Marcegaglia and Mosaico Studio. A special thanks also to all the donors, whose names appear in the colophon, who have given a fundamental contribution to the project.

Useful information for the visit

Hours: Gardens from 10.00 to 19.00. Arsenale from 10.00 to 19.00 (from 10.00 to 20.00 on Friday and Saturday until September 30th). Closed on Mondays (except May 13, September 2, November 18).
Tickets: please visit the official website.
Phone: +39.041.5218711; fax +39.041.5218704
E-mail: aav@labiennale.org
Web: Biennale of Venice