Concetto Pozzati. Da e per Morandi: Casa Morandi hosts the tribute exhibition to the great Bolognese master

From January 17 to March 15, 2026, Casa Morandi — part of the Musei Civici Department of the Municipality of Bologna — hosts the exhibition Concetto Pozzati. Da e per Morandi, curated by Maura Pozzati and produced in collaboration with the Concetto Pozzati Archive: a tribute to one of the most active leading figures in Italian culture in the postwar period.

Concetto Pozzati, Da e per Giorgio Morandi, 1964

The exhibition is part of the institutional program of ART CITY Bologna 2026 (February 5–8), the calendar of exhibitions and events promoted by the Municipality of Bologna with the support of BolognaFiere on the occasion of Arte Fiera.

Concetto Pozzati wrote several key texts on Giorgio Morandi, including the presentation for the exhibition at the Galleria d’Arte Moderna di Bologna, Morandi e il suo tempo (1985–1986), entitled Morandi’s “autre” time, and a portrait of Morandi included in his own painter’s diary, published by Corraini in 2007 under the title Concetto Pozzati. Parola d’artista (An Artist’s Word). In this text, the conflicted relationship he had with the great Bolognese master emerges (a friend of his father Mario and his uncle Severo Pozzati): “an uncomfortable man, whom I did not love and whom I do not love, unlike the depth of that unreachable microcosm that was his painting.”

Da e per Morandi (From and for Morandi) is the title chosen by Concetto Pozzati for a series of works bearing witness to a dialogue with Giorgio Morandi’s oeuvre that lasted more than forty years. A constant engagement, expressed both through paintings dedicated to him and through texts and reflections on his pictorial method. For this exhibition, Casa Morandi presents some of the artist’s most representative works, opening with Da e per Giorgio Morandi (1964), the year Pozzati took part in the 32nd Venice International Art Exhibition and in Documenta III in Kassel.

The opening is scheduled for Friday, January 16, 2026, from 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m.

January 17 – March 15, 2026

Casa Morandi

Via Fondazza 36, Bologna

Gibellina, Italian Capital of Contemporary Art 2026. The inaugural program

Thursday 15 and Friday 16 January 2026 have been chosen for the official launch of Gibellina – Italian Capital of Contemporary Art 2026: a wide-ranging program that weaves together visual arts, performance, music, and critical thought, reflecting the profound identity of a city and its territory as a space for cultural experimentation, Mediterranean openness, and a transnational vision.

Thursday 15 and Friday 16 January 2026 mark the official opening of Portami il futuro (Bring Me the Future), the program of Gibellina – Italian Capital of Contemporary Art 2026, an initiative promoted by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture.

Supported by the Sicilian Region, the Municipality of Gibellina, the Ludovico Corrao Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Orestiadi Foundation, the initiative is entrusted to the Artistic Direction of Andrea Cusumano, who also curated the program of the two inaugural days. Conceived as a symbolic and cultural journey through the identity of Gibellina, the program is fully consistent with the thematic lines and principles that will guide the entire programming of Gibellina – Italian Capital of Contemporary Art 2026.

The structure of the inaugural event is conceived as a progressive narrative, in which each moment enters into dialogue with the next. It highlights the memory evoked by the city’s emblematic sites, the relationship between tradition and contemporaneity expressed through musical choices ranging from the symphonic repertoire to popular traditions, Gibellina’s Mediterranean vocation as a crossroads of cultures, and the centrality of public space understood as a place of sharing, participation, and the collective construction of meaning.

Pietro Consagra, Ingresso al Belìce, Stella, 1981, Gibellina, Trapani. SIAE 2025

The program opens on Thursday, January 15, 2026, at 11:30 a.m. with the institutional ceremony held at the Agorà Hall of the Municipality of Gibellina, broadcast live in the square in front: a solemn moment, attended by the Minister of Culture Alessandro Giuli, in which official speeches intertwine with symphonic music and poetry. The opening is entrusted to the Orchestra Filarmonica del Sud (FIDES), conducted by Maestro Antonio Giovanni Bono, performing the Italian National Anthem and the overture from La Forza del Destino by Giuseppe Verdi. On the occasion of Gibellina – Italian Capital of Contemporary Art 2026, the Orchestra Filarmonica del Sud will also begin a process of rooting itself in the territory, becoming the city’s resident orchestra, based at the auditorium of the MAC – Ludovico Corrao Museum of Contemporary Art.

