Where and when
Altre sedi
Saturday, April 25 for the 70th anniversary of the celebrations, will be inaugurated in Piazza Santa Maria Novella a permanent site-specific installation by the artist Alberto Garutti. The inauguration, scheduled for 13:00 in the presence of Undersecretary Luca Lotti, will be accompanied by a commemorative performance designed for the occasion by the same artist.
The work, located in front of the Museo Novecento, consists of a slab of pietra serena of the size of 100 cm by 95 cm set in the sunny pavement of Piazza Santa Maria Novella, which bears the inscription All the steps I have taken in my life have brought me here, now’. The work, made possible by the Presidency of the Council of Ministers, It faces the Leopoldine gallery and is designed in dialogue with the commemorative plaque that was placed there in memory of the courage of the hundreds of political prisoners who were deported to concentration camps in March 1944. The installation is conceived as an invitation to reflection and remembrance.
For the seventieth anniversary, the artist Alberto Garutti has also planned the realization of a performance on the theme of courage, with the participation of students of the Academy of Fine Arts and the University of Florence, which will involve, in addition to the public and the square, the exhibitors of the area through the distribution of hundreds of leaflets and placemats in the colors of the Italian flag, which will bring a text on the installation and the theme of courage. At the suggestion of the artist, the performance will be repeated in the next two years, always on the occasion of April 25, as a warning to remember.
The celebrations will end at 17.30 on the Arengario of Palazzo Vecchio in Piazza Signoria with the traditional concert of the Rossini Philharmonic.
Alberto Garutti, artist and teacher, teaches at the Brera Academy in Milan and at the IUAV in Venice. He has been invited to international events such as: the Venice Biennale (1990), Havana (2000), Istanbul (2001) and Prague (2013), the Memory Marathon at the Serpentine Gallery in London (2012). His search for an open dialogue between work of art, spectator and public space, earned him the invitation to create works for cities and museums around the world such as the S.M.A.K. Museum in Belgium (2000), the Marta Museum in Herford (2003)the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan (2002) and the Moscow Museum of Modern Art in Moscow (2011). In Italy he has designed numerous interventions in public space such as those made in the cities of Bergamo (2000), Bolzano (2003), Trivero (2009), Rome (2009) and Milan (2010, 2011, 2012). In 2012, the Pavilion of Contemporary Art in Milan dedicated his first retrospective to him, entitled: Didascalia / Caption.
The official account of the celebrations of the presidency of the Council of Ministers is @70th and the hashtag is #il coraggiodi.