HAGOROMO

Massimo Bartolini

CURATED BY

Cover: Statuette of the fisherman Hakuryo finding the mythical Hagoromo, Luca Cerizza
ivory, Meiji period (1868-1912) / mid Taisho period (1912-1926), collection
Mudec - Museo delle Culture di Milano. Photo: Agostino Osio Cristiana Perrella
TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. INTRODUCTION 6
2. TEXTS
CRISTIANA PERRELLA AND MASSIMO BARTOLINI 9
Present, Past, Future and Infinitive
A Conversation
LUCA CERIZZA 27
“Living in Cognition by Trying and Trying Again”:
Massimo Bartolini and Art as Experience
CARLO FALCIANI 47
The Compass in your Eye—the Measurement of
the Field
CHUS MARTINEZ 59
Rolling Elegance
DAVID TOOP 69
Organ Loft: the listening sensibility of Massimo
Bartolini
ANDREA VILIANI 79
In the shadow of another name, something shimmers.
The “work provider” Massimo Bartolini
FRANCESCA COMISSO E LUISA PERLO / A.TITOLO 87
Making Place
FIONA BRADLEY 97
Massimo Bartolini: Little Moments of Happiness
LAURA CHERUBINI 105
Books Forgotten by Heart
MARCO SCOTINI 113
The Threshold as Method
Massimo Bartolini and the Space of Difference
JEREMY MILLAR 127
“…there is an ecstatic mechanism in birds that makes
them fly upwards in spite of worms…”
3. WORKS 1989–2020 135

4. IN LÀ 2021-2022
LUCA CERIZZA, ELENA MAGINI 419
Introduction to the Exhibition
GAVIN BRYARS 420
Notes on the music for In là
5. APPARATUS
GABRIELLA VALENTE 453
Biography, Bibliography
INTRODUCTION
Massimo Bartolini’s exhibition at the Centro per
l’arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci is an important
occasion for many reasons: it celebrates a Tuscan
artist of international fame within the region’s
primary contemporary art museum; it realizes one
of the most ambitious projects of the artist’s career,
presenting his interdisciplinary artistic practice in
its many forms; it punctuates the gallery spaces with
a highly varied series of works, narrating the voyage
of Bartolini’s artistic production over the past three
decades; and it renews this institution’s responsibili-
ty to produce significant monographs dedicated to
our country’s leading artists. Thanks to the support
of Intesa Sanpaolo, the Italian Ministry of Culture,
the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativi-
ty, and the Italian Council, this exhibition is en-
riched by a comprehensive catalogue that reflects
the complex and diverse interpretations of Barto-
lini’s work, including those by important interna-
tional contributors. The exhibition and this publica-
tion constitute two parts of an expansive project,
testifying to the importance of creating connections
across shared, rigorous programming.
Reopening museums with ambitious projects
such as these is a challenge that an institution
dedicated to contemporary culture cannot shy away
from. Despite the complexity of this historic mo-
ment, the Centro Pecci continues to believe in its
obligation to the Tuscan region and its communities.
The artistic project Bartolini developed throughout
the galleries and in the activities which inhabit and
animate the museum’s architecture, address a
diverse and varied public. Through an inclusive and
6 7
sustainable lens, the Centro Pecci seeks to explore
contemporary culture through a broad range of
disciplines, from art, music, fashion, dance, and
theater, to literature, gastronomy and oenology,
education, training, and architecture and urban
planning. As an institution dedicated to contempo-
rary art, the Centro Pecci has reaffirmed its mission
to stimulate our senses after the torpor of the past
few years, offering a unique experience within the
rich cultural panorama found throughout Tuscany.
The Centro Pecci’s programming is developed
with a focus on expanding awareness and develop-
ment of the Tuscan region, both for those who
explore the gallery spaces regularly, as well as those
visitors who come to see them for the first time.
The museum’s relationship to Prato and Tuscany as
a whole is central to its identity, a context that not
only nurtures the cultural imaginaries that live
within its walls, but also defines its activities thanks
to its ongoing collaboration with the significant
cultural landscape of the region. Bartolini’s impres-
sive sculptural and sonic installations created for
this exhibition, presented alongside his works
which explore the fascinating relationship between
the body and the built and natural environments,
fully engage and represent the mission of the
Centro Pecci. A collective body defined by a syner-
gistic relationship of mutual exchange with the
landscape in which it is immersed—as Bartolini has
proposed here—can only be a good omen for the
new era to come.
STEFANO COLLICELLI CAGOL
Director of the Centro per
l’arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci
Hagoromo (“The Wings”) is the title of a well-known
piece of Nō theater from Japan. It tells the story of a
fisherman who discovers a magical cloak of feath-
ers, hanging from a tree branch, which belongs to a
Tennin—a dancing spirit in Japanese mythology.
When the Tennin asks for her cloak back, without
which she cannot return to heaven, the fisherman
agrees, on the condition that she first performs a
dance for him.
Hagoromo (1989) is also the title of what Massi-
mo Bartolini considers his first mature work. In it, a
musician improvises on a saxophone on a well-lit
stage, while a female dancer interprets the music,
moving inside a structure on wheels that looks
something like a miniature living unit. The perfor-
mance piece anticipates certain themes which will
come to characterize Bartolini’s artistic oeuvre: the
narrative dimension, which develops out of homag-
es, references, and samples of other stories, works
and biographies; the relationship with architectural
and spatial stylistic motifs; and the relationship
with the theatrical and performative dimension,
including through the use of sound and music.
In the years following the creation of Hagoromo,
which, like many of his other early pieces, was
informed more by a training in theater than one in
art, Bartolini’s practice expanded to include a tre-
mendous variety of media and materials, of surpris-
ing and unexpected incarnations of them: from
performances that involved temporary actors, the
general public, and architectural spaces, to drawings
executed over long periods of time; from large public
installations often created in collaboration with
other’s hands and skill sets, to small work sketches
made in the studio; from complex sound installations
to photography and video works.
This publication seeks to document Bartolini’s
artistic output in the most complete manner to
date, tracing his rhizomatic—non-hierarchical and
non-linear—career which has spanned over three
decades, including multiple incarnations in solo
and group shows and the most significant interna-
tional exhibitions. Presenting a multifaceted,
critical and historical analysis of Bartolini’s oeuvre,
this catalogue compiles not only a broad collection
of essays, by an international cohort of authors,
covering various themes, but is also richly illustrat-
ed and provides a complete and updated biography
and bibliography of the artist.
This book accompanies Bartolini’s exhibition at
the Centro per l’arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci in
Prato (September 16th, 2022–January 8th, 2023;
curated by Luca Cerizza with Elena Magini), sum-
marizing the show through photographic documen-
tation and texts by the curators as well as the com-
poser Gavin Bryars, who collaborated with Bartolini
on a monumental sound installation which serves as
the fulcrum of the exhibition. This catalogue and the
exhibition constitute two parts of a single project,
working in perfect dialogue with one another; the
publication provides an overview of Bartolini’s
practice, one which the show, with its experimental
and non-linear approach, deliberately rejects.
A complex publication such as this one would not
have been possible without the help of a strong
team’s efforts over an extended period of time. The
curators would like to thank, first and foremost, all of
the writers for their essay contributions which have
deepened the literature around Bartolini’s multi-
forme work; the editors Vittoria Pavesi and Camilla
Mozzato who took turns in the vital coordination of
the project; Gabriella Valente for her careful editing
of the artist’s biography and bibliography; and finally
Lorenzo Gigotti and the staff of NERO, in particular
Carolina Feliziani, for building the intricate architec-
ture of this volume in close collaboration with the
curators and the artist. Luca Cerizza would like to
thank Cristiana Perrella for having initiated this
ambitious curatorial and editorial project, as well as
Massimo Bartolini for sharing a rich dialogue with
him that began in 1996 and has deepened and inten-
sified over these past three years. Beyond her co-cu-
rator and the artist—fellow companions throughout
this exciting journey—Cristiana Perrella would like
to thank the Directorate-General for Contemporary
Creativity at the Italian Ministry of Culture for their
support of the project.
LUCA CERIZZA, CRISTIANA PERRELLA
Luca Cerizza, Cristiana Perrella, Massimo Bartolini,
and the entire team of NERO would like to dedicate
this project in memory of Luisa Perlo, a friend,
curator, point of reference for public art in Italy,
and author of one of this book’s texts, which, sadly,
she will not see published.
Present, Past, Future and
Infinitive. A Conversation
between Massimo Bartolini
and Cristiana Perrella
CP In what spirit do you face this first attempt to
read and systematize your entire work? I had the
sense that you were putting up some resistance.
MB Indeed, I do put up resistance. It is a kind of
great psychoanalysis, in which you reexamine
the works made over thirty years with today’s
eye; and not all of them resist. It is formative, but
also painful. I have always thought I could work
from pure “flashes,” then age taught me how to
put things together, but this is the greatest
attempt at a wider systematization that I have
ever made. Five years ago, I wouldn’t have been
able to do it, now I do, but with great difficulty.
CP Why? What has changed in five years?
MB I began to teach. I hated instruction; when
I studied at the Florence Academy of Fine Arts
it was a rather disastrous experience. Except for
certain encounters—Luciano Cavallaro, Adri-
ano Sofri—and for the lessons on Duchamp, I
was as ignorant when I left as when I entered. I
didn’t know anything about art and I continued
not to know anything until I began to teach.
There is a famous joke that says, “if you do not
know something try to teach it and you will see
that you will learn it.” This is exactly how it hap-
pened to me. Seven years ago, by chance, almost
like a phone call in the night…
CP Who called you?
MB Terry Adkins died, and Carlos Basualdo
called me and asked me if I wanted to take his
place at the School of Design at Penn University in
Philadelphia. My English was even worse than
now, but I accepted. I set out to study art, because
I was a strong reader of narrative and poetry, but
not of theory, and even less so of criticsm: I knew
very little. I have discovered many things teaching.
CP What did you teach?
MB The Master’s in Fine Arts, so all my students
were already conversant. Something clicked
there: at more than fifty years old, I was able to
place my work within a history of art that I had
been ignoring. That changed me, to the point
9
that today, perhaps, I can do a book like this.
CP Did it help you to rationalize your work’s lines
of development?
MB There is a beautiful line from Rimabaud:
“My immortal soul, keep your vow despite the
lonely night.” I have always believed that inside
of me, in a perhaps unconscious way, the line
was clear; I believed in it as one believes in God,
thinking, “I don’t understand, but my soul
knows it,” or something like that. In reality, it
was not exactly like that. Teaching put me
within a broader historical discourse, or chroni-
cle of art, and at that point, the work also
changed. I made many fewer works. I became
more reflective, a kind of oxidation of the mind
called wisdom. A big transition for me.
CP Your work over thirty years has certainly not
developed in a linear way, but in a rizomatic one,
I would say. You have widened your field of action to
always include new ideas, new themes, but without
abandoning the initial nuclei of reflection.
It is as if your threads of research don’t run out, but
grow, generating further questions, opening further
pursuits. Everything begins from a point and then
branches outwards. I would like to begin by individ-
uating it, this point.
MB The seed… generally it is made to coincide
with the beginning, no? I don’t know if it is right
or wrong, but it is in any case a rational enough
figure, Cartesian. Since I come from a not particu-
larly stimulating place and being rather ignorant,
for me, it began with the necessity of understand-
ing something of my surroundings and myself. I
clearly remember that moment. Now I’m reading
Works by Vitaliano Trevisan, who at a certain
point says: “I began to write on the eighteenth of
November 1992.” It is the same for me.
CP And when was that?
MB I do not remember the date, but it was
while I was working as a surveyor.
CP Did you graduate?
MB Yes, I also have the certification from the
province of Livorno. A surveyor like Trevisan.
I was working at a surveyor’s office, but I was
restless. I knew very little of art, it was more a
fascination that began when, doing the military
service. I saw a soldier drawing. He was copying
Klimt or Caravaggio, and it seemed like a miracle
to me. So beautiful that I wanted to try too. But, it
was a pastime: some people go fishing; I copied
 drawings and photgraphs. Then, however, my life
stopped working, and one day, in front of a
wave-beaten jetty, I said to myself, “If I get to the
end and come back without running, I will change
my life.” I set off on foot, slowly; I returned all wet;
and I left the surveyor’s office. “And now what do
I do?” I thought and it seemed to me that the only
way to figure it out at that point was to dedicate
myself to religion, or to philosophy, or even art.
At that time, I practiced Hindu meditations, but I
quickly understood that philosophy was not my
road… I’m a little more immanent… “Art!” I
thought, that at least one is not alone with one’s
own soul, as Michel Piccoli says, but being in
Cecina, I had no references so I enrolled in the
Academy of Fine Arts in Florence and started
from there.
CP Science did not appeal to you, as a method for
understanding the world?
MB Not at that time. However, I encountered it
immediately afterwards. When I was at the
Academy, Luciano Cavallaro gave me Bateson’s
Ecology of Mind. He said “you have to read this
book,” and that is where science entered in all
its power. I have never left its study since.
CP Therefore, you arrived at science through art.
MB Yes, a somewhat romanticized science,
popular science, not that of the scientist. It is
true, however, that by studying as a surveyor, one
does a lot of mathematics, topography, construc-
tion technology, all knowledge that I have used
an awful lot in my work. The world of the survey-
or is strictly bidemnsional, a drawn, Cartesian
world. The real science, however, came later,
with Bateson, and with it came a world that is no
longer so secure of having a single level, but
where there are many levels, a multifarious
world. But, my true education has essentially
been the people I have met.
CP And when did you approach theater, present to
a great extent in your first works?
MB When I was at the Academy, I was living
with four other students in a little apartment,
and we replied to the advertisement of a compa-
ny in Florence, Aldo di Criscio’s Bausette Theat-
er, which was looking for actors. We started,
and di Criscio, who also loved excersizing a
pedagogical role, took us to see all the theater
shows that were being put on in the city.
CP It was a golden moment for experimental theater
10
in Tuscany. In the 1980s there were the Magazzini,
Krypton, a strong connection with the visual arts, the
search for a language beyond all disciplinary bounda-
ries, the relationship with technology, video....
MB Yes, I also saw Marcido Marcidorjs and
Famosa Mimosa, and Le albe di Verhaeren. We
went around a lot. Staying in Cecina, in the
summer at Castiglioncello, there was Castello
Pasquini, where I saw Micha van Hoecke, Mau-
rice Béjart’s company, Kazuo Ono. We did not,
however, go and see exhibitions.
CP They were also years when art was made in
nightclubs, fashion ateliers, and theaters, rather
than in exhibitions. To get out from the designated
places, to mix languages, was the hallmark of the
livelier Florentine culture in the 1980s.
MB I arrived when that radical intent had
already been softened by a more pop attitude.
Mendini was going strong, there was Buti, King
Kong Production, big lights, Wood’s lamps, it
wasn’t an environment that I frequented often.
The only artist I met directly was Mario Mariotti.
CP Were you not in contact with artists of your
generation?
MB No I was rather solipsistic until I went to
Milan, a bit later. I didn’t know anybody; I didn’t
meet anybody. I later met Vittorio Corsini, who
was from Cecina like me and was already exhib-
iting at Sargentini’s in Rome. I always went to his
studio and he taught me a lot but I had no other
contacts. My readings also went in another
direction: I was reading about Grotowski, about
the Odin Teatret but not Rosalind Krauss...
CP At that time, the mainstream references in art
were the Transavanguardia, and Arte Povera, which
began to gain recognition from the market in exactly
those years. A certain maximalism was ingrained,
even if of a postmodern bent, a still heroic, individu-
alistic idea of art. Then at the end of the 1980s,
beginning of the 1990s, your generation comes along,
so everything changes.