The symbolic heart of the ceremony will be two original video contributions created in the city’s emblematic sites: Alberto Burri’s Grande Cretto, featuring a reading of the unpublished text Poesia Gibellina by writer and poet Marilena Renda, winner of the 2025 Premio Strega Giovani Poesia, and Mimmo Paladino’s Montagna di Sale, the setting for a musical performance by jazz saxophonist Francesco Cafiso. A tribute to the memory and artistic identity of Gibellina, these moments are accompanied by a time of reflection and remembrance of the earthquake, which occurred on January 15, 1968.

In the afternoon, the inauguration continues with the opening of the first exhibitions. At 3:30 p.m., the exhibition Colloqui: Carla Accardi, Letizia Battaglia, Renata Boero, Isabella Ducrot, Nanda Vigo opens at the Fondazione Orestiadi, bringing into dialogue the works of five central figures in Gibellina’s cultural history. The exhibition creates an unprecedented exchange between languages and memories, offering a perspective capable of inspiring younger generations of artists. At 5:00 p.m., Dal Mare: dialoghi con la città frontale opens in the spaces of the Teatro di Pietro Consagra, where the video installations Resto by MASBEDO and The Bell by Adrian Paci spark a reflection on the Mediterranean as a human, political, and existential horizon.

The day concludes at 7:30 p.m. in the Agorà Hall with a concert by La Banda del Sud, a special project of the Italian Ministry of Culture conceived by Neapolitan artists, bringing together ten talents from southern Italy in a folk music orchestra conducted by Gigi Di Luca and Mario Crispi. The ensemble—comprising artists from Campania, Basilicata, Calabria, Apulia, Sicily, and Sardinia, alongside international musicians from Spain and Palestine—creates a musical dialogue that highlights shared cultural roots and the project’s Mediterranean vocation, staging an encounter between cultures, languages, and traditions as a metaphor for a shared future.

Ludovico Quaroni, Chiesa Madre, 1985-2005, Gibellina, Trapani. Ph. Andrea Repetto. Courtesy Fondazione Orestiadi

On Friday, January 16, the exhibitions connected to the Generazione Sicilia project open to the public. At 5:00 p.m., Daniele Franzella’s installation Austerlitz inaugurates at the former Church of Gesù e Maria, designed by Nanda Vigo, while at 6:30 p.m. the MAC – Ludovico Corrao Museum of Contemporary Art opens the group exhibition dedicated to the Elenk’Art Collection. Two projects that tell the story of a territory capable of transforming its history into a plurality of contemporary artistic languages.

At 9:00 p.m., the two-day inauguration concludes with the concert Max Gazzè & Calabria Orchestra in Musicae Loci, held in Piazza XV Gennaio 1968. A live performance that blends singer-songwriter music, folk orchestration, and local traditions, translating the identity themes of Gibellina – Italian Capital of Contemporary Art 2026 into an accessible, contemporary, and highly communicative language, capable of generating participation and resonance.

From 10:30 p.m., again in Piazza XV Gennaio 1968, Città di Tebe, a fireworks display designed in dialogue with the urban context and the themes of the program, symbolically brings the inaugural events to a close.

Every artistic choice across the two days is aimed at strengthening the image of Gibellina as a vibrant cultural capital—one capable of combining rootedness and openness, experimentation and accessibility, memory and vision—anticipating from the outset the spirit and trajectory of the entire year-long program.

Anatomie spontanee: a new exhibition at TWM Factory’s Parentesi exhibition space

On Friday, January 9, 2026, the exhibition Spontaneous Anatomies opened at the Parentesi exhibition space of TWM Factory (Rome). Curators Paola Farfaglio and Benedetta Carpi De Resmini have conceptually brought together two artistic paths that, in different ways, address the theme of food as an element of sharing, a cultural act, a symbol of identity, and a space of relationship. The title evokes what comes into being without being planned—what grows at the margins, in the folds of the living and of imagination.

Nordine Sajot, Caretto-Spagna, Camille Orlandini, Installation views. Courtesy Latitudo Art Projects e CAP. Photo LALO studio

The exhibition takes place at Parentesi, an exhibition space within Roma Smistamento, the cultural center of TWM Factory located on the first floor of the Arimondi District— a former industrial building that for years has hosted artists’ studios, residencies, galleries, and creative spaces.

The project explores elements in transformation: those of ingredients, of the gestures that shape them, and of art itself, which observes, dismantles, and recomposes reality. The exhibition presents itself as an invitation to reflect on how art and food share a common essence—that of continuous transformation, mutual nourishment, and the potential that arises each time we enter into a relationship with living matter.

