The exhibitions
GALAVERNA
sculptures by MASSIMO SACCHETTI
extended exhibition
Pad.C - Ponte Peter
In Massimo Sacchetti's art, nature is the source and the instrument that shapes his works. The artist sees the passing of time and the changing of the seasons as the material and suggestion, the chisel and the hand that shape the sculptures. This is where “Galaverna” comes from: an atmospheric phenomenon that occurs between late winter and early spring when the temperature drops and the frost creates real natural crystals, fleeting and fragile yet extraordinary natural shapes, fragments of ice that settle on the branches, on the grass, creating a natural geography of fairytale, dreamlike colours.
The artist's inspiration stems from these visions and the desire to capture a phenomenon that would otherwise only be ephemeral by artificially setting this natural spectacle on larch wood.
BRENVA
videoinstallation byStefano Cerio
31 october 2024 – 1 january 2025
PAD. C - Video Area
With the unedited Brenva images and video, artist Stefano Cerio takes a large inflatable wall to where the Mont Blanc glacier once stood, documenting its dramatic retreat with a drone. The theme of balance emerges in a subtle but essential way: the retreating glacier is the sign of a natural equilibrium that is now compromised, a fragile balance between the power of nature and the devastating impact of human activities. Cerio's choice to place an artificial, lightweight object like the inflatable within this scenario evokes precisely this contrast: the precariousness of what we have built against the majestic, but threatened, solidity of the mountain and the ice. The work invites us to reflect on how fine the line is between harmony and chaos, between preservation and destruction, reminding us that balance is not a permanent state, but a continuous dialogue between opposing forces that, if altered, can lead to irreversible consequences.
Stefano Cerio lives and works between Rome and Paris. He began his career as a photographer when he was only 18 years old. Since 2001, his interest has gradually shifted towards research photography and video. His works increasingly address the theme of representation, exploring that borderland between vision, the telling of reality and the spectator's horizon of expectation, the staging of a possible reality if not true at least verisimilar. His works are in many public and private collections.
ERO NESSUNA
Site specific installation by Sandro Mele
31 october 2024 – 31 march 2025
PAD. C - Il Circolino
On the occasion of Flashback Art Fair 2024, the artist Sandro Mele (also author of the fair's guiding image) takes up and re-elaborates Ero Nessuna, the intervention conceived for the Fondazione VOLUME! in Rome in December 2023. The exhibition, in the halls of the Circolino di Flashback Habitat's creative reception area, starts from the personal stories of Fioralba Duma and Karen Ducusin (two girls born from Albanian and Filipino parents, who grew up in Italy without citizenship) to give life to a story told through images that aims to sensitise those who do not know and those who do not want to know, inviting the spectator to reflect on the concept of citizenship by retracing the history that led our constituent fathers to write Article 3 of the Italian Constitution: ‘All citizens have equal social dignity and are equal before the law’.
Sandro Mele (Melendugno, LE, 1970), a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice, began his career in the studio of Roman artist Fabio Mauri. Through his work, he has always dealt with political and social dynamics linked to current events, starting from everyday life experiences and stories. In addressing these topics, he seeks a human and profound reflection, with the intention of offering a genuine point of view, without contamination. Over the years he has used painting, video, photography, installations and sound settings to shape an exhibition structure capable of creating a dialogue with the viewer.
Opera Viva Barriera di Milano, The Manifesto
10th edition CAMOUFLAGE
Exhibition project curated by Alessandro Bulgini
PAD.B the stairs
Also this year on display along the stairs of Pad.B is the exhibition of the project “Opera Viva Barriera di Milano, Il Manifesto”, whose theme is CAMOUFLAGE. The project is a choral operation that aims to express discomfort through the public demonstration of its opposite. Seven artists and their posters that together compose a single complaint, a single work of dissent. “Opera Viva Barriera di Milano, Il Manifesto” was born in 2015 in Turin and uses a municipal advertising space (cimasa 56530). Like every year, all the posters are returned to the public in the spaces of Flashback Habitat.
Fragments of stories from the Children's Institute of the Province of Turin
A better life.
Fragments of stories from the Children's Institute of the Province of Turin
curated by Alessandro Bulgini
in collaboration with Città Metropolitana di Torino
The project presented at Flashback Habitat in Corso Giovanni Lanza 75 in Turin, whose title is A Better Life. Fragments of Stories from the Institute for Children of the Province of Turin is not to be considered an exhibition but rather an artwork and an act of love. A. Bulgini
The project aims to give voice to that multitude of worlds that have intertwined in the halls of the structure, a former orphanage in Turin, through glimpses of the stories of some of the protagonists who, firsthand, have experienced that place like the children, now adults, the nannies, the employees. The exhibition, curated by the artist and director of Flashback Habitat Alessandro Bulgini, aims to be a collective work, a choral work where history, emotions, art and life intertwine. An exhibition that tells intimate and personal stories, but incredibly universal because they are linked to concepts that touch us closely such as birth, family, identity, through original fragments, collected thanks to the collaboration of those who were there at the time, documents recovered in the historical archives of the Province of Turin and direct testimonies. The exhibition aims to be a complex, human, social and above all artistic fresco, which enhances everyone's lives by making them works of art, in the spirit and poetics of Flashback Habitat.
The exhibition is spread over the rooms on the third floor of Pavilion B in Corso Lanza. Each room wants to be a microworld where you can immerse yourself and enter the stories told. Personal and universal narratives at the same time, collective works that speak of life. Each room consists of audio-video portraits of the "natives" who answer the question "Can you tell me?" and they do it in profile: a position that suggests turning outside, elsewhere or perhaps towards another self. The talking portraits are accompanied by components dating back to a photographic exhibition on site set up when the orphanage closed. Finally, each room is enriched with a map-story with stratifications of meanings thanks to photographs and documents from public and private archives.