MB In those years, it seems to me that there was
a strange balance between mainstream and more
marginal research experiences. The system did
not yet engulf alternative spaces, which managed
to remain fairly independent without being
sectarian, the same happened for people. Then
something happens, the margin retreats to the
center. I was too artistically immature to per-
ceive certain changes; I had in mind Giacometti,
Brancusi, Duchamp, as a more contemporary
reference, Enzo Cucchi. I did my thesis at the
Academy on plinths, from the Giorgione's
Castelfranco altarpiece to Manzoni’s magic bases
to my artist friend Cosimo Vinci’s portable podium.
CP Does the figure of the stage, which recurs in your
work, come from there as well as from the theater?
MB Definitely, even if it is thanks to theater
that I discovered plinths in art.
The thesis ended with a quotation from a text
by Cucchi: “It is said that once upon a time
painters... solitary navigators poured out imag-
es...to set a course.” I was a great admirer of him,
above all of his writings and drawings; to this
day, I think he is one of the greatest writer-art-
ists. There is in him a form of irony with respect
to man, to the world, that I liked very much. I
saw his exhibition at the Centro Pecci in 1989,
together with Cosimo, who, in addition to being
a friend, I consider a great teacher and with
whom I read Heidegger, Paul Valery... We spent a
whole day commenting, analyzing, and accompa-
nying with stories and poems those great fables
that were the monumental embossed works or
the repainted backdrops of sets that Cucchi
presented in that exhibition. Transavanguardia,
as a movement, on the other hand, never really
grabbed me all that much. Reading Heidegger
undermined the heroic idea of art and pushed
me to the attempt to understand things outside
of man’s area of action. To begin to think, “I am
not just me, I am also context,” clearly pushed me
toward another way of understanding art.
CP In that sense, did the relationship with Mario
Merz, whose assistant you were, shape anything?
MB When I was working with Mario Merz, I
had already done exhibitions and I already had a
certain kind of approach. In my opinion, Mario
is a painter, always, and I share with him the
sentiment of unifying, of enveloping. For exam-
ple, I remember his exhibition at Pecci, the spiral
of wood bundles that crossed the entire Museum
from the outside to the inside. He had drawn a
spiral on the floor, which was then displayed in
space. The sculpture materialized a drawing.
CP Yes, an extraordinary work, a unique interven-
tion that traverses, embraces, all of the museum’s
rooms, creating a frictional relation between its
organic form and the architecture’s orthoganal
space. Did you think of that work when you con-
11
cieved your project for the Pecci Center, which also
unifies the space with a single sign?
MB In my case, if I may permit myself a com-
parison with a very beautiful work by a giant
figure, there is no drawing from the outside, but
it starts from the inside. Let me explain: the
course of my structure at Pecci is dictated by the
course of the passage of the rooms, not superim-
posed by the spiral. The material is almost
entirely what exists in the rooms themselves, not
an imported, alien material. In practice, a
strange paradox is unleashed: Mario’s work is a
spiral that is formed with external materials, my
work, instead, does not have the appearence of
the cochlea, the spiral, but does form itself in the
same way: by emanation.
CP At that time, the first forms of relational art were
also manifesting themselves. Incidentally, it is precise-
ly in Tuscany, with the group of artists named the
“Piombinesi”, that we have the first experience of
these practices in our country.
MB The Piombinesi were an isolated diamond
that were then taken up by Domenico Nardone
with the help of Sergio Casoli and brought to a
certain point of notoriety and visibility. I
remember that Flash Art followed their entire
parabolic course… I liked them, even if I didn’t
understand them. Or rather, I understood them,
but I wasn’t particularly captivated. It was
never a line of thinking that led me to make a
work; it was always the opposite.
CP However, the spirit of the time also influenced
your work.
MB Yes. When I came out of the Academy, up
until ’91/’92, I was making plaster sculptures,
which I then buried.
CP And how did the transition to installation come
about?
MB My first installation work, some dental
01
 roots made of alabaster (a material I worked
with a lot) stuck in the ceiling [fig. 1], I consider a
bit of a bridge. Straight afterwards, I did the
fifty-seven centimeter raised floor at Francesca
Sorace’s house [Untitled, (Casa Sorace) 1993]. I
dreamed it; it was a strange dream, a half
nightmare. I started working on it and it became
a work on perspective, a kind of large prosthesis.
CP It is more a stumbling block than a prosthesis,
because every ordinary step in that space must be
rethought, by virtue of the change in floor level.
MB Any upgrade starts with a stumble, a forced
pause, an afterthought, but here it is more the
things than the people that are stuck. In a later
version, the ability to interact with objects is
removed. At Francesca’s, on the other hand, you
could enter; you could use the closet; you could
lower yourself into the bed; the window became
dangerous. However, it was something that came
more from theater—but without theatricality—
than from art. I really liked theater, because you
used all the materials; you put everything
together; you built spaces and people in the same
way. However, the thing I found most interesting
was the presence of the audience. So, I tried to
restore this idea of presence, one who enters
inside, one who touches something, in short,
skin to skin contact with the work.
CP Before Roots and the floor, however, there had
been performative works Drum, 1989 and Il frutto,
1990, which even more visibly showed the connec-
tion with the theater.
MB They certainly came out of that influence,
but with less intention and less culture. The
circumstances had also shaped them. I believe
that a good work is half made by the occasion. I
had friends, whom I always saw, Edoardo
Marraffa, a very good saxophonist, and Lucia
Biondo, a fantastic dancer...
CP Who appear in both works…
MB Yes, and therefore completed these actions.
CP Who was your public composed of?
MB Friends. We would do a dinner and then…
CP Your first actual exhibition was the one at Artra
in Milan in 1993.
MB Thanks to Marcella Stefanoni, who came
to my house in viale Certosa to see the works
and within a year called me to exhibit. Before, I
had only done small things in private spaces.
The most beautiful was a group exhibiton at a
12
hairdresser’s parlour in Milan, Orea Malià. It
was very fun, with the support of Marcella,
who was one of those responsible for the
programming; I encountered many new things
and people, like the great Shake Edizioni, an
underground publishing cooperative in Milan,
specialized in counterculture. It published Neil
Stephenson, William Burroughs...
CP Your generation was very much marked by an
ironic detatchment from things, a multiplicituous
reading of reality and also a reduced individualism.
This “lightheartedness” has long been read nega-
tively, and it is an analysis that should be revised. In
the book L’uccello e la piuma Luca Cerizza begins
this revision, claiming that the art of those years
was in its own way also political precisely through
the laterality of its thinking.
MB In my opinon, it is a discussion that only
regards Milan, and some remarkable figures
such as Cesare Pietroiusti, because the rest of
Italy, including Tuscany, in those years, was still
tied to the rehash of classicism
CP There were certainly figures in Milan, like
Corrado Levi, who were more in tune with other
instances of the contemporary.
MB I would go even further back, it is some-
thing that starts earlier, for example, with
Munari... how much Munari is there in Corra-
do Levi? Then there is another important thing:
in Milan, the industrialization of art and design
eliminated the heroic aspect... Next come Levi,
Fabro, Garutti, cleansed of the excesses of myth,
they manage to communicate a beautiful
freedom and happiness of action. “When I
think, I laugh,” Fabro says in ‘68... true masters.
When I read Fabro’s lectures “Arte torna arte” I
think, “darn it, though, how he believed it!”
CP It is curious how the generation that they
formed then had—as you say—much more the
ethics of doubt than the ethics of certainty.
MB Because artists like Liliana Moro, Mario
Airò and then Grazia Toderi, who are then the
ones I was in contact with in Milan, took
lightness, fun and sensuality from Fabro. The
two lines, lightheartedness and structure came
together in a way that generated fantastic
artists.
CP You arrived quite early in Milan, in 1990. Why
did you go?
MB Because, I had no interlocutors in Tuscany.
Things were happening in Milan, so I went and
won a contest to become a community educator
in a private cooperative that ran a community
center in Cinisello Balsamo. The center, which
was in a school, was completely wrecked... it was
an experience that changed me, stories, dramas,
really shocking situations. There, I met Mario
Gorni, who was staying in Cusano Milanino.
When they closed the center, because everyone
was going there to deal drugs, they put us in the
municipality office to do something. I was at an
infopoint for young people and I curated two
shows there. I put out a call for proposals and
lots of applications came in. The porticos of
Villa Ghirlanda were used and there were people
reading, people playing music, people showing
pictures... it was called The Parnassus and it
worked. Mario would occasionally come and we
would spend time together. He involved me in
an exhibition in a lost place. He still occasionally
asks me, “but do you still have that work?” “No, I
don’t know where it is.” “Good, you did well,
throw it away.” It was a plaster cast of four
grooves in the ground and I had put objects in it,
also made of plaster.
CP Talking about Cecina and the part of Tuscany
where you were born, you said you realized early on
that there weren’t any stimuli for you. However,
looking at your work, the relationship with the land,
nature, and the landscape is very strong. When I
came to visit you, one of the last times, in the
winter, you took me to the sea and then to some tuff
caves, in the woods. You told me that you needed to
see those places to understand your work.
MB In our neck of the woods, wherever you
are, you always know that there is some space
on one side, towards the sea. There is the open
horizon, and it is towards the west. To the east,
on the other hand, there are the woods, the
hills. To the west, open space, to the east, closed
space, and one stands there, in the middle. I
mean, precisely because I had those roots I was
able to move. If you come from somewhere, you
can go somewhere; if you don’t come from
anywhere, you can’t go anywhere.
CP Art critic Pierluigi Tazzi also always used to say
this. What was your relationship with him?
MB We did one or two things together, but I
don’t think he was very interested in my work. I
knew him very little but I held him in high
13
esteem for his writings and for what I heard
him say. He once invited me to do a beautiful
project—a “side event” of the 2001 Szeemann
Biennial. It was an exhibition curated together
with Fabio Cavallucci: Refreshing. The artists
were asked to make temporary places of re-
freshment: a bar, a restaurant, a food trolley.
Cai Guo-Qiang had made a bicycle; Olafur
Eliasson and Tobias Rehberger made the restau-
rant. I made the bar.
CP An idea that was later taken up for the Birn-
baum Biennial, where Rehberger made the bar and
you the education room.
MB The installations commissioned by Birbaum
were permanent. The one in 2001 was tempo-
rary, but I liked it; I would like to do it again.
Mine was a kiosk-bar, whose roof opened and
closed like an oyster over the bar. With the roof
open the bar opened to the outside too, like a
talking, open mouth; while with the roof closed,
it became a more cozy place, sitting inside you
felt protected, like inside a stomach. The perfect
bar for getting drunk [Bar aperto-chiuso, 2001]...
CP Let us talk about interiors: there are many
landscapes in your work, but also many rooms. The
theme of inhabiting recurs.
MB My father was a small construction busi-
nessman and did renovations, so I can say I was
born on a construction site; I liked to go there. I
worked with him, for several summers, so I
know the house from the foundations in the
ground up to the roof. The room, the door, the
window are all elements that I know well from
a technical point of view and they have become
icons for me. It is the inside of you and the
outside of you. Looking back for this book, I
realize that I made a whole house, piece by
piece, doors, windows, thresholds, floors, tables,
ceilings, scaffolding, walls. It is a kind of post-
humous project on the 1:1 scale.
CP As if the project totally adheres to reality...
MB I think of Borges’ 1:1 map: the only exact
plan is the posthumous plan. Once again,
Trevisan, who was a surveyor, said that the
architect he worked for didn’t do first the draft
then the final version of his drawings: he was
obtaining the drafts by tracing the actual
drawings! No a priori design is ever consistent
with what gets made. The only way to match
the concrete world and the world of ideas is to
 adapt the ideas to what you are able to make.
CP Conceptualizing reality and the life that takes
place in spaces.
MB If there is a world of ideas, it is the world
of plans.
CP Dogville by Lars von Triers comes to mind, a
film in where the spaces in which the plot develops
are traced on the ground and represent simulations
of environments (the houses, the church, the school,
the stores).
MB I saw that film by myself in Cecina; once I
came out, I needed a few minutes to compre-
hend that the film had finished. There are
boundaries and bodies, few things… but bound-
aries don’t have bodies and let loose an uncon-
trollable, violent and limitless intensity.
CP Returning to the relationship between interiors
and landscapes, which is one of the oppositional
pairs in your work, in the middle there is always the
threshold. The door, the window are the boundary
between the two elements, the point of synthesis.
MB Polarity produces synthesis, which is what I
favor. Now as I get older perhaps less so, because
anyway, synthesis is really a flash, a moment
when things put themselves into a bit of order,
naturally... synthesis is never entirely explaina-
ble, but it offers in return a kind of immediacy, a
scent of harmony. I would like the work to be
understood even if observed in a rush.
CP As in Bande à part by Godard, the scene where
they run into the Louvre.
MB Yes, in my opinion the work must have the
possibility of being understood in a second, as
much as in five minutes or in an hour. When a
works allows this, then it is well made. The
synthesis comes from discourse. I made a work
with a man who runs in a courtyard [Run
Ibrahim, 2000] and I had to refer to alchemy to
do it: nigredo, albedo and color theory. It is a
black runner who disappears into the night and
on his run follows the lights of the courtyard
windows as they light up in sequence. I didn’t
know that even a jog can be beautiful; I needed
a conceptual structure, which perhaps weighed
everything down. Lightness for me was an
arrival point (and I’m not there yet) and not a
starting point. Maybe I don’t even have it now,
however, levity for me was still an achievement,
whereas my Milanese friends already had it. I
think there was a greater awareness in them,
14
due to their path; I always had to make an
effort to bring it out, because, since I didn’t
know anything, I was learning randomly,
through encounters.
CP It is nice that among the greatest artists of your
generation, you and Stefano Arienti came to art from
external and technical paths (he is an agronomist.)
MB I believe that in Stefano's work his studies
are important, especially in the way he works
according to a method, even classificatory one,
typical of botany. Marco Mazzucconi was also
an architect by training, but a property devel-
oper. I always loved his work very much. And
Mario Airò, I don’t think he had other studies,
maybe one year of university; he really was
born an artist. I have always considered it an
asset to come from another background, even if
there are many works in my career that maybe
I would have done differently if I had known
more. For example, the series of rooms with
curved corners: [Heads, 1996–2004] one day in
2005 I was told, “There’s a guy named Doug
Wheeler who did infinity room spaces, which
are very similar to yours.” I checked and it was
true. I put objects in the spaces, and the rooms
are closed on all sides. In short, there are
differences from Wheeler’s that, after some
dismay, made me think that my works were fine
just the same. But, if I had known that before, I
might not have made them. Then it happened
that Paul Schimmel invited me to exhibit one in
a show at MOCA in 2005, where they have
Wheeler’s works in their collection, precisely
because he considered it a continuation. I
understood something important there: that a
work of art is never made by a single artist.
Authorship is a simplification at best, specula-
tion at worst. My rooms, however, emerge from
a totally different history, from my solipsism,
from love of the desert, (the sea and sky are
deserts for me) and from “limbo,” which I had
once seen in a photography studio.
CP That white backdrop with curved corners, due to
which in the end every object that is put in front of us
lies as if floating in a space without reference points.
MB For me those spaces had to tell a story,
through the objects that I inserted within and
which in the void acquired a particular vivdiness.
CP Where did you make the first?
