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Futuro Antico. Interview with Patrizia Sandretto
26 lug 2022
Marco Bassan
Collector Patrizia Sandretto reflects on the future, and she doesn't talk much about artworks, but rather about education, youth, ecology. And about a small island in the middle of the Venice lagoon.
What are your inspirational references in art?
The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch at the Prado Museum in Madrid; The Sacred Conversation by Giovanni Bellini in the Church of San Zaccaria: when I’m in Venice, I often go there to admire it in silence, sometimes immersed in the blue of the Madonna’s mantle on the throne, other times focusing on the architecture or the fragile delicacy of the trees on the sides of the scene. Louise Bourgeois, the extraordinary Appassionata by Carol Rama, Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills, but also the works that don’t exist yet and that I am sure will strike me. Among the many readings that have inspired me, Patrons and Painters by Francis Haskell and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein. I love reading and rereading the pages of Self-Portrait by Carla Lonzi to rediscover the rhythm of a choral dialogue, with its voices, intertwined thoughts, pauses, and digressions. It reminds me of how important it is to talk to artists, to preserve the memory of the conversations had together, putting them one after the other to enrich the understanding of art in its plurality.
What is the project that represents you the most? Can you tell us about its genesis?
I always seek connections between ongoing projects and my life, the interests and thoughts of that particular moment. For me, planning is a vector of vital energy, research, and discovery. Looking at the history of the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, which I created and have led since 1995, the most representative project is the Young Curators Residency Programme, launched in 2006. Since then, every year, three young foreign curators, from the most recognized specialist schools in the world, come to Turin for a residency conceived as a long journey through Italy, its art scene, institutions, museums, artist studios, galleries, and magazines. The program fosters a deep understanding of our system and supports art produced in Italy, which curators, once back home, will know how to convey beyond our borders. At the end of the journey, they curate an exhibition, concretely translating through the artworks their impressions and vision. The exhibitions are renewed with each edition and today form an ideal “collection,” a history of contemporary Italian art seen through foreign eyes, from the perspective of different cultural backgrounds. Since 2020, we have brought this project to Spain: it’s the program that the Fundación Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Madrid, founded in 2017, chose to approach the young art of this country, promoting field research and dialogue as keys to entering an artistic reality.
How important is the genius loci in your work?
It’s not an expression I usually use. The spirit of a place interests me as a layered set of stories, of human existences but also of physical geographies, territories, and geology: earth, stones, water, trees. In the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Art Park in Guarene, among the Piedmont hills of Roero, the spirit of the place was a majestic hundred-year-old cypress, which fell from old age a few years ago. Thanks to the artist Mark Handforth, its essence remains in the wood, used to create two large benches, positioned facing the landscape. In the design of the two seats, Mark explained to me, “The natural shape of the wood can speak.” The cypress continues to speak its language, made of knots, rings, and lines. The site-specific works that I commission and produce for the Park interpret the many spirits of the place. This is the case with Rise, the large sculpture by Marguerite Humeau, installed next to our young vineyard of Nebbiolo grapes. Made with an aluminum casting, Rise reproduces on a large scale the microscopic male and female flowers of the vine. The intertwining recalls their first pollination, the encounter that generated the first hermaphroditic flower, characteristic of the Sativa subspecies of Vitis Vinifera, the result of the wise selection of ancient winemakers. The technological and futuristic form of the sculpture looks like the result of a wind tunnel test. At the same time, it contains the many research directions that the artist followed, tracing local traditions and cultures, the stories of the masche from Piedmont, with their magical powers of transformation and metamorphosis, passed down from mother to daughter.
How important is the past for imagining and building the future? Do you think the future can have an ancient heart?
An ancient heart and a new heart. An ancestral beat and a freshly born one. I believe our capacity for the future, as individuals and communities, lies in the balance between the legacies of the past and the drive to imagine and build what does not yet exist. The titles of Carlo Levi's books are beautiful. Travel books, essays, articles, a novel. Levi, who was born in Turin exactly 120 years ago, traversed places—from Italy to the Soviet Union, from India to China—seeking what he called the “coexistence of times,” the contemporaneity between the remote and the present, something that goes beyond history, or, as he wrote in the first page of Christ Stopped at Eboli, “what is commonly called History.” I think it would be important to recover some of the literal meaning of the word “contemporary.” We pronounce it as a synonym for actuality, but it is, in reality, a word full of echoes. It carries with it the sense of an encounter between different temporalities: a meeting between generations, as Giorgio Agamben precisely put it.
What advice would you give to a young person who wants to follow your path?
I believe strongly in education, research, and study. At the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, training programs are a central part of our entire activity. It’s our way of responding professionally to the demand from young people who want to pursue a career in the art world. Campo, our study and curatorial practices course, is a specialized and intensive path we’ve offered since 2012. Attended by students or graduates in art history, philosophy, cultural heritage, sociology, and other disciplines, it explores, inside and outside the museum, a broad concept of curating, as a special form of care that concerns the exhibition space but also the discursive dimension of the public program, the relationship with the audience, projects linked to festivals, independent publishing, and writing. Every day, our advice is concretely translated into workshops designed specifically for high school classes and their teachers, for groups of university students and young adults, and through the research grants we awarded last year, as part of Verso, a project co-produced by the Foundation in collaboration with the Piedmont Region and the National Youth Policies Department, aimed at people between the ages of 15 and 29. The message behind each of these experiences is to recognize contemporary art’s real ability to impact the learning and inspiration paths of the young people who are growing up.
In an era defined as post-truth, does the concept of the sacred still have importance and strength?
I think in contemporary art, the sacred is translated into silence. I remember with emotion Aletheia, the installation by Belgian artist Berlinde De Bruyckere, produced and realized for her solo show at the Foundation at the end of 2019. Her sculptural work investigates universal themes such as the suffering body, pain, memory, the power of care, and pietas. The work occupied the large central hall of the museum and was inspired by Berlinde's visit to a leather workshop in Anderlecht, Belgium. Transformed into wax and pigment casts, the skins became sculptures, metaphors for the fragile condition of every living being. Inside the large hall of Aletheia (from Greek, meaning disclosure, revelation, unveiling), visitors moved in absolute silence, as in a sort of sacred, though secular, space, where they could gather, reflect, and feel compassion.
How do you imagine the future? Can you give us three ideas that you think will guide the coming years?
We have recently inaugurated the construction site for the new headquarters of the Foundation on the island of San Giacomo, a strip of land between the calm waters of the Venice lagoon. I like to think of it as an “outpost of dreams.” On the small island, which is square-shaped and the result of a layering of settlements that have alternated over the centuries, I aim to create a research center for the future. I will therefore cultivate my ideas for the coming years while circling that small island, following an ecological thought capable of intersecting the preciousness of water and the power of contemporary art.