The IPI, inaugurated in 1958 by President Gronchi, every year hosted about three hundred boys and girls awaiting adoption, often born in corso Lanza 75, and then given up for adoption, generally before the age of three. Today many of those children, who have become adults, frequent the place and the activities of Flashback Habitat, recognizing their origins, their first home in Corso Lanza, enriching the new life of the place itself with stories and emotions.
works by local artists are integrated into the ecosystem.
Artist's Light
Mater - Ex Istituto per l’Infanzia della Provincia di Torino
artwork by Alessandro Bulgini
Insegna sagomata a lettere piane in alluminio verniciato,
illuminazione flex led - 10mx2,78m
Roof of pav.C
As part of the project Luci d'Artista - Constellations, the work by Alessandro Bulgini Mater arrived at the headquarters of Flashback Habitat in 2023. Installed on the roof of Pad C and visible from Corso Vittorio Emanuele II and Porta Nuova station, the work is dedicated to those born more than forty years ago in the current location of Flashback Habitat, a former childcare institute of the Province of Turin that was active until the 1980s. The luminous sign stands out on the roof of the oldest and tallest villa of the former institute, becoming a beacon in the darkness.
The story of this work begins when Alessandro Bulgini (artist and current artistic director of Flashback Habitat) entered the former Institute for Children of the Province of Turin at Corso Giovanni Lanza 75, a space entrusted to Flashback Association. The story of this place began in 1953, when the Province decided to open the Institute to meet the needs created by mass immigration and the large number of women forced to leave their children in foster care. They were housed in this space for 30 years and then, due to the overthrow of the system, the space was closed. Once aware of the story of this place, he decided to take action and give those who were born here a space where they could meet again. From the very first contact, he took on the role of guide of this place, taking them into every nook and cranny of the four buildings, bringing back memories and suggestions so familiar with them.
“When they come back here, at Flashback Habitat, some of them touch the walls in search of the pictorial stratification that was present at their birth. That's why, as time went on, I began to think that the mother was still present through her absence. The walls become the epidermis of this place. It was as if the mother(s) had left their own mark in the short time they were here. For this simple but profound reason, I wanted to give her to give a clear, visible indication, a sign that would bring light to a desire."
Alessandro Bulgini.
works by local artists are integrated into the ecosystem.
Vivarium [der. from the Latin Vivo] is the permanent exhibition that inhabits the external space of Flashback Habitat. The idea of also populating the powerful green area of 9000 square meters and transforming it into a real art park in metamorphosis and constant becoming was born in 2022, as soon as we entered what has become Habitat for Contemporary Cultures. The works of art are inserted into the space, to stay and "put down roots", giving life to a harmonious fusion where everything that is uniform comes from the dialogue between the artist and the habitat. In the natural environment composed of history and people, Flashback adopts the works that the artists leave in trust to the ecosystem.
After the large light installation Mater, on the occasion of Flashback Art Fair 2024, Flashback Habitat's artistic director Alessandro Bulgini also enriches Vivarium with Light of the Apocalypse, a work that weaves personal memory, history and universal reflection through powerful symbolism and intense colours. A large beech tree - dead, but present not only as memory - painted bright red and made extraordinary by lights and luminous spheres is the symbol of a historical and present time in which we are constantly immersed. Each of Bulgini's creations draws from the pre-existing to revive in the present and, as in a flashback, brings past time and present time into dialogue. Red, omnipresent in his works from 1993 to 2000, becomes a colour of universal connection: a symbol of passion, war, life and blood, it brings together the deepest meanings of the human condition. The centuries-old tree, dead due to climatic imbalances, becomes the beating heart of the work: the artist decides not to ‘cut it down’, but to transform it into a sculpture, evoking a crown or the effect of an object falling into water and generating splashes. Dyed red, it becomes a symbol of an alien or nuclear explosion, with orange luminous spheres crystallising the contradictions of our time. Night adds a mystical dimension to the work: the light it emanates evokes the eclipse, an event that in popular belief was a source of terror and magic. On display at the entrance to Pavilion B, six photographs of Bulgini's daily life taken at different times complete the work: filtered in the same red as the sculpture, they amplify its sense of apocalypse.
Light of the Apocalypse embodies the tension between the sacred and the profane, between rebirth and destruction, inviting the viewer to reflect on the search for Equilibrium through contrasting worlds. Technical sponsor of the work is Roberto Spiccia Unicable Services.
Walking through the park of Flashback Habitat one encounters Chairs in Space (1995) by Fabio Cascardi, an installation in steel and anti-rumble paint inaugurated in April 2023 and recently moved to the highest point in front of Pavilion B. Also from 2023 is Mushroom Forest by Michel Vecchi, who, using wood and logs salvaged from the park, creates colourful mushrooms of surprise, magic and curiosity. On the occasion of Flashback Art Fair 2024, the work is enriched with sounds that the artist himself recorded in the park, transforming them into a natural soundtrack. Michel Vecchi is an artist from Valle d'Aosta who lives and works in Ibiza.
Also from 2023 is the work Tout se tient by Luisa Raffaelli, also created by enlivening elements already present in the park. The artist transforms a structure that acts as a sling and the protection, also metaphorical, is composed of innocent pipes that give a sense of care, protection and safety, coloured gold to emphasise the protective function. Finally, Carl Von Pfeil has created four site-specific anthropomorphic sculptures in 2024, with materials found in the park, that dialogue with the natural ecosystem: Woman with Open Arms, Wandering Man, Chick with Goldilocks and
One-Eyed Painter.