MB In London and then at De Carlo, in via
Bocconi, in 1996 to 97. In those years, I was
influenced by books such as Stephenson’s Snow
Crash, which even the concept of “metaverse”
derives from, or Gibson’s Neuromancer. I was
trying to understand how the digital can be
physicalized and rendered in my work. In the
first room that I made there were mouse cursor
arrows that were projected on the walls and
moved to the rhythm of a drum solo [Head no. 1,
1996–97]. In the second there was a table with a
screensaver projected onto its surface (the
world’s first ever screen was the table) [Head
no.2, (Studio), 1997–98]. The third room wasn’t
curved, but upon entering it, one was was
greeted by the sound of a computer booting up,
while the lights were brightened to maximum
intensity and then dimmed to black [Head no.3
(Library), 1996–97]. There are many differences
with Wheeler’s work, however, I had to earn the
fact of not having torn the pages from all the
books on which those works of mine are pub-
lished. But now, I have made up with it and, in
fact, I have begun to “collaborate” with other
artists—even if they don’t know it—to pay
homage to them, drawing from it a series of
works. When I was working with Vittorio
Corsini in Florence, I heard Gavin Bryars for the
first time (Vittorio is a great music connoisseur)
and I loved the album Hommages. I listened to it
continuously while working and it made me
understand how beautiful, sweet and relaxing it
is to make a tribute to someone or something.
CP Is the album a tribute to specific musicians?
MB The first track is dedicated to Bill Evans, it
is very beautiful; it has a gift, something that
provides a release… What I know now I owe to
many maestros that I have had, almost all of
whom I remember. Cosimo introduced me to
the Goldberg Variations and to Heidegger. Vitto-
rio to Gavin Bryars, everything is related to a
name for me; it is a world made up of friends
and encounters, which I like.
CP By teaching, you are in the postion to become
somebody’s master. How do you experience this
handover?
MB I try to avoid it, because I’m not good
enough to be a master. It would be enough for
me to be able to recommend a good book, to
support, to accelerate. To become a master
requires that one knows where to go and I have
15
never had a clear idea. However, I can under-
stand how you may go where you want, without
it meaning that you have to come to where I go.
The problem of the master is that sometimes he
makes you go where he wants.
CP Time is one of the great themes in your work,
and it is also its instrument. Your first works were
performative, tied to a defined, effemeral and
inescapable temporality, that can be repeated, but
will never be the same. Then there is sound, which
is inevitably tied to time; there is the cycle of
nature, that your work often agrees with. There is
the time of machines and of mechanisms, which
remove things from production and restore them to
the imagination; and there is the narrative charac-
ter of works that refuse to be understood in a single
moment and that ask to be in time. Working on this
book and on its iconographic apparatus, attempting
to understand how to better describe your work, we
have seen how difficult it is to grasp its essence in a
single image, even if there are beautiful and iconic
photos. You yourself tend to prefer a sequence,
multiple points of view, or the help of a text that
tells and recounts what the image fails to say or
show. Do you live this aspect as a limit or an expres-
sion of the richness of your work?
MB Definitely as a sign of richness; it is some-
thing that shares in the time of the viewer. Those
who experience the work live in time and move
in turn. There is a sympathy, a similitude. With
respect to an inorganic sculpture, the object that
has this occult mobility has a different temporal
scale. The botanist Stafano Manuso affirms in
one of his books that we haven’t considered trees
as living beings, because we have a different time
scale. For us, the vital processes of a tree are
inexistent, because they develop over too long a
time period. The different scale of time causes
this kind of incomprehension.
CP The time of art has long been an absolute time,
a time cut off from the flow of our life. The great
works of the past crystallize a moment even when
they seek simultaneity, even when they attempt to
represent multiple moments in time. Among the
very few of your works that seem not to search for a
dynamic relation with time there is the Montagne
(1995–ongoing); and it seems to me that they return
in your discourse like punctuation. It’s not by
chance that they are also the most immediately
attributable to the language of art, to sculpture. I
therefore wanted to reflect on the time of art, on
the time of your works and on languages.
02
MB I have always considered the mountain a
linchpin of space. Wherever you put they,
everything revolves around they. For me, it is a
point of reference and has a link to performa-
tivity rather than sculpture. My mountains are
flat, they aren’t pointed, they look to Beato
Angelico and to the mountains of the Floren-
tine renaissance painters [fig. 2 and fig. 3].
The idea is not to copy, but to use those forms,
and the strong Florentine stone, the stone of
the paving of Piazza della Signoria. Being flat,
one can climb onto them. They are a step, a
base. I would like it if someone were to sponta-
neously climb up.
03
CP Another work that recurs over time, like the
Montagne, are the Dews (2006–ongoing), here too,
there is a reference to a specific language of art, to
monochrome in painting.
MB I have always been struck by monochrome,
considering the figure to be coercive, something
that impels one to think something else in a very
specific way. That being said, the figurative
painters move me greatly: I love Morandi; I love
Cucchi; I love painters that have a narrative and
that want to tell me something. I love above all
the spaces left empty by the figure on the canvas:
16
Michaël Borremans, Luc Tuymans. My natural
inclination, though, has always been toward
monochromists, such as Barnett Newman, who
is perhaps the one I most admire, with his form
of indifference to painting and of engagement
with the space and time of the painting.
CP But also indifference to time, because it we are
dealing with absolute, spiritual, unchanging painting.
MB The audience is the time of that work. In
this sense, large formats have been a true revolu-
tion. When you take at least 5 seconds to walk
along a painting, the painting becomes time. To
return to the point, my first two-dimensional
works were drawings of trees, which incorporate
time, on top of incorporating a rule since they are
sheets of paper folded more or less randomly, and
where the fold is, I draw the tree. They are trees
that exist in moment in which they are drawn. It
is a series that I have done since ’95 and that will
continue. Clearly, trees grow, change, disappear;
therefore the work, in its whole as a series,
records the passage of time, incorporates an
archived time, a time that returns, putting
together drawings from different years.
CP Therefore, every tree that you represent in the
series is a pinpointed tree?
MB They are all the trees that have been in the
garden of my studio. There are trees that I no
longer have and others that are still there. The
design also changed; in the beginning, it was very
minimal, simple; then it became more complex
because I realized that those trees came from
surveyors’ drawings of trees: when you make
architectural drawings you add saplings to
beautify the ugliness of the terraced houses. I
could do better but I like them to have that
character, in fact, maybe I even do them too well.
The Dews, as you said, are also recurring works
that relate to my love of monochrome. The idea
was to make a monochrome that eventually
changes, and in fact the Dews change color
depending on the point of view from which you
look at them. They are a work that changes, and
where there is change there is time. Even the
drops of dew on the surfice of the canvas change,
merge. As soon as it is installed, the work has
many fine drops; the more time passes, the larger
the drops become. In still life a chemical dew is
used, which evaporates much more slowly than
water; the drops can also last a long time, I have a
Dew from fifteen years ago and there are still
drops on it; I have never touched it.
CP In your work, there is linear time and circular
time. Between the two, which is your time? I’m
thinking of works like Cera persa [2017–2022] [fig. 4]
04
and of the sense of an ending and of the cognition
of what is lost, which pervades the entire work, but
also of waves, of the seasons and of references to
the buddhist religion, which rather imply a return,
something cyclical.
MB Cera persa comes from a work I did when I
turned fifty years old. They had prepared a cake
for me with number fifty candles and it seemed
unbearable to me. So I made Fifty, (2012) with
those candels cast in bronze. The cast had a
point, like a nail, like a painful thought, that I
was not able to forget and I wanted to develop.
Cera persa is composed of the casting of candels
from numbers one to sixty, in a linear progres-
sion. Over the years I have changed a lot: before I
lived in immanence, therefore in a time that,
rather than linear, is punctiform. I would forget
everything I did. With getting older and the
change generated by teaching, time came back
round in the form of catching up with what I had
ignored at certain moments. Because of this,
very often turning to the past means turning to
something new. So I would say that I live in a
time between the two times, past and future,
almost equally unknown. A kind of distraction
elicited by a nonlinear sense of time. I don’t
believe in evolution, I haven’t evolved since I was
a one year old; I have changed; my body and
related experiences have changed; but evolution
implies a towards, a direction, a refinement, and
it doesn’t necessarily coincide with change. I feel
linear time as something that has to do with
being able to make predictions, with a form of
control.
17
CP I have to say that I have always thought of
linear time as a tragic time, not the time of evolu-
tion, nor the time of control, but as a time that
cannot fail to consider the end. Circular time has
therefore always been, for me, a consolatory time,
because it starts again, and a time in which the end
makes sense, because it is the inevitable condition
of a new beginning. The difference between the two
times is the relationship to the end.
MB I agree, but the concept of an end is an
approximation too, like linear time, which, at a
certain point, according to its nature, cannot
include the complexity of the world. Even
circular time is a definition that tends to simpli-
fy: I imagine the course of time more like a
strange animal, like an ameba with infinite
offshoots whose edges are traversed by events
that meet in certain loops, twisting and turn-
ing… It much resembles how we think of space,
in short. While linear and circular time are
conventions, I believe that, paradoxically, one
has more experience of amoeboid time than
linear time. Saint Augustine said, “What is time?
If no one asks me, I know. If I want to explaint
to someone else who asks me, I do not know.” It
really is the most judicious sentence that may be
said on this subject. Carpaccio depicted St.
Augustine at the Dalmatian School in Venice.
[fig. 5] There is a score in the painting, in the
cartouche, you probably had to play this music
05
while looking at the painting. Another way to
bring time inside the painting.
CP So let us talk about time in music. What inter-
ests you most in bringing music into your work?
 MB As a boy I liked to play the drums; I fol-
lowed music; I began like everyone from Lucio
Dalla and from the Rockets, Kiss, to get to King
Crimson—who were very cultured—and to
begin to listen to what Fripp reccommended;
and so I discovered Coltrane and Bartók and
then I began to love jazz a lot, which has always
been present in my work, much like theater. For
example, In the curved rooms, there was always
a low sound that tended to vibrate the walls, a
note made with a keyboard, prolonged endlessly
such that at a certain point it began to assume
strange aspects, resonances. This has to do both
with movement—vibrating a wall, which is
apparently still—and with the idea that every
space has a sound. This is also why I really like
Giuseppe Chiari’s work in which he asserts that
he plays the room, the museum, the city...
CP It is interesting in your work on curved rooms
that, where space tries to nullify its points of reference
and thus become somehow continuous and absolute,
there is sound to give it a temporal dimension.
MB The objects placed inside them also have
this function; it is thanks to them, that strange
emptiness takes on an odor, a taste; it refers not
to an eternal time, but to the present time.
CP And to bodily time, which is not only the time of
movement but the time of life. How do you relate to it?
While we were talking about Cera persa I was thinking
of a work by Hans-Peter Feldman, 100 Years, which I
installed in an exhibition in a circular fashion: 101
photographs of people of ages ranging between a few
weeks to one-hundred years old, each with a label
identifying them and indicating their age. Looking at
them, everyone finds their own point in their lifetime
and reflects on the patency of bodily change.
MB Yes, it is a work that I loved very much and
that has some similarities with Cera persa, which,
however, is more ambiguous. The title refers to
the technique that I used to create the work,
which consists in the fusion of 60 birthday candle
numbers (the wax is lost in the bronze casting of
objects, which exists in the form of a copy of the
lost original); numbers don’t have faces. Those
numbers in Cera persa could be house numbers,
for example, or points in a list.
CP In all cultures, there is the necessity of marking
moments of passage; festivals are an essential
element from the anthropological point of view. You
have used festive season’s lights in some of your
18
works, the ones that are mounted in villages around
the annual patronal festival. Are these works also
related to the concept of marking time?
MB I had never thought of the connection to
Cera persa—lights, but undoubtedly it’s there.
Festivals, whether private or public, are moments
in which you celebrate together with others the
passage of time. That work was born during a
residency done in Sicily, in Ficarra, a small
village in the province of Messina, on the inita-
tion of Daniela Bigi. In that period, there fell the
patronal festival, which began a week before,
with bands going down the street, fireworks, and
priests with loudspeakers talking urbi et orbi.
The deactivated lights had been stacked just
below my house, waiting to be put up, and they
suddenly appeared to me as sculptures, whereas
when they are on you only see the light. I liked
the idea of using, in another world and in another
position, this ephemeral architecture, which is
linked ultimately to the celebration of power,
whether religious or political, through splendor,
wonder. To put them up horizontally instead of
vertically meant, for me, to weaken this aspect, to
reduce a sign of power to a landscape [La Strada
di sotto, 2011]. The man who put them up was a
special person, Don Valentino Ricciardi. I had
him do an interview in which he spoke about his
own interests for forty minutes. His voice, in the
video interview projected in a room, determines
the rythm by which the illumination’s little lights,
stacked in the other room, turn on and off.
CP I always brought the work back to the photos of
people stuck in the ground, such as Flowerbeds
(Anna), 1995 [fig. 6] or My Fourth Homage: to Car-
mine Carbone, 2003 in which the idea of the prov-
ince, of roots, was very strong.
MB The beauty of the province is that you like
06
it and hate it with the same intensity. You never
manage to like it completely and you never
manage to hate it completely, and so you always
live in permanent friction; you always live a
little bit in inner turmoil, in the province.
CP If the luminaries express an element tied to
popular religiosity in the Catholic tradition, other
works of yours address the theme of the sacred
through reference to Eastern forms of religious
thought. I don’t, however, see any mysticism in
these references.
MB Mine is a lay relationship to religion. I
powerfully share with it the desire to evoke
something invisibile. The Gesamtkunstwerk is an
invention of the Catholic Church, the association
of images and music. You hear the organ in Santa
Croce, you kneel down and think, “It exists!”
Cioran said, “If anyone should thank Bach, it is
God himself.” The image of the bodhisattva,
which I have used in some of my works, straddles
the line between religion and laicism; it is under-
stood as a condition of active presence in the
social dimension. The two works representing it
both have a strong relationship with time. One
[Revolutionary Monk, 2005] is a bronze statuette
of a bodhisattva in prayer, with an awkward
posture that indicates imperfection and whirls
like a vortex around itself, making prayer danger-
ous. The other [Pensive Bodhisattva, 2017–2018] is
instead pure time, which is not punctuated by
actions. It is a figure that does nothing epic; it
seems to lose time and instead is a clock. Like the
bell of a belfry that rings on the hour, the bo-
dhisattva comes out of his structure every hour. I
would say he sets a good example: doing nothing
for five minutes an hour could save the world.
CP However, it is you who gives movement to the
bodhisattva.
MB True, but if the beating of the bell is a call
to do something, the movement of bodhisattva
is a call to do nothing. Even that which turns in
on itself displays the power of meditation,
prayer. Prayer can be a weapon. And in fact if
you touch the spinning bodhisattva you will get
hurt. It has something to do with the bonzes
who used to set themselves on fire in the 1960s
in protest of the Vietnamese government’s
persecution of Buddhism. The motionless
bonzo sitting on the ground, wrapped in fire, is
a cult image [fig. 7]; and it is a reference for that
work. Pensive Bodhisattva, on the other hand, is
raised on an orthogonal structure that refers to
the Cartesian axes, x, y, z. Coordinates are
19
07
needed for the purposes of planning, of opera-
tion, but inaction doesn’t need coordinates.
One of the mottos of the 1960s was “never
work”; that’s it! I like this bodhisattva because
it adheres to that motto but with balance and
grace of figure. The grace of the mystics, to be
what God is by nature.
CP The use of organs leads to the theme of religion
too, because, either way, organ music is sacred
music par excellence. You have often used this
instrument in your work, even to the point of
making it the principal element of your exhibition
at the Pecci Center, with an unusually large struc-
ture that unwinds throughout the museum. Here,
too, there is a tension between opposites: on the
one hand the element of spiritual elevation suggest-
ed by organ music, and on the other the profane
materiality of the scaffolding tubes you use to build
your instrument.
MB In this work there is the idea of the sacred,
but the biographical aspect is also strong: since
my father, as I was saying, was a builder, as a
child I was always on scaffolding and around
construction sites. I was born there and I really
liked it a lot; you would go there to make war;
for me, it was a forbidden play park, but also
very accessable. It was also nice to work there; it
was a micro-jungle that could grow to become
extremely high. I don’t know how I came up
with the idea of building an organ there, perhaps
through the association of two things that
manage, in very different ways, to bridge dis-
tances: the scaffold through the physical combin-
ability of its elements, and the organ by instead
launching a vibration that propagates in the air,
in an immaterial but continuous way. In nature
the continuous sound is the sea, the sound of the
river; so many other sounds (birds, animals,
thunder, lightning, wind) have a moment.