It brings together works by several artists who worked throughout 2025 on two parallel projects: Anatomies of Nourishment, curated by Cities Art Projects (with Caretto-Spagna and Gaia & Greta Scaramella), and Roots and Routes, developed by Latitudo Art Projects within the European platform Magic Carpets (Camille Orlandini, Ombretta Gamberale, and Gaia Scaramella). Both projects involved various communities from

Caretto-Spagna, Esculenta Lazzaro_Brassica oleracea, dal 2014, site-specific installation, table, ground, cabbages and mixed technique. Courtesy çatitudo Art Projects e CAP. Photo LALO studio

Caretto–Spagna, artists from Turin, show how culinary experiences connected to the harvesting and transformation of wild plants or cabbages, developed during the project, open up a reflection on biodiversity and interspecies relationships. Within the exhibition path, the work ESCULENTA is presented, transforming a simple wooden table into an active organism—a device that makes visible the continuous cycle of consumption > revitalization > regrowth.

Throughout the exhibition, a long wooden table is set up as an experimental site in which the metamorphosis of cabbages can be observed over the duration of the show: matter that is consumed, regenerates, and grows again. The table is divided into three sections, each designed for a specific and complementary function. The first section is dedicated to food preparation (salads, cutting, everyday gestures). The second is equipped for the revitalization of cabbage scraps, featuring a hidden water system that enables a slow, continuous process of reabsorption. The third section is devoted to regrowth: here, the regenerated cabbages are allowed to grow until the completion of their life cycle, from flowering to seed production.

Gaia and Greta Scaramella—an artist and a sociologist respectively—present the laboratory-based experiences centered on milk carried out at the Saxa Rubra school. Both have explored milk as a symbolic and cultural food, in which nourishment becomes a metaphor for growth, care, and sharing.

In the exhibition, Gaia presents Milk, a work in which milk, the primary symbol of nourishment, is transformed into absence: breasts filled with milk become empty strainers, from which the milk flows out and is lost. The work is a meditation on the importance of care and vital support, but also a reminder of the conditions of children who, in many war-affected areas, lack access to milk. It is a thought addressed to mothers who have lost this nourishment, or who can no longer offer it.

Greta, on the other hand, presents a series of milk fables, written and conceived by her, designed as short stories of symbolic nourishment dedicated to the children who took part in the workshops. These are tales in which milk becomes imagination, protection, and origin—a narrative form of care that accompanies and sustains, just like the first food we receive in life.

Within the Roots & Routes project promoted by Latitudo Art Projects as part of the Magic Carpets platform, artist Ombretta Gamberale presents a collective cookbook, Ricette memorabili (Memorable Recipes), along with a series of engravings born from the exchange of culinary traditions: family memories, recipes, drawings, and botanical prints created using dried aromatic herbs.

Her contribution—developed both with the family home L’Approdo of Spes contra Spem and with participants from the Biblioteca Galline Bianche—places food at the center as an affective archive, a space in which intimacy becomes a shared narrative. The stories and drawings collected in the cookbook were generated in a collective and family-oriented context, yet one that was also deeply reflective.

Play played an important role: children, families, and young people from the family home created their own cookbook, offering a mosaic of personal perspectives. Reflective, because the very conditions that enabled the production and circulation of these narratives are linked to an awareness that food holds multiple values—material and symbolic, and above all, personal.

Camille Orlandini, Fair pain commun, 2025, site-specific installation, video, drawings. Courtesy Latitudo Art Projects e CAP. Photo LALO studio

Camille Orlandini, a French artist in residence at Latitudo Art Projects, also developed a project within Roots & Routes together with the family home L’Approdo and the participants of the Biblioteca Galline Bianche. Her project, Faire Pain Commun, is dedicated to water and bread, and in particular to rivers—the Tiber and its tributary, the Aniene—which flow alongside the neighborhoods where she carried out her residency. Water, a fluid, mutable, and multifaceted element, moves through territories, histories, and cultures, transforming them. This pervasive nature finds an analogy in the act of breadmaking, where the meeting of water and grain becomes a daily ritual and an ancient heritage. The study of water and grain allows us to observe how different societies have attributed meaning to these fundamental elements, using them to build social systems and cultural models. The artist presents a video installation, Impastare da una sponda all’altra del Tevere (Kneading from One Bank of the Tiber to the Other), which conveys this complex and vital relationship.

Finally, the work of artist Nordine Sajot, Ex-voto against war, is presented. During his residency at the Centre Claude Cahun in Nantes, as part of the Magic Carpets program, the artist developed a new section dedicated to the gestures of eating as a bodily language, using images related to food distribution in Gaza. His installation powerfully interrogates food as a political weapon of domination and, in particular, food deprivation as a tool of oppression. The work restores the everyday act of nourishment in its most vulnerable and urgent dimension.

January 10 – January 23, 2026

Roma Smistamento / TWM Factory

Via Giuseppe Arimondi 3, Rome