Making an instrument that has a sustained
sound has been a cornerstone for music. The
 organ could virtually have an eternal sound, chitecture, destined to disappear as soon as the
provided that the bellows are always kept in use. construction, of which it is an instrument, is
The scaffold, on the other hand, lives in the finished; it is a premise, it is provisionary; it is
present, indeed, in the pre-present. It is a pre-ar- lightness and geometry. So human...

01 Roots, 1992. 05 Vittore Carpaccio, Visione

02 Untitled (Montagna che se la
fa sotto), 1995.
03 Untitled, 2004. With Beato
Angelico's Annunciazione, 1432 ca.
04 Cera persa (detail),
2017-2022.
di Sant’Agostino, 1502.
06 Flowerbeds (Anna), 1995.
07 Burning Monk, Saigon 1963,
photo Malcom Browne,
Associated Press.

Drawing of Trees Drawing of Trees Drawing of Trees

2003 21 2005 → 2008 →
 “Living in Cognition
LUCA CERIZZA
by Trying and Trying Again”:
Massimo Bartolini and Art
as Experience
It suffices to flick through the large, central part of
this catalogue—observe how, for dozens and dozens
of pages, images of works that traverse an extreme
variety of artistic languages, forms, measures, and
materials follow one after the other—to understand
at least this: to order or narrate the work of Massi-
mo Bartolini by means of some formal category
would be a doomed exercise. From performative
works that involve provisional actors, the public, or
architectonic space to drawings completed over
deliberately long periods of time; from large public
installations often created in collaboration with
other’s hands and skill sets to small work sketches
gathered together in the studio; from complex sound
sculptures to photographs and videos, Bartolini’s
work displays absolute freedom in its the use of
media, of productive methods, and is likewise
unpredictable in its formal results. Through the
exploration, the juxtaposition, and even the contra-
diction between the nature of different materials
and linguistic forms, his work delineates a rhizomat-
ic itinerary that constantly expands outwards
horizontally, following a line of thought to be
translated into a material, a technique, or a relation.
Naturally, in a chronological scansion that covers
more than thirty years of artistic practice (the
criteria adopted by this publication for the ordering
of his works), similar attitudes or even works or
series of works reappear like different inflections of
the same typology. Since they are not confined to a
narrow time span, as if resulting from a quickly
exhausted, lived experience, nor to a “vertical”
exploration of a medium or technique, works of
different genres cut across the years like variations,
reconsiderations, and regenerations of ideas ex-
plored many years before, while certain series of
works continue over the years as a varied exercise
in modes and details.
The chronological scansion rather refers back to
an exploratory path in which the artist gives differ-
ent forms to an expressive necessity. A necessity that
has its roots in what is perhaps the founding princi-
27
ple of his art-making: to construct by this means a
path of knowledge. Knowledge of oneself, of one’s
own relationship with the world, of the possibility of
relating to another and to the community.1 Like the
Buddha’s teachings, art is a vehicle, a means through
which one may potentially arrive at liberation—cer-
tainly not at truth.2 In this sense, his path is orient-
ed/directed toward incessant discovery and investi-
gation into the language of art, initially conducted
from a position of absolute isolation from the
artistic debate and context of the time. In this
itinerary, Bartolini seems to search time and again
for the material most adapted to giving form to an
expressive demand and a narrative possibility.3
Beginning from this initial cue, the text should
be read as a legend in order to orient oneself in one
of the possible maps of a path, understood as a
cognitive itinerary, that traverses, with a deliberate-
ly sustained rhythm and few pauses only (read here
as: critical analyses), more than thirty years of
work. Divided for convenience into a series of
thematic chapters that correspond to their different
“functions,” the works should not only be read as
recurring questions over and above the differences
in language in which they are posed, but also as
some of the possible responses that the artist
entrusts to art in its capacity as an instrument of
comprehension and relation with the world.4
Am I Experienced?
If Bartolini’s works may be read as instruments on
a path of knowledge, this itinerary is actualized in
the double sense of the artist’s direct participation
in the practice of his work and in the interaction on
the part of the audience with the work itself. An
experiential component, carried out as physical
action, is present in many of the artist’s works,
through the staging of a series of perceptual and
imaginative stimuli, instruments for questioning
the senses and the audience’s knowledge. If con-
structivist psychology teaches that one learns about
the world through action, Bartolini’s work aspires
to learn about the world through the action that
traverses or presides over the work of art.
However, rather than patient passages of slow
exploration, Bartolini’s first works amount to
visions, hallucinations, forms of pure rapture, even
enchantment. They are startling images, live explo-
rations of the expressive possibilities of the lan-
guage of art. They are born from a personal condi-
tion of dissatisfaction tied to the biographical
dimension of the artist. They are attempts to
undertake research, to make contact with a lan-
guage, that of art, which in truth was only studied
later on, after training as a surveyor. This is why
many of the early works rely, if anything, on forms
derived from theater, Bartolini’s only real artistic
education in those years, or on literary, poetic and
philosophical stimuli, in an attempt to “take the
body to where thought goes.”5
Performative situations mark the early works, in
which the experiential component is entrusted to
the technical skills of one or more performers who
inhabit or activate the work. There is already in
1989 a stage on which Bartolini invited dancer Lucia
Biondo to move within a small, mobile and extenda-
ble architecture, following the improvised music of
the saxophonist Edoardo Marraffa. A tribute to a
classic piece of Japanese Nō theater whose plot it
stylizes, Hagoromo is the work from which it was
decided to begin the iconographic journey of this
book, which takes the word as its title; it brings
together and anticipates many aspects that would
recur throughout Bartolini’s work: the narrative
dimension, which develops out of homages, refer-
ences, and samples of other stories, works and
biographies; the relationship with architectural and
spatial stylistic motifs; and the relationship with
the theatrical and performative dimension, includ-
ing through the use of sound and music.
Bartolini’s early works all have a performative
character: there is another stage on which Lucia
Biondo again moves, tilting it and eliciting sound
from four large stones tied to its corners (Drum,
1989); and again it is she who dances hanging from a
tree while a double bass plays for a dance the musi-
cian does not know in a live videotaped act (Il frutto,
1989). The performer hosted in the spaces prepared
by Bartolini is the activator of an image that is
transformed into action as an engine of knowledge.
Are You Experienced? (Said the Artist to
the Spectator)
As a consequence of opening to the other, in a
second instance, the artist begins to share with the
spectators part of this itinerary. Thus he invites
them to traverse the spaces he has modified and
prepared in the guise of an anarchic surveyor, a
28
visionary architect; to walk across a pavement
raised around the furniture of a house (Untitled
[Casa Sorace], 1993), putting into question hu-
man-space relations; to try to remain in equilibri-
um on a soft floor, an unpredictable wave on which
to surf between the furnishings of a private home
(Morbido Ground, 1994), or, years later, to cross a
tilting floor that makes a sound when the nuts
placed on its surface are distributed (Drum, 2002)
[fig. 1].6 To relearn to walk is to interrogate knowl-
01
edge we thought we had already acquired: the work
is like a laboratory test. Bartolini’s works are
continually traversed by phenomena grasped in
moments of action, often solicited and activated by
the movement of the viewer who is not only a
viewer. Water, wind, light, scent, force of gravity,
different forms of energy produced by humans and
by machine cut across Bartolini’s works as a way to
“make friends with the phenomena,”7 interrogating
their functioning in order to understand the ways
and possibilities of being in the world.
Sometimes the intervention is a more subtle form
of involvement. To enter in a space in which all
angles have been covered with pearls is an almost
imperceptible vision. By returning the pearl to its
original protective function, this intervention sug-
gests a delicate gesture of welcoming, of protection
for who enters, the search for a dialogue with the
other (Strongbox, 1994 [fig. 2] and 2001). The win-
dow-paintings that compose the Dews (2006-ongo-
ing), in which artificial dew drops are squirted on
iridescent colored surfaces, need our movement to
“activate” that abstract landscape found beyond the
window that the work simulates. In Bartolini’s
works, experience is a space and an image to be
traversed, in a sensory elicitation that puts into
question our perceptual and imaginative habits.
02
After all, the figure of awakening, of alertness,
runs through some works as a precondition for
embarking on a path of knowledge. “Kwatz!” is the
yell used by the Zen master to call his student to
fresh attention. As if it were a tag, the artist writes
it in marker pen on a step made of a different
material to the others of the staircase they makes
up, inserting a difference into repetition (Kwatz!,
1997-98). Thus, the gesture of entering a library is
accompanied by the sound of a computer turning
on and a heightened brightness that fades after a
few seconds, as if to give physicality to a state of
alertness, but also a disturbance for those who
inhabit the space (Head n.3 [Library], 1996–1997).
The drummer who bangs the gong that has replaced
the missing bell in a tower does the same (Sun of
Today, 2009)—attention as the most legitimate form
of imagination.8
To begin on a path it is often necessary to open
and cross through a doorway, to cross a threshold,
traditionally a metaphor for entering a different
dimension. Since 1997, Bartolini’s work has been
traversed by many doors through which one can
enter from either side. From one, made of wood left
deliberately coarse, a light source emerges in a
strong contrast between opposites. But, the bright-
ness is an illusion, for the door opens to another
dark room. Another door is rotating, like those used
in hotels: moving it scatters and mixes two different
scents that had previously been diffused in the two
spaces it divides. What used to separate now unites.
Our action triggers a change, unites differences, and
creates a new hybrid (Mixing Parfums, 2000). It is
we the spectators who have to put these spaces into
action, in which “the dream of making the idea
habitable” 9 takes shape.
29
1>1: The Space of Distance
Vision is followed by reflection, the need to make
order, to explore reality in ways that are more
accurate. If confrontation with oneself, others and
the world is a guiding principle of Bartolini’s work,
a first possibility to explore these relationships is to
stage a condition of crisis, a clash, an alternative.
Many works are crisscrossed by an oppositional,
dialectical situation that appears alien to any
possibility of reconciliation, synthesis, or resolu-
tion. The work can be precisely that space in which
an alternative is shown in its inalienable tension, as
the first step to create order in complexity.
A room is divided horizontally into two parts.
On the ground floor one walks through what looks
like a surveyor’s or architect’s office, complete with
bed and drafting table and spanned by large wood-
en beams. By a small staircase one enters a space of
absolute, luminous white, a cube whose corners are
rounded off, an “other” dimension (A Cup of Tea,
2000). The space of work, of life, is contiguous but
separate from the space of reflection, of meditation,
perhaps of ecstasy. To build and to meditate, to
make and to contemplate: mundanity and spiritual-
ity inhabit two different yet contiguous places.
Which to choose? Is a simple staircase enough to
connect them?
Outside the Basel Art Fair (the so-called “Messe-
platz”), on the large A of the word “platz” painted
on the pavement in a work by Heimo Zöbernig,
Bartolini built a kind of extended bench, a sparse
roof garden made of gravel, trees, street lamps and
a drinking fountain (A Bench, 2006). Like so many
urban gardens, this one is also fenced in a circle so
that the image derived from this encounter corre-
sponds to the symbol of anarchy. But what sort of
anarchy is possible within an enclosure? What space
of action and freedom is really possible for a group
of people, an individual, an artist in this hortus
conclusus? In the most prestigious and richest trade
fair on the planet, a symbol of the link between art
and capitalism?
In the German island of Rügen, also noted as a
place of work and inspiration for many German
Romantic painters, from a small islet in the pond in a
large park comes a voice that every so often utters
the German word “Existenz” (existence). From the
trees around the pond further voices answer “Leben”
(life). In the form of a sound installation (Existenz /
Leben, 2013), Bartolini synthesizes a dialectic
between the individual (an island) and a collective (a
row of trees), between the spiritual dimension of
existence and the mundane one of life. Like the
dialogue between an actor and the chorus of a
Greek tragedy, a space is delineated here that is
physically traversable by the spectator of a dialectic
that echoes, among other things, the dialogue
between Wolfgang Goethe and Ludwig Wittgenstein
imagined by Thomas Bernhardt in his book Goethe
Schtirbt (1982).
Earth and sky, mundanity and spirituality, self
and world, singularity and plurality, individual and
collectivity, inside and outside, above and below;
they are oppositions that—to stick to only those of
a more general order—continually run through his
works becoming matter, space, experience. In
Bartolini’s works we sink or rise: we see the artist
himself do it, the performers do it, we visitors of his
work do it. Great leaps and equally great falls.
There seems to be no room for anything other than
inhabiting an extreme, one of two spaces in a
dialectic that seems to embody the principle of
Aristotelian logic—the basis of Western dialec-
tics—according to which tertium non datur, a third
possibility is not given.
To Form an Archive / Perform the Archive:
Rules and Actions against Chaos
Beyond all dialectical opposition, another way to
traverse complexity is to accumulate, name, distin-
guish, or order. Many of Bartolini’s works are made
of or include lists and rosters, bring together or
manage data and information, follow processes
predefined by the artist as rules that feed the work,
divide one phenomenon or entity from another or
isolate it from diversity in order to better experi-
ence, define, or know it.
A first step might be to accumulate and assemble
data, to build an archive, as a place to gather tools
for future explorations and investigations. Small
towers built on compositions of deserts, for exam-
ple, are spaces for a solitary exercise that begins
from a specific collection of texts to become places
for reflection and information (Desert Dance,
2003-2018).10 Rows of books like vines of a knowl-
edge that one wishes to liberate and share: Book-
yard (2012) is an expanded book-crossing that takes
the place of the “Book Tower” designed by architect
30
Henry van der Velde (1942) as part of the Ghent
University library, but then closed for renovations.
Like the brain-library already mentioned (Head n.
3), these are like analog computers that we can
physically enter: they show the volume (in the
double sense of a book and of a measure of space)
and the weight of data and encourage us to manage
them with our whole bodies, to give physicality to
our thought as we walk through it.
However, it is possible for these data to undergo a
process of modification, to be given new life by the
artist’s interventions. Thus writer César Calvo’s text
is etched into the stained glass window of a museum
in Sao Paulo to “play” when the wind blows through
it (O som também..., 2004) turning the text into
music,11 the word into living matter; while the text
commissioned to the writer Fanny Bussche is built
on a list of names of the people buried in a ceme-
tery—which is, in fact, a forest on the island of
Rügen—transforming it into a new vocabulary,
which is also sound and action (Das Nämliche, 2013).12
For Bartolini, the archive is a place of knowledge
which is given-in-formation, a formative process.
If one goal of artistic practice is to manage
complexity, one possibility for traversing it is to set
oneself rules. So it happens in works, especially on
paper, in which a series of decisions imposed a
priori, guide their creation, or which function as
measurements of time of life as time of the work.13
The pieces of paper on which a taxonomy of trees is
drawn in correspondence with the intersections of
the folds of the paper (Disegni di alberi, 1995-pres-
ent); paper airplanes whose folds are flattened out
and retraced in pencil (Airplanes, 2006-17); the
drawings produced by spinning hypothrocoid gears
until the paper wears thin and is punctured (Until It
Breaks, 2008); these are a few examples. While these
series of works follow predefined rules to reduce
the infinite possibilities of personal choices and
subjective inclinations, the hours the artist spends
drawing the complex intricacies of branches (273
ore, 2014) measure a posteriori the idea of a work as
a meditative practice, even therapeutic occupation,
as perhaps is the patient, irreducible drawing of
dust threads on paper, which still makes “infram-
ince” into a work of art (Dust Chaser, 2016).14
In addition to accumulating, naming, and order-
ing, complexity can be managed through the admit-
tedly contrary process of deconstruction: separating
parts from what is normally considered a unity in
order to force us to see them in their individuality.
In the aforementioned Il frutto, the movements of
the dancer hanging from a tree are observed from a
distant room, where a double bassist plays music
for a dance thought out without music, creating a
temporal inversion. The visual and sonic registers
are also separated in Music and Player, 2005, anoth-
er asynchronous situation in which a trumpet is
embedded in a wall separating two soundproof
rooms, so that the audience has to choose between
listening to the sound or observing the musician
producing it. There is no possibility of recomposi-
tion if not in our imagination or visual memory.
Even the complexity of nature can be subjected
to a closer look, in which the artist isolates natural
phenomena from the context in which we are used
to observe and experience them in order to practice
“in vitro” observation. And again, the dust drawn
on paper, as if seen through a microscope, the
“soliton” wave that moves in perpetuity (the equiva-
lent of the musical perpetuum mobile) inside the
tanks (Untitled [Wave], 1997-2012), or the conical
one that rises and falls in some fountains/seating
(Conveyance, 2003 and 2006), are subject to a gaze
that is more precise, but which, and not for this
reason, achieves possession, a level of absolute
knowledge. Reiterated in a loop, nature can become,
in fact, an instrument of meditation, inducement
into a trance state. To watch so as to order so that
one may lose oneself again.
Dis-play: Present, Put on Stage, Put on
Display.
Here is no drama without an audience
(Massimo Bartolini in conversation with Hans Ulrich
Obrist, in Realizer, Museum Abteiber Mönchengladbach
2003).
Isolated in purity from the flow of nature, from the
complexity of its context, the wave is a spectacle: a
solo played in a loop. After having made contact
with the variety of the world through forms of
archiving, isolation and deconstruction, one possi-
ble means of getting to know the phenomenon
better, of building some form of dialogue and
relationship is to elevate it, to separate it from
multiplicity in order to present it in a space of
vision. Bartolini’s work is, in fact, full of theater
platforms, stages, supports, plinths, different forms
31
of display: situations in which something is staged
or put on display. Spaces in which to isolate an
entity, a body, a phenomenon, an action from chaos
in order to examine it better; to raise it up, to put it
on a pedestal or on a stage in order to have it
perform, in an attempt to have and give ulterior
instruments of knowledge and relating to the world.
It is the natural continuation of that need discussed
earlier to create a state of alertness, of attention,
which also leads to looking at an entity in a context
of solitude in order to achieve a more precise
engagement with it. It is a continuation of that
drive toward theater, its forms and spaces, that
characterizes his early artistic explorations.
The Heads (1996-2004) contains many of the
tools adopted by Bartolini: archive, theater and
display. They are rooms that one enters one at a
time, as if to plough the threshold of a brain and
solicit its attention. Once inside we soon realize
that the unnatural light, the monochromatic and
cornerless walls render visible the objects and
actions that take place within them in extremely
accurate ways. Immersive capsules, small space-
ships with modified atmospheres where time is
suspended, the rooms allow figure-background
relationships to be staged, such that the latter helps
us to see better (like gold in a Byzantine mosaic),
but is also an element that may be crossed physical-
ly. Entering these depthless rooms is like looking at
things in a desert, in their isolation, without dis-
traction, so as to make our experience exemplary
for the purposes of knowing.
Like the archive, the museum is, in even more
explicit ways, one of the apparatuses in which to
practice this process of bringing into focus. After
all, the Heads are forms of display, especially when
it is not just an object or a visual or sound effect
that is isolated [fig. 3], but a work of art taken from
the museum’s collection to be presented in a white
limbo, where it seems to float without any interfer-
ence (Head n. 8 [Museum], 2004–2005). The rotating
03
floor around a well-known work by Cildo Meireles
is also certainly a display; there Bartolini seems to
celebrate the eternity of a line of thought concern-
ing the irrelevance of boundaries, in an apparent
reversal of terms (Room for Mutações Geográficas:
Fronteira Rio-São Paulo, 1969, 2005-2007).
If the latter work visually produces as little as
possible while producing movement, it is because
“to guard is to create,” as Martin Heidegger wrote
in Holzwege (1950).15 Therefore, custodians are an
integral part of some of the artist’s works. Their
function is amplified when they themselves, in the
act of protection, are transformed into a museum:
they tightly clench pearls burrowed within their
fists and, as and when they wish, they show them to
the spectators. Once the impurity of the grain of
sand that originated it has been removed, the pearl/
protection is also in essence an (im)possible mi-
cro-space preserved within the hand, which is a
shell, but also a place of conservation within the
macro-space of the museum. Double Shell (2001–
2005)16 is, perhaps, one Head “performed” within
another [fig. 4].
04
However, the collection and the archive are not
mere forms of accumulation, protection and conser-
vation. For Bartolini, it is equally important that
the museum can be “performed,” that it becomes a
place in which to activate new relationships, en-
counters, and works; a museum-theater, bringing
History and the stories it contains back to life.
Conservation must be a conversation. The collec-
tion of the Museion in Bolzano is performed when,
together with artist Stefano Arienti, Bartolini
moves all eighty-four grids from the underground
storage room to the third floor, dedicated to exhibi-
tion activity, without selecting or reinstalling them,
but transforming that preservation device into one
of presentation (-2 + 3, 2010).17
If the Museion exhibition space becomes a stage
for turning the collection into theater and narrative
(the performance Reading, 2010), the CSAC archive
32
in Parma is given new life when Bartolini meta-
phorically and actually DJs in another performative
situation, juxtaposing two seemingly very different
forms.18 To the plaster copy of Luciano Fabro’s Lo
Spirato (1972), Bartolini puts in proximity the
collection of LPs belonging to photographer Luigi
Ghirri and portrayed in a series of his photos; he
plays them one after the other almost as if he were
in a listening session in a small bedroom among
friends, placing hope in the thaumaturgic power of
music (On Identikit, 2020).
Lo Spirato takes the stage in a new show that is a
display, but the many structures created to play host
to performative moments, which characterize his
practice’s early beginnings and about which has
been written above, are obviously stages. If more
technically advanced stages would be constructed
many years later with Impressions (2008) and with
the multifunctional room for the Venice Biennale
(Sala F, 2009), many of Bartolini’s interventions
seem to tell us that the theater is also a mental
dimension, an abstraction applied to every context,
which may be delimited to serve temporary per-
formative actions. There is no need for a construct-
ed architecture when the natural elements them-
selves transform into, or delimit a, scene, when the
landscape is theater, an earth-theater. The space
around a tree—the object of the “show”—surround-
ed by a stand for spectators, is a theater stage
(Audience For a Tree, 2016-2017). So is the square of
earth retrieved from underneath the museum, like a
portion of desert on the which accordionist Rüdiger
Carl plays for Gerard Richter’s monochrome canvas-
es in the Museum Abteiberg in Mönchengladbach,
in another reactivation of a museum collection; so
too is the islet of Rügen, where solitude speaks as
existence; the spaces around the trees for which
saxophonists play (Ballad [Concert for a Tree], 2003-
2008); and the round and dark pools of water where,
many years later, two synchronized swimming
athletes “dance.” If in the first work, the story of
Hagoromo was presented in an ancient, narrow well
in a Tuscan villa (Hagoromo, 2005), in the second,
that black and liquid stage was indeed a theater
stage, but it was also part of an installation, as if an
abstract painting (Kazimir Malevič), had been blown
up and rendered habitable, in which an attendant
cleaned the white surface of that canvas-stage from
the signs of the life-performance (Black Circle
Square, 2016).
But, after all, perhaps the aforementioned floors
are also stages, on which the simple action of
walking is transformed into a performance where
the public is the protagonist. And those gardens
raised above the ground are stages too, in which the
everyday gestures of sitting, conversing with
friends and drinking from a fountain are “elevated”
to an exemplary dimension, a gesture of offering
from of the artist (A Bench, 2003; A Bench, 2006); so
is the bridge that is transformed into a space from
which to look better over the landscape and at the
same time to be looked at, perhaps as part of a
small community (Belvedere, 2013). If these stages
are sculptures, they are then works/pedestals,
“magical” supports that partly disappear under the
feet of the viewer/performer. As displays they
elevate and show, but as works they disappear.
Spaces waiting for something: people. Bartolini’s
“stages” welcome the professional as well as the
pensioner, the human and the animal, the human
and the plant. They are places of encounter and
conversation between different creatures, instru-
ments of knowledge, perhaps also places of resist-
ance. If we once again consider the earth as the first
stage, the first “pedestal,” as suggested by the title of
a large bronze casting of a portion of plowed land
(Basement, 2011),19 the image, which depicts a row
of the artist’s neighbors, friends and relatives in the
countryside around Cecina, who are literally plant-
ed in the fields, restores the determination of
community by revisiting an icon of the history of
Italian painting. If Pelizza da Volpedo’s Il quarto s
tato (1898-1901) portrays the forward movement of
the people as a revolutionary dynamic, in a new
political and social context the act of resistance is,
for Bartolini, the same as becoming a tree, a plant,
or a vegetable in order to be radically faithful to
the land (My Fourth Homage: to Carmine Carbone,
2003).20
The Art of Storytelling: The Artist as
Narrator
“[…] for a work, usually, I invent a story or I find one
already ready to be visualized. My works are born from
writings: it is like a tale.”
(Bartolini, “Sculture che,” 41).
Taken together, many of Bartolini’s works stage
spaces for isolation and meditation, and interrogate
33
the alternative between being with oneself and with
others. But a desire to build a dialogue, a discussion
with another, is surely a further phase of the itiner-
ary that the artist fulfils through the work. One of
the ways to leave a solipsistic or dialectical dimen-
sion is not only to build spaces for more or less
temporary communities, but to bring two and more
singularities together as tools to produce a story. It
is surely a desire to build a community of compan-
ions that leads to the outlining of a narrative plot
beginning from references to other works and other
lives, work-narratives populated by references,
quotations, stories. Works of works, works with
works, works with others: from the mid-2000s21
Bartolini begins to regularly include in the plot and
form of his works samples, references and quota-
tions from the works and lives of other artists,
writers, musicians, and thinkers.22 An enthralled
explorer of the creative process, of the miracle of
talent, and of the exemplariness of certain lives, he
constructs works of a narrative mold without even
resorting to writing,23 if anything, by giving bodily
form to a linguistic construct.
Since the start of this journey, with Hagoromo,
we have encountered works that arise from a
literary mold, from a narrative source. Others tell
us of a desire to narrate, often starting with the
form of homage. And if Bartolini continues to
dedicate homages to artists, musicians, and writers
in a series of often small-scale works that start from
details of their biographies or their works (ten
homage-works were created between 2000 and
2019), others take the form of complex installations
and sculptures as dedications, tributes, or acts of
love to other lives and other sensibilities. Works not
necessarily narrative but narratively constructed,
because “behind” the work there is a story as a
necessary premise for creation.24 Such as when
Bartolini finds the writer Witold Gombrowicz’s
diaries, thickly annotated by the previous, unknown
reader, in a store and turns the comments into a
performance for two actors/readers (The Unknown
Glossator, 2017). Or when he returns to a biographi-
cal episode in homage to Mario Merz: pins cast in
gold and deformed by Bartolini’s grip, a reminder
of the brief period when he was Merz’s assistant,
with his main task exactly that of fixing sheets of
paper with pins (My Sixth Homage: to Mario Merz,
2010). Works as reconstruction of a memory, an
extension of a detail, of an epiphanic moment.
 To shorten a distance, to demonstrate empathy
with figures of obsessive talent, to make their
idiosyncrasies into works, of details as seemingly
minute as they are revealing of their existences.
Like pianist Glenn Gould, who had chosen the
isolation of the recording stage to search for a
perfection that he could not attain in concert. His
humming as he performs the Goldberg Variations is
dubbed over, “interpreted” by baritone Nicolas
Isherwood as if to make song of seemingly insignifi-
cant material, to redeem in beauty the loneliness of
obsessive genius (Hum, 2012). Like the sudden
revelation of a possible imaginary proximity to Paul
Cézanne: when a tree falls on the window of Barto-
lini’s studio, the artist remembers his visit to the
French painter’s studio in Aix-en-Provence and how
near he was to trees (Cezanne’s Leave, 2000).
But the illustrious lives of artists, musicians, and
poets are not the only inspiration for Bartolini’s
micro-narratives. On the contrary, it is precisely the
micro-stories25 of so many ordinary individuals,
their sufferings and small acts of heroism or resist-
ance, that become the subjects of as many works.
Just as ordinary people were elevated on the stages,
pedestals, and flowerbeds of so many “theatrical”
works, so these stories are elevated to exemplary
status. Bartolini finds “Manca anima” (“lacks soul”)
written in a mixture of spit and terracotta dust in
what were once the prisons of the Spanish Inquisi-
tion of Palazzo Steri in Palermo. He transforms a
prisoner’s desperate graffiti into glowing red neon,
as if to keep the light of memory burning (Manca
anima, 2016). Called to work at the Trento Civic
Gallery for the opening of a new stage in the life of
that institution (2009), he investigates its history.
He discovers many uses prior to that of a center for
contemporary art and pays homage to these lives
and histories with a series of neon signs as in a core
drilling operation into human, economic and social
history. In the town of Ficarra in Sicily, Bartolini
meets Don Valentino, the first “luminaro” of that
town. The voice of the old light installer, who
recounts his life in a video interview, sets the pace
for the luminescence of the lights used for tradi-
tional Sicilian festivities. Now that they rest on top
of one other in the rooms of a gallery or museum,
they seem to be moved by the breath of the person
who brought them to life on so many previous
occasions (La strada di sotto, 2011).
For Bartolini, encounters do only take place
34
between lives and narratives that either become
works or run through them. Encounters also take
place between materials that represent stories,
fragments of moments in his life and those of
others. Many works are built on the encounter
between materials used differently from what is
usual. Everyday, deliberately prosaic, and aestheti-
cally “banal” materials are often recontextualized in
forms that are even alienating, in surprising con-
trasts and juxtapositions that demonstrate an
affection for those forms brought into contact for
the first time. The coconut that becomes a loud-
speaker (Speaking Chair, 1996), the camping table
over which the stars of a computer screen saver are
projected (Head n. 2 [Studio], 1997–1998), a rock
supported by pearls (Rock on Pearls, 2012): the
artist’s task is put into relation what was distant, to
seek a nearness where there was a fracture, to
construct a space of encounter in the work.26
Numerous works are based on these surprising
relationships, these unplanned encounters, includ-
ing by way of the adoption of large-scale dimen-
sions. But from this perspective, many Studio
Matters (1994-ongoing) reestablish the possibilities
that these encounters occur in synthetic and seren-
dipitous ways, with a particular formal density.
Here again we may return to the typology of the
archive, for these series of works arise from the
juxtaposition of objects that may have remained in
the studio for a long time, preserved precisely
because they possessed narrative substance, often a
fragment of personal history. Materials juxtaposed
in unexpected ways, little accidents of chance
facilitated by creativity: the Studio Matters embody
perhaps the most playful and personal aspect of
Bartolini’s practice, one in which the distance
between thought and time in the work seems to be
reduced to an almost childlike game. If in produc-
tions conducted using forms of outsourcing and
collaboration with other technicians, relationships
are transformed into realizations, into productions
that are only possible with the experience and skill
of others, in this series of works, still in progress,
the process is entirely within the space and time of
the solitary artist in the boundaries of his studio. In
Studio Matters it is the juxtaposition, the dialogue,
the relationship, and not the construction, that
bridges distances, and the idea inhabits the limited
boundaries of an extreme intimacy.
“To sing the transformation of bodies into
other entirely different” (Ovid)
Metamorphosis, therefore, is a generative principle of the
work, although it does not erase the preexisting form.
Such metamorphosis reacts to a context, incorporates and
modifies it...27
(João Fernandes, “Da Volterra a Serralves con Massimo
Bartolini,” in Massimo Bartolini. Non entri chi non è geomet-
ra, published on the occasion of the exhibition Massimo
Bartolini, Marino Marini Museum, Florence, curated by
Alberto Salvadori, Mousse Publishing 2015, 95).
For Bartolini, to create is also to care, to relate, to
bring together, to bridge a distance through a
process that is ultimately not far removed from
curatorial and editorial forms. When construction
or encounter is no longer enough, however, the
miracle of transformation is put on stage. One
cannot fail to notice how a metamorphic thought, a
transformative principle, fundamentally energetic,
continually runs through Bartolini’s work and
manifested itself by means of different linguistic
and productive processes. Energy as the engine of
cyclical processes that suggest the possibility of
transformation. Thus Thelonious Monk’s circular
dance brought back in the form of a rotating and
looping triple video installation transforms the
jazzman into a whirling dervish, a real monk, and a
mystical and sapiential figure when he shows the
ring that says “Know” (“Monk” spelled backwards
and the “M” flipped) (Triple Loop, 2006).28 The
circular run of a black jogger who follows the
switching on of lights in the direction of the sunset
in a courtyard is perhaps the staging of an alchemic
process, the transformation into a more subtle
matter such as night (Run Ibrahim, 2000), while the
sound of a light bulb that brightens until it explodes
is recorded and sampled, becoming the cue for a
musical composition to be performed live (Ouver-
ture per Pietro, 2006).
If a visible form of energy performs a possible
transformation of state, in many other cases objects
and forms habitually associated with certain materi-
als are turned into decidedly unexpected different
ones, as if they had undergone some very slow,
mysterious transformation. What look like sheets of
paper hanging on the wall are actually made of the
thinnest alabaster (Charms Papers, 2014); a portion of
plowed earth like a bivouac and what would seem to
be a woodpile are in truth made of bronze (Basement,
35
2011; Fuochino, 2011; Depot, 2013); but, above all, a
long, ruined walkway is made of bronze, like an
apocalyptic landscape turned monument (Two, 2013).
Transformation of material that is also transforma-
tion of statute, because bronze, a classical sculpture
material, not only makes fragile and banal materials
imperishable but also gives them monumental
substance. Thus the pearl from which the grain of
sand has been removed loses its perfect spherical
shape, but acquires a new purity; it becomes a
micro-space, in a transformation from content to
container (Double Shell, 2001). If the sphere is a
self-sufficient form, closed within itself, its altering
breaks that integrity to make it a welcoming space.
Perfection is corrupted to become possibility.
Ultimately, it is as if some external factor, or per-
haps the very force of thought, the intensity of the
imaginative power, had acted on materials normally
associated with certain uses and production. These
are what the artist, echoing critic Georges Didi-Hu-
berman, would call “figures of dissimilarity,” on
which the mystery of the Incarnation, of a verb, of a
word that becomes a (sculptural) body, seems to act,
following the claim that, through devotion, a
definition is really something else.29 Incarnation as
an imaginative principle.
The metamorphic inclination is, after all, con-
nected with Bartolini’s attitude of viewing sculpture
as a place of transformation that precludes stasis, a
form that “acts.”30 In many other cases stasis is
overcome through constructive interventions that
give new life to certain objects and architectural
elements, also making possible a mutation of form
and function. We have already encountered archi-
tectural and domestic elements that have under-
gone forms of alteration, but there is also the
handrail transformed into a musical instrument
(Recall, 1998), the large windows into small tables
and chairs (Untitled [Biella], 2003), the windowsill
into a small boat (Windowsill, 2001), the rooftop
terrace that has been stretched as if it were a
trampoline suspended over the landscape (An Island
For The Horizon, 2004).
Mechanics is another transformative tool, one of
the means of giving substance to imaginative
thought, when a column (Do (Der Tiefe Ton), 2017),
kitchen cabinets (Three Quarter-Tone Pieces, 2009), a
large scaffold of “innocent” pipes31 (Organ, 2007;
Otra Fiesta, 2013) are transformed into musical
organs, or when a ceiling moves like a wave hang-
ing over our heads (Shaking Ceiling, 1995-2004), or
a floor equipped with seated benches and lampposts
rises, accompanied by a carillon motif, to open up a
habitable space as a cinema (A Cinema, 2006-2009).
They are examples in which, as in other cases,
music and sound are “transformed” into volume,
form, or sculpture. The same change in the use of
materials and objects, the shift from one context to
another, assigns new functions to them. The bridge
that served to connect the mainland with an island
is removed and taken to a meadow, fulfilling its new
function as a vantage point or meeting place, like a
ready-made assisted by the force of a crane (Belve-
dere, 2013); the illuminations of Sicilian folk festi-
vals become walls of a room (Caudo e fridu, 2018); a
doorstop is also, if we desire, a small ramp (Wedge
Ramp, 2010-12). Even though the metamorphoses
performed by Bartolini may astonish and amaze
through the enchantment of artifice and mechanics,
as happened in Baroque culture,32 their function is
not the acritical seduction of the viewers, but the
possibility of questioning their conventions, keep-
ing their senses on the alert, perhaps through the
creation of epiphanic moments aimed at demon-
strating the porosity of categories and the imagina-
tive possibilities for the transformation of the
world. These are other steps in a process of knowl-
edge that uses the transformation of the object as a
tool for the transformation of the individual.
Figures of Involvement: Possibilities and
Risks of Empathy
Among the various forms of metamorphosis we
should also include empathy, in its most extreme
degree. Wanting to be so close to something/some-
one else that one becomes that thing, that person.
To be transformed by sympathy. Metamorphosis
and empathy are also tools to overcome the distanc-
es embodied by oppositional dialectic, the space
between us and others, between two different
forms, between two different materials.
For Bartolini, empathy is inflected in different
meanings and in a range of possible relationships,
with a variety of living beings, human and non-hu-
man, and even with mechanical apparatuses, as if
to question precisely any distinction between
entities. From the position of loneliness, of isola-
tion, embodied in some works, Bartolini seeks in
others the possibilities of a proximity to other
36
individuals, certainly by elevating women and men
on the many plinths, benches, or stages that we
have already encountered, or by using pearls to
delimit the edges of an existing space, as a gesture
of welcoming, of protection for those who enter it
(Strongbox). But the statuette of the Burmese
bodhisattva (Buddha predestined) that spins on
himself above a pedestal and refuses enlightenment
in order to continue teaching (Revolutionary Monk,
2005) is perhaps the symbol of an energy placed at
the service of others.33
Empathy is perhaps also a desire to be other, to
live other lives: whether those of performers who
are almost alter egos of the artist (the musician
Edoardo Marraffa, for example), of the many
creative figures Bartolini cites and includes in his
works, or in the proximity to a work of another
individual’s talent (an ancient panel painted by
Lorenzo Monaco) demonstrated by a daily devotion-
al offering of flowers (Apocalypse, 2010). Empathy
occurs between materials, as if the human artifacts
and natural elements were to approach each other
through attraction and commonality of experience
or of linguistic definitions. A mattress is covered by
the same tiles as the floor on which it is laid, as if it
were a continuation of it (The Studio at 3, 1994-
2002), the small mountain made of pietra serena
that “travels” motionless on top of a baggage rack
that whirls around on itself, unites two different
physical and mental dimensions (nature and me-
chanics, the static and the mobile) to the same
destiny (Or Should I Stay, 2001), while in Sala para
uma Onda (2005-2007), a sort of diorama, of pictori-
al image is placed in action: a container precisely
thanks to the habit of traveling by sea, is trans-
formed into moonlight with a perpetual wave, thus
restoring the illusion of the tide, in an image that
measures time in movement.
Since the early 1990s, well in advance of debates
that are extensively shared and widespread today,
Bartolini has testified many times to his empathy
for the natural elements, for the land as a dimen-
sion that is precisely organic but certainly also
social and political. If his work is constantly
traversed by the theme of landscape, even in ab-
stract forms [fig. 5], it is precisely the organic and
living substance of nature that is the object of
attention, protection, and conversation. Think of
the photos in which the artist plants himself in a
field near his home; he becomes a geometric figure;
05
he even ends up disappearing with his head in the
earth, (Untitled [Plantations], 1995); or let us look at
the actions contributed to by the bodies of men and
women, which become vessels, containers, vases of
earth and flowers (Flowerbeds, 1995-2007). The
human body that reconfigures itself, conceals itself
in identitarian traits in order to get as close as
possible to the natural element, demonstrates an
absolute fidelity to the land/territory, of which it
becomes a monument (Basament, 2011) and icon
(My Fourth Homage: to Carmine Carbone, 2003).
The musical improvisations in front of the trees
(the Ballad) represent the desire to establish com-
munication with a seemingly different entity, where
man is possibly and temporarily incarnated in some
strange bird. This man who can now better perceive
the sound of the adjacent river, once the win-
dow-membranes are removed (Untitled [Biella],
2003), who can listen to the various sounds of
nature beyond the large glass window that has been
engraved (O som tambén…, 2004), who tries, finally,
to relate to the infinite variety laid before him in
sound form, the five hundred different sounds with
which Edoardo Marraffa seeks a dialogue through
his saxophone, in a mad attempt to listen to the
singular in the manifold, to once again make the
archive alive, performed (Aus Schlafes Bruder, 2006).
“With trees, contemplation is change of perspec-
tive, emptying oneself of the name ‘tree’ and of
opinions about trees, letting oneself be looked at by
those who have no eyes,” writes Chandra Candi-
ani.34 Words that could be applied to the photo in
which an uprooted tree bends over the window of
Bartolini’s studio, as if to enter the human space
(Cezanne’s Leave), or to the grandstand designed
around a tree in a park in Pune, India (Audience for
a Tree, 2016–2017), which from a device meant to
protect and see could be reversed into one to be
seen or heard by the tree itself, in a process of
inversion that is a further sign of empathy.
In Bartolini’s work, the animate-inanimate
37
dichotomy, like the human-plant dichotomy, is
continually questioned, not only because usually
inanimate objects and devices are innervated with a
new mechanical energy, but because it is the very
distinctions themselves that are questioned. The boy
who runs in circles following the turning on of lights
in a courtyard seems to turn into a machine (Run
Ibrahim, 2000), while the tame drinking fountain
that follows a man using a sensor overturns the
roles of man and machine, which are empathically
united by movement (Man and Fountain, 2001). After
all, since the early years of his work, Bartolini has
staged processes of empathy, which he himself called
“figures of involvement,” moments of response to
the risk of distance, of incommunicability. We could
call them figures of contradiction, because, in truth,
they stage the possible danger of an excess of empa-
thy. Perhaps this also holds for a photographic
image that unites sky and water starting from a
banal event, suggested by the title (Irrigation, 1995),
and then, even more explicitly, in the video Figure of
Involvement (1997), where a fireplace made of wood
catches fire while performing its function: content
and container are too similar to coexist. Thus the
fountain/tub that fills to the brim with water high-
lights a state of continuous tension, where water
drowns water (Figure of Involvement, 2004) [fig. 6]. It
is an assisted suicide that stages the contradiction of
too much love.
06
There’s No Success Like Failure
From the path followed thus far, it should be evi-
dent how an existential, if not spiritual, mold
underlies Bartolini’s work. It is a disposition that
considers the work a space in which to experience
the world, and the artist’s work an itinerary of
knowledge. Although many works contemplate,
 Il corpo del pensiero,” in (Turin: Einaudi, 2021), 150. Massimo Bartolini in conver- Vauteren in due giorni all’ini-
represent and stage physical movement, an experi- (Bedside Wave, 2002), while the water coming out of Massimo Bartolini, GAM 13. As in other works, the sazione con Luca Cerizza,” in zio di aprile 2012 a Cecina,
ential situation, or a metamorphic state of transfor- a reed would seem destined to fill a cistern in which Galleria d’Arte Moderna e self-imposed rules and pro- Massimo Bartolini, Four Italia” in Studio Matters,
mation, this energy does not necessarily lead to a a man is sitting: a thought of death that perhaps Contemporanea (Turin: Hope- cess-works echo forms and Organs (Turin: Hopefulmon- (Amsterdam: Roma Publica-
fulmonster, 2005), 55. modes of certain conceptual ster, 2017). “Gimme two tions, 2013), 10.
solution, to the overcoming of a condition and the does not have sufficient means or will to fulfill itself 6. This is a new version of and process art, popular records and I’ll make you a 25. The reference to the
attainment of a higher state. The experience is not (Der Seemacher, 2002). the previously cited 1989 especially in the mid-1960s to universe...” musician DJ historiographical current
always successful. As the fountain remains in a The raft adrift without a guide but covered with work. mid-1970s. As with some of Spooky once wrote. opened by Carlo Ginzburg’s
7. “Fare amicizia con i feno- those practices, the desire to 19. In addition to celebrating essay Il formaggio e i vermi
state of impasse, some works speak of a condition drawings of birds in flight remains like an im- meni.” Massimo Bartolini to minimize the artist’s choices human labor and toil, the (Turin: Enaudi, 1976) and
of false movement, illusory dynamism, if not age-dream of emancipation from a life one wants to the author, 6/5/2022. so as to bracket the weight plowed earth is portrayed in supported by editorial pro-
8. In the face of reality the and role of subjectivity in the its “purest” condition, devoid duction for Einaudi between
failure. A scaffold seems to take us up into the sky, escape from (Floating Floor (Raft), 2020). Too much imagination recoils. Instead, creation of the works is not of other elements. In this 1981 and 1991 is not made by
but is actually suspended in the void, like a gymnas- time or too much energy can break the perfection attention penetrates it, direct- alien to Bartolini’s attitude. sense, the process followed by chance.
tic exercise for its own sake (Bars, 2009-2013); the of a form (Until It Breaks, 2008), but when the ly as a symbol... It is therefo- 14. Painting/art is indeed a this work is similar to that 26. “Unire due piani è il vero
re, in the end, the most “mental thing,” as Leonardo adopted with the burrowed lavoro dell’artista, ciò avviene
lights that had been vertical stage panels for great energy drops, will alone is not enough: thus when legitimate, absolute form of said, but for Bartolini the pearl. attraverso una ‘soluzione’
community events lie on the ground, still pulsing the electricity from the generator fails the musical imagination.” In a text on conceptual enunciation of the 20. In his After lockdown: a maturata dal precedente
but perhaps hopelessly vanquished, transformed performance collapses (Primo movimento, 2016). We Bartolini, Laura Cherubini idea is not enough, because it metamorphosis (Cambridge: isolare i componenti dei piani
quoted these words from is not sufficient without the Polity Press, 2021) Bruno (nel riserbo della vera identi-
into landscape (La strada di sotto, 2011); paper wait for a resolution, an event, a change, but per- Cristina Campo, whose The body, without concreteness of Latour dwells on the need for tà) e in un ‘momento di delica-
airplanes fix the lightness of childhood pastime into haps, for today, too, we have to put it off. “Anche Unforgivable (1987) is one of form. It is not enough to let a reappropriation of terms tezza’ nel riunirli” (“uniting
a stasis carved in marble, like obelisks commemo- oggi niente” (“nothing today either”) was written the artist’s declared points of the dust settle in the Du- such as “soil,” “territory,” and two planes is the true work of
reference (Cherubini, “Tra le champian celebration of not “land” by a progressive and the artist; this is done through
rating a flight that never happened (Airplanes, with headlamps switched on at the night at the pieghe,” 48). doing, it must be embodied. ecological culture, and on the a ‘solution’ matured from the
2014-2021). What used to be a bridge to connect the construction site of a large museum, quoting writer 9. “Il sogno di rendere 15. Quoted in Massimo need to distinguish between previous isolation of the
land to the lovers’ islet is brutally uprooted—inti- Cesare Pavese (25 aprile 1963, 2008): a statement abitabile l’idea.” Quoted from Bartolini, “Double Shell,” in “locating” and “situating,” as components of the planes (in
Massimo Bartolini in conver- Luca Cerizza and Anna Dane- on other issues traversed by the reservedness of true
macy now requires greater effort—and trans- about art or about oneself? About a time that passes sation with Hans Ulrich Obrist ri, eds., Yona Friedman (Milan: Bartolini’s work. identity) and, in a ‘moment of
formed into something else (Belvedere, 2013); the without evolution? After all, the time of continuing in Realizer, Museum Abteiber Charta, 2008), 45. 21. The first work in this delicacy,’ in bringing them
long Venetian promenade over the detritus of who life is marked in candles cast in bronze, as if in a Mönchengladbach, 2003. 16. This work was first sense is the aforementioned together”). Massimo Bartolini,
10. Inspired by the list of presented at the exhibition Room for Mutações Geográfic- Light as a Bird, not as a Fea-
knows what destruction stops in front of a wall desperate effort to stop it (Cera persa, 2017-2022). technical treatises that Arthur Strategies Against Architecture as: Fronteira Rio-São Paulo, ther, (Paris: Onestar Press,
(Two, 2003), the symbol of anarchy is reduced to a The path of knowledge and improvement that, Rimbaud had asked his II (2001) curated by the author. 1969 (2005-7) made for the solo 2002), 143.
mother for before leaving for It should be noted that the exhibition at the Serralves 27. “La metamorfosi, quindi,
small garden where one can go to take a dog and in Bartolini’s thinking, the work of art is supposed Harar, Ethiopia, these mi- exhibition took place inside Museum in Porto and curated è un principio generativo
drink from a fountain… (A Bench, 2006). to fulfill, also goes through moments of impasse and cro-libraries also contained the large industrial hangar by João Fernandes (2007). dell’opera, benché non cancel-
If the artist’s path of research and growth is failure, even despair, as necessary passages of technical treatises. used by Pisa’s Teseco Founda- 22. The ostensibly complete li la forma preesistente. Tale
11. It should be noted that, in tion for its exhibitions. In that list of all these names, which metamorfosi reagisce a un
traversed by a series of figures of the pathetic, there experience. They are parts of an unavoidable Italian, “incidere” means “to context Bartolini’s work the artist has shared with the contesto, lo ingloba e lo
is certainly a dark side, an even gloomier soul that confrontation with ourselves and the world, on a record” music, but, at the seemed a possible answer to author, reaches forty (and modifica…”
circulates in other works. The conical wave moving path nevertheless full of potential. Maybe tomor- same time, it is by means of of the many large-scale works by counting...). 28. Moreover, as early as
vinyl engraving that a record other artists. 23. Exceptions in this 1958 Jack Kerouac had called
inside a black well placed next to a bed is a materi- row, something. Maybe tomorrow, better. reproduces music. Compared 17. See Massimo Bartolini, regard, are at least the per- Monk the “monk and saint of
alization of a restlessness that accompanies sleep to the English “record,” which “n!”, in Letizia Regaglia and formance Scultura lingua bop.” Jack Kerouac, The
has an archival meaning, “to Frida Carazzato, eds., -2 + 3 morta (2015) at the Marino Subterraneans (New York:
engrave” certainly has a more Stefano Arienti Massimo Barto- Marini Museum in Florence, Grove Press, 1989).
sculptural mean lini. La collezione Museion / Die in which Arturo Martini’s 29. “L’incarnazione è la più
12. The correspondence with Sammlung Museion / The text of the same name (1945) bella figura religiosa che
the words of the poet Chandra Museion Collection, (Milan/ is read in front of sculptures esista, nella forma il segreto
Candiani, years later, is Bolzano: Mousse, 2010), 193. by Marino Marini, as well as della trasmissione e dell’am-
curious: “E i morti, i morti The text was published on the Goethe schtirbt überdacht pliamento della conoscenza.”
1. Bartolini himself suggests nottetempo, 2018), 9. The red the work of the artists of zio Cattelan, Eva Marisaldi, solo numerati, sentirli alle occasion of the exhibition of (2013), Thomas Bernhardt’s (“Incarnation is the most
to me a juxtaposition with the reference to Buddhism is the Lazzaro Palazzo group, and Luca Vitone. spalle mentre ero nel bosco, the same name. Goethe schtirbt (1982), which beautiful religious figure that
famous three chairs that justified by the artist’s inte- students of Luciano Fabro’s 4. It is obvious that the text inoltrarsi insieme e poi 18. Certainly, many of was republished as word for exists, in the form the secret
Henry David Thoreau kept in rest in Buddhist thought, to course at the Brera Academy, should be read as a necessa- disperdersi, non più numeri, Bartolini’s works bring word in the exhibition cata- of the transmission and
his hut in Concorde and which more than one work and, in particular, the work rily incomplete exercise, ma esseri volatili, pellegrini different materials and log, but only up to the point expansion of knowledge.”)
described in Walden (1854): refers explicitly. of Mario Airò, and of Vittorio more like an outline than a verso il divenire spazio” (“And narrative subjects within his at which the island of Rügen, Bartolini, Light as a Bird, 143.
one for solitude, two for 3. That “post-medial” attitu- Corsini, whose assistant registry. Some works mentio- the dead, the dead only works into dialogue and the site of the exhibition 30. Massimo Bartolini,
friendship, three for society. de that was growing in the se- Bartolini became. In this ned in the text could easily numbered, feeling them connection, using forms of itself, is mentioned. As an https://www.youtube.com/wa-
Among other things, it would cond half of the 1980s, at least sense, Bartolini’s work is a be included in other chapters behind me while I was in the juxtaposition, editing, and assisted ready-made, the text tch?v=1UeLfXP_z0U
have been an interesting in the Western art world, may reflection, perhaps even an and serve other “functions,” woods, advancing together postproduction similar to should be considered one of 31. In Italy, scaffolding tubes
exercise and no doubt possible also have contributed to the extreme one, of an attitude of while others are not mentio- and then dispersing, no longer what occurs in the DJ’s mix or, the artist’s works. are nicknamed “innocenti”
to have ordered Bartolini’s variety of languages and medial freedom that runs ned due to lack of space. numbers, but volatile beings, as he himself has stated, in 24. “...For me there is always after the Italian company
work according to the chap- forms adopted by Bartolini. widely through Italian art 5. “Portare il corpo là dove pilgrims toward the becoming ways similar to jam sessions a story behind everything,” that first designed them.
ters and contents of that book. Bartolini may have absorbed from the late 1980s onward arriva il pensiero.” Massimo space.”) Chandra Candiani, where the artist engages in Massimo Bartolini, “Studio 32. In what is considered a
2. Byung-Chul Han, Philo- this attitude no earlier than and is visible at least in the Bartolini cited in: Laura Questo immenso non sapere. dialogue with other artists, Matters + 3. Una conversazio- kind of manifesto of Baroque
sophy of Zen Buddhism (Milan: 1993-1994, when he encounte- very different paths of Mauri- Cherubini, ed., “Tra le pieghe. Conversazioni con alberi, technicians, or artisans (see ne tra Massimo Bartolini, aesthetics, Gianbattista
animali e il cuore umano, “Sculture che fanno rumore. Fiona Bradley e Philippe Van Marino wrote: “È del poeta il

38 39
fin la meraviglia / (parlo de
l’eccellente e non del goffo): /
chi non sa far stupir, vada
alla striglia!” (“The poet’s
aim is wonder / (I speak of
the excellent poet and not
the clumsy one): / who does
not know how to astonish,
goes to the curry comb!”)
33. “…un bodhisattva non
nasce mai in un inferno, e
neppure in una forma degra-
data o deforme. Soprattutto,
Airplane
2008
il dolore del continuo sacrifi-
cio è superato dalla gioia di
pensare a quella che sarà la
grande ricompensa, ossia il
raggiungimento della facoltà
di illuminare altri esseri,”
(“...a bodhisattva is never
born in a hell, nor is he born
in a degraded or deformed
form. Above all, the pain of
continual sacrifice is outwei-
ghed by the joy of thinking
about what will be the great
40
reward, namely the attain-
ment of the faculty of enli-
ghtening other beings”).
Ananda Kentish Cooma-
raswami, Vita di Buddha,
(Milano: SE, 1993), 33.
34. “Con gli alberi la contem-
plazione è cambio di veduta,
svuotamento del nome
“albero” e delle opinioni sugli
alberi, lasciarsi guardare da
chi non ha occhi,” Candiani,
Questo immenso, 89.
CAPTIONS
01 Drum, 2002.
02 Strongbox, 1994.
03 Head n.4, 1997.
04 Double Shell, 2001-2005.
05 Untitled, 1998.
06 Figure of Involvement,
2004.
41
Airplane Airplane
2006 42 2008 → 43
Airplane Airplane
2011 44 2011 45
 The Compass in
CARLO FALCIANI
your Eye—the Measurement
of the Field
Strolling from Ponte a Mensola toward Vincigliata,
between the sparse and shining cypresses against a
Robbian sky, Massimo describes to me the aluminum
pipe organ that he has designed for the exhibition at
the Pecci Museum, a scaffold of musical notes writ-
ten by Gavin Bryars, who, in 2016, published specifi-
cally for Villa I Tatti—whose perimeter wall we have
just crossed—a disc of madrigals on which verses by
Petrarch are set to music, along with Bronzino, Laura
Battiferri and Michelangelo Buonarroti il Giovane.
They are words in which Petrarchism is deformed
and made to submit to private affairs of love or
death, and forms of poetry, grave and burlesque,
whose echoes are constantly reflected in styles of
painting and sculpture. It would be easy to immedi-
ately establish a dialogue between his pipe organ and
those that Matteo da Prato—so called degli organi—
had constructed between 1422 and the middle of the
century at Prato, Pistoia and Florence. I am reminded
of today’s incessant attempts to introduce forced
forms of dialogue between the present and the past,
between, contemporary art and renaissance art,
often unregulated by intrinsic motives or strong
expressive structures; they appear to me to be an
extreme offshoot of a frayed, postmodern attempt to
stitch back together linguistic ties that are already
broken, a procedure whose every spur is, to my eyes,
already exhausted. Not that these attempts at dialec-
tic across distant historical epochs are new; dialogue
across time has always existed in the arts, but not as
established a posteriori; rather, it was the artist who
chose to listen to the voices of those who had ex-
pressed themselves, like him, centuries, or only
decades earlier, to validate his own sentiment.
Still climbing the mint-scented road, we talk of
museums that have given up on conserving and
explaining history, and that instead prefer to jumble
together collections according to emotional criteria;
and of artists who express themselves by becoming
curators of exhibitions dedicated to the styles and
works of epochs distant from their own, without
bothering to avoid misunderstandings; but also we
talk of what, for Massimo, are the deep-seated
reasons for a dialogue that he seems to detect
47
between contemporary forms and subject mat-
ters—a pipe organ of scaffold construction made of
“Innocenti”1 tubes with iron clamps—and those
tubes of a distant time constructed in Florence’s
Cathedral, or against the walls of the Cappella della
Cintola in the Prato Duomo by an organ builder with
a turbulent life engaged in the destruction of Agnolo
Gaddi’s fourteenth-century frescoes. I had already
written about the abstract, numerical foundation
underlying Massimo’s works for one of his exhibits
at the Marino Marini Museum in 2015; I leant on
the authority of pages of ancient texts and published
in the catalogue fragments of Plato, Aristotle,
Nicholas of Cusa and Leon Battista Alberti in parat-
actic sequence, without organizing them into a
discourse. It was almost a metaphorical mirror, in
which one could read the intuition of an absolute
and aniconic form pitched beyond the sensible from
which the poetry of geometry still springs today.
But today, having arrived at Vincigliata, among
bristly cypresses and an enamel sky, Massimo reveals
other linguistic roots, telling me of a Tuscan pipe
organ builder from centuries ago, a friend of Donatel-
lo’s, who had constructed for the latter’s organ gallery
a harmonic device that was different from the one he
had built for Luca della Robbia’s gallery. Elevated high
up in the space of the Florentine Duomo, these are
the two organs that ushered in a tradition that would
endure for centuries. Through the works of that
remote organ builder, Massimo tells me about the
attention payed to the work’s methods and we try to
imagine the gestures that the organ builder used to
constructed new organs perhaps related to the
different and opposing musical harmonies expressed
in the bas-reliefs of the two organ galleries. But in
that case, rather than reinvoke an abstract dialogue
with ancient texts, one must investigate the origins of
Massimo’s preference for a distillation and completed
coherence between the form and subject-matter of his
works, as well as the reasons for the simple, but
refined, dexterity of execution. A completeness born
of an ancient mastery, the same that, in the fifteenth
century, led to the crystallization of humble workshop
instruments, in marble or in bronze, though their
insertion in a monument, not as elements of contin-
gency, but if anything as words of common parlance.
It is something similar to when Massimo presented a
path of ascent, made from rubbled plaster cast in
bronze, at the 2013 Venice Biennale, later exhibited in
a different form in 1917 at Art Basel, and from 2021
installed in full sunlight on the grass of a Tuscan
meadow: three different ways to rhetorically articu-
late the same thought [fig. 1]. To write a commentary,
01
I searched for that incline of disconnected fragments
also among the images of my childhood, in the
Tuscan countryside, and I found the rubbled plaster
used to repair the base of the dirt roads, where winter
and wear created puddles and where debris served to
form an at once stable roadbed. As the memory of a
modest and commonplace archaeology that told of
the modernization of the farmhouses, the fragments
either remained visible for some time, in the dust of
the rapidly hot summer, or surfaced in the autumn
rain. Massimo nonetheless exhibited much more
ancient roots when he transformed poor waste
products into perennial material—albeit in contem-
porary form—and immediately evoked the activities
of the artistic workshops of the fifteenth century,
parallel to the capacity of humanistic philology to
retrieve noble words from common modes of expres-
sion. In the Martelli sarcophagus at San Lorenzo’s
Basilica the marble renders a simple wicker basket
eternal [fig. 2], while in the niche sculptured by
Donatello for San Ludovico di Tolosa at Orsanmichele
there is a woven mat of straw folded to soften the
contrast between the shelves and the base, but it too
is transformed into marble, as if to render perennial
the memory and the work of the one who erected the
whole, studiously sculptured monument.
Nor does the pipe organ constructed by Massimo
seem far off from these examples; it possesses a
02
03
48
suspended architecture and conjoins two great
clumps of ploughed earth cast in bronze; it constrains
one to follow an obligatory path, but it does not
prevent you from looking through the resonant and
harmonious metal. The metal grill of Verrocchio’s
Medicean tomb at San Lorenzo [fig. 3] springs to
mind—where the bronze, cast in a humble wire mesh,
allows one to examine, but not to reach, the Donatel-
lo’s decorations of the Sagrestia Vecchia [fig. 4]—or
04
the bronze railing of Maso di Batolomeo’s chapel of
the Sacro Cingolo at Prato—where the rose windows
are strewn with buds, acorns and leaves clasped by
straps with different buckles. Massimo perceives the
almost physical continuity with that distant world,
with methods that are analogically translated using
today’s materials through a parsimony of simple
gestures, and announced by his work for all time: the
poetry of the timeless movement of the musician
called to play an instrument, unchanged like the
sparing gestures of the one who, in the countryside,
grafts a branch of fruit onto a tree at the beginning of
spring—once again with gestures and tools that are
themselves depicted at Schifanoia, or on Luca della
Robbia’s glazed terracotta tondi,2 originally in Piero
di Cosimo de’ Medici’s study, and today at the Victo-
ria and Albert Museum. They are the same gestures
that allowed Massimo to depict simple firewood set in
bronze, or a spade whose bronze handle is a garden
branch, suggesting a symbiosis between expression
and nature that is repeated when, in another work, a
polished brass trumpet is fused to a dark branch, the
memory of a winter’s pruning.
In Massimo’s work there are further analogical
echoes to ancient expression, in particular from the
fifteenth century, which was always somehow mind-
ful of nature’s phenomena: the roots of this dialogue
are found in his personal biography; they are declared
by a photo taken many years ago in which Massimo is
planted up to his knees in a field in the land of his
childhood. A land from which he sometimes fled, but
which he always pursued in gestures and manners, in
the everyday words, whose expressions remain vivid,
like the petrarchesque or dantesque expressions of
the fifteenth-century vulgate whose diffusion philolo-
gists have sought—during the disputes concerning
the language of that century—in the parlance of the
Florentine countryside.
Yet in this apparent naturalism, Massimo always
chooses the path of abstraction, of symbolic synthesis,
of linguistic purity, of formal extraction. On display, a
sonorous architecture unifies every episodic narrative
and transcends lived experience, of which traces
remain in the bronze candles that commemorate
Massimo’s sixty years of age, arranged along the
route of the exhibition like house numbers on a
street. The organ is thus accompanied by temporal
checkpoints, depleted bronze candles that seems to
say et caetera fumus, like the cartouche wrapped
around the unlit, but still smoking candle at the feet
of Mantegna’s San Sebastiano found at the Ca’ d’Oro.
Such a reflection already appears in some portraits—
Verusca, Ginevra, Edoardo—where the person’s age
corresponds to the sides of a polyhedron. A geometric
figure that is a crystallized image of the absolute
foundation underlying existence and, at the same
time, a figure of the path completed in our becoming.
In those works, through an intuition dear to Nicholas
of Cusa, the discordant and physical features of the
person are translated into a geometry freed from
sensibility. With the passing of the time we are given,
the sequence of sides gets closer and closer to a circle,
a polygon that tends toward intangible perfection and
that, in its representation of the path of existence,
becomes a metaphorical portrait capable of encom-
passing and at the same time transcending death.
Once we arrive at Vincigliata, our walk turns
back on itself, and the changing light offers a
different form to what we saw on the ascent, like
how a display of a sequence of spent candles winds
along two obligatory paths, specular but different.
And if the sequence of years, presented in bronze
numbers suggests a temporal sequence, the dialec-
tic between the works is instead that of a poetic
tone; of empirical data that is forever transcended
in favor of a lay metaphysics; of a sacredness of
form; of an illumination that preserves the memory
of the color of the sky; of blooming; of the clods in
the field; of the dew on the leaves; of a plastic sheet
that becomes a meridian sea dotted with islands
seen during the last visit to the Cecina studio.
49
The linguistic syntony in Massimo’s work that
always involves the man-nature relationship is
charged, through continuity, with that power of
renaissance expression that, until shortly after the
first half of the twentieth century, remained anchored
to the ancient and sacred gestures of the rural world.
It was a time, not too far off, in which it was possible
to discern poetry from the marketing calembour, the
meaningful roots of expression from emotional
subjectivity, and ultimately the endurance of expres-
sive nuclei through history from the ephemeral desire
for entertainment. However, we should quickly clear
the field of a misconception concerning the nostalgia
for the ugly and archaic beauty of rural Italy, insofar
as here with us the poetic awareness of certain
gestures was obviously inseparable from political
action and from the idea of progress that voluntarily
aspired to destroy a world encrusted with obligatory
and unconscious fatigue. It was the same awareness
that allowed my father to indicate the rows of grape-
vines and say, “this is my library,” but he knew that
the political construction of society was necessary to
say this; in fact, he read Rinascita in the evening, as
well as Petrarch’s Il Canzoniere, even though he had
only attended middle school in pre-war Italy. My
father knew the poetry of the rows of vines in the
alternating seasons and the exertion of keeping them
ordered and parallel by arranging the leaves to
protect the fruits; while I remember from my child-
hood the heaps of wheat arrayed in a circle, to sit on
when eating during pauses in the harvest, and then
the afternoons that the slanting, late summer sun
filled with boredom before school began; and even
more remotely, the moral tales that described the
pointless stubbornness of a man in front of his wife,
or the ignorance of a merchant: short tales recited by
an aunt who had always been a laborer which, at
University, turned out to be Le facezie written in the
mid-fifteenth century by Poggio Bracciolini; perhaps
she too, born in the 20s, listened to them as a child in
the evening, during the vigil, when brooms were
prepared for the tying of the vines. My father also
knew that modernity had its price to pay and that the
past—where labor was also symbolized by ancient
and uneven bricks, replaced at home by grit, and by
worn doors that let the air in on cold nights, substitut-
ed by joinery ones even in the new white and green
tiled bathroom―should be forgotten. Today, modern
materials such as the aluminum fixings are hideous,
but back then they were glossy symbols of emancipa-

tion. Massimo has preserved from that world the
ability to make even industrial materials beautiful
and talkative: a mechanic’s bodywork lacquer, a truck
tarpaulin spread in the studio to accommodate
terracotta sculptures, or the “Innocenti” tubes from
construction scaffolding, mustered to replace ancient,
hand-chiseled organ pipes. Yet still nowadays the
latter are cut by hand by expert organ builders, so
that they may produce, analogically, music capable of
sparking harmony in the face of today’s bewilder-
ment. They are yet echoes of that rural world dedicat-
ed to work that one forever recognizes in the rhythm
of nature and in figurative and literary expressions
capable of serving as the place of ethical teaching.
Such teaching is narrated, without shame, by means
of a conceptual representation that was equal in
contents to that of writing, with the latter hard-won
for the first time by the generation of sharecroppers
born at the beginning of the twentieth century. Such
writing is already described in an eighth century
codex by means of a piercing metaphor: “se pareba
boves, alba pratalia araba, et albo versorio teneba, et
negro semen seminaba. Gratias tibi agimus omnipo-
tens sempiterne deus.”3 In one of the first records of
the vernacular Italian language, writing is already
compared to the agricultural activities of plowing and
sowing; the fingers that guide the pen are described
as oxen (boves); the sheet as a field (alba pratalia); the
pen as a plow (albo versorio); ink as a seed (negro
semen). It is a metaphor that has a wide, centuries-old
circulation in dialects across the whole of Italy as a
description of the interchangeable poetry of writing,
and the orderly pattern of furrows in plowed fields:
furrows measured by eye in a gesture equivalent to
that of the one who traces letters in the exercise of
controlling one’s concepts when executing a fair copy.
“Scrive... (la nonna ammira): ara bel bello, / guida
l’aratro con la mano lenta; / semina col suo piccolo
marrello; / il campo è bianco, nera la sementa. /
D’inverno egli ara: la sementa nera / d’inverno
spunta, sfronza a primavera; / fiorisce, ed ecco il
primo tuon di Marzo / rotola in aria, e il serpe esce
dal balzo.”4 So writes Pascoli in Myricae, once again
returning to the eighth century; he reminds me of
Massimo, who, without the slightest nostalgia, and
far from any postmodernist disengagement, has from
his first works arranged the plowed land according to
the measure he saw as a boy in the garden, without
the watchwords of sustainability that today vainly
attempt to tie together, through the categories of
50
there and back again. The same thing happens in the space. The clods of bronze that open and close the
marketing and consumption, a lost bond and senti- Ulysses Gallery of the Palace of Fontainebleau, order of the exhibition are landscapes. The flowers
ment. Just as in Pascoli’s verses, writing and the frescoed by Primaticcio in the mid-sixteenth century, lying between two alabaster chairs inspired by Mi-
flowering of thoughts on the page are regulated by where the entire Odyssey is represented on the long chael Haneke’s Amour are a memory of fields in
the seasonal cycle of the harvests; Massimo, too, has walls according to the temporal order of its events. spring, while in another of Massimo’s works the
compared the slow growing time of barley, seeded Hence the frescoed scenes are read in a round trip gesture of offering ever new flowers to a Gothic
around a pool where waves continuously flow, to that that begins, on the short walls, with the figures of the painting, kept in a museum, still spoke of the devo-
absolute time that regulates the water’s movements four seasons; thus, the path of the reader, overlaying tions of a rustic tabernacle. Thus, shelves packed with
through physical laws. As mentioned, Massimo also that of Ulysses, is beaten out by nature’s tempo, which books had been installed by him in the garden of an
surrounded that land with affection, and with people regulates the life of men in the alternating changes of abbey in Ghent as if they were rows of vines, the
lying in a chain, or else he used it as a stage for an the year—the same seasons that regulate the sprout- order of the pages likened to that of the leaves: “this is
accordion concert; he then photographed friends, and ing of the seeds in the verses by Pascoli dedicated to my library.” A concise translation of the natural that
himself, planted in a field behind the house in order writing. In the Ulysses Gallery the steely, rhetorical preserves memories and sensory suggestions, placed
to depict the ones who were capable of expressive structure was thus softened by natural notes but, on like a peel over the surface of works regulated by an
gestures full of ethical rigor, but also to depict the the outward and return journey, in addition to internal harmony, so that they contain “una certa
suffocating presence of those roots in a photograph in likening the life of Ulysses to that of the visitor, it concordanza di grazia nel tutto che non lo fa il natu-
which the earth almost entirely envelops his body in symbolically celebrates, according to Guillaume Budé, rale.”5 But to do this, Vasari, too, knew well that
an embrace that resembles a burial. the path necessary for philosophical speculation. “bisognava avere le seste negli occhi e non in mano,
The phrase “le seste negli occhi” (the compass in Here too the timeline of Massimo’s life, set and perché le mani operano e l’occhio giudica.”6 And it
your eye) indicated, in the Rennaissance, the artist’s consummated in the bronze candles, regulates the should not seem strange to anybody, Vasari contin-
ability to measure architecture by eye, or even the timeline of the exhibition’s visitors in a cyclical path, ued, that the artist delights in “della solitudine, come
proportion present in a statue or a painting and thus, divided by the organ into an outbound and return quello che era innamorato dell’arte sua, che vuol
in parallel with writing, so too the capacity to meas- journey, where the notes of nature contained in the l’uomo per sé e cogitativo,” because “chi attende alle
ure a field’s regular and symmetric furrows, traced work may be of comfort in the reading of the whole. considerazioni dell’arte non è mai solo né senza
during plowing as if they were drawn on a sheet of Among his works is a landscape: the profile of hills pensieri, e coloro che gliele attribuivano a fantastiche-
paper. Several times, Massimo has traced in pen over that encloses a recumbent sculpture by Giacometti in ria et a stranezza, hanno il torto, perché chi vuole
the geometric furrows in the folded paper of a bronze. The Dews, are excerpts of a landscape, where operare bene, bisogna allontanarsi da tutte le cure e
childhood game, or he has drawn saplings at seem- a lacquered metal surface, like a white or iridescent fastidi, perché la virtù vuol pensamento, solitudine e
ingly random distances on a large sheet of paper, so car body, welcomes the random variety of drops, comodità, e non errare con la mente.”7
that it becomes the abstract plan of an orchard. A fragile, transparent but undying, in a circumscribed
hidden proportion that, in ancient times, the intel-
lect measured using the eyes, managing to that
extent to glimpse the hidden but absolute order of
things and to give it a poetic representation. 1 In Italy, scaffolding tubes della Facoltà di Studi Uman- Bettarini and Paola Barocchi, bothers, because virtue
Although fragmentary, in a present where the are nicknamed “Innocenti” istici dell’Università degli 1966–1987, vol. 6 (Florence: desires thought, solitude and
utopian order of robust thinking is still dispersed, said after the Italian company studi di Milano,” 72, no.1 Sansoni), 109. [a certain con- comfort, and not errors of
that first designed them. (2019): 67–92. cordance of grace in their totali- the mind].
measure always appears in Massimo’s works, anchored 2 In reference to the fres- 4 Giovanni Pascoli, Il piccolo ty that the natural does not].
in a continuous dialectic between nature and propor- coes of palazzo Schifanoia at aratore, in Myricae (1891) 6 Vasari, Le Vite. [You must CAPTIONS
tion that informs almost everything: the distance Ferrara. (Livorno: Raffaello Giusti, have the compass in your eye
3 This brief text, written 1905), 149. [He writes… and not in your hand, be- 01 Two (Mercer's Version)
between the dew drops; the music played before a tree; on three lines of different (grandmother admires): till cause the hands work and the (detail), 2013-2020.
the same order is expressed by those who coveted the length was discovered in beautiful boy, / drive the eye guides]. 02 Donatello’s workshop,
apparent randomness of the cypresses, encountered on 1924 by the paleographer plough with a slow hand; / 7 Vasari, Le Vite. [solitude, Sarcophagus of Niccolò and
the climb and descent, to and from Vincigliata, that the Luigi Schiaparelli, on the sow with your little hoe; / the like the one who was in love Fioreta Martelli, XV sec.
upper part of the 3rd folio of field is white, the seed black. / with his art, who wants man 03 Maso di Bartolomeo,
setting sun now makes impenetrable. the LXXXIX codex of the He tills in the winter: the to be pensive and unto Grata della Cappella della
With Massimo, we have followed the same road Biblioteca Capitolare di black seed / sprouts in spring; himself,” because “the one Santissima Annunziata,
there and back again, in a landscape that appeared to Verona, a mozarabic oration / blooms, and there! March’s who attends to the considera- Florence, Basilica of the
dated to the eighth century. first thunder / rolls through tions of art is never alone Santissima Annunziata.
be different from the ascent to the descent, and this On this question, see Cristi- the air, and the snake leaps and never without thoughts, 04 Andrea del Verrocchio,
metaphor will also exhibit itself wherever the pipe ana Pasetto and Alfredo forth]. and those who attribute to Monument to Giovanni and
organ joins the two bronze fallows, a specular begin- Sansone, Lo stilo e l’aratro: 5 Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de’ him fantasies and oddities Piero de’ Medici, (detail),
immagini dell’atto scrittorio più eccellenti pittori scultori e are mistaken, because the 1469-1472, Florence, Basilica
ning and end, and divides the museum’s space in two nella letteratura e nell’epigra- architettori nelle redazioni del one who works well, must of San Lorenzo.
paths that must be followed in an obligatory cycle fia latina, in “ACME, Annali 1550 e 1568, edited by Rosanna stay away from all cures and
51
Until It Breaks
2008 52 53
Until It Breaks Loco tondo
2008 54 55 2020 →
CHUS MARTINEZ
I. Rolling Elegance
Some years ago, in an exhibition on wilderness in
Tokyo I encountered a wonder stone. It was a gigantic
ball of stone, a full meter in diameter, a specimen of
maruishi [fig. 1], naturally found in certain stream
beds in the Yamanashi mountains of Japan. The
sphere of stone awakened all sorts of feelings in me.
Worshiped since prehistoric days, these solemn
spheres are truly awe-inspiring—especially since they
are not made by human hand. It immediately made
me think of Ballad for a Tree, by Massimo Bartolini.
We have been naming multi-species evolution, we
have been aiming at multi-species communication
and yet, for the first time, looking at that stone I felt
she was looking back at me. I did not understand, at
first, that she was a product of experience. Oh! I
thought about another Italian artist, Giuseppe Pe-
none. He often uses stones as the “brains”—as I call
them—placed on the top of his bronze trees. Stones
01
that have rolled for centuries, that fell from the
mountains and entered the cold water of the stream
and kept moving… This stone—now so perfectly
round, a world, a sun, a moon…—was, too, a traveler.
And what could I say? I had an urgent question: is this
stone made of stone? It may seem obvious, but did
this stone lose parts of it, in centuries of rolling, that
were not only stone but also forest? And then, in
rolling, isn’t it possible to imagine a moment when
the stone did not only endure external pressures, but
also swallowed external parts? Lichens, mosses, and
mushrooms: how many has this stone encountered?
and fishes, and waters? They may all be inside of her.
No, I don’t mean inside the stone as if it were a
box or a vessel. I mean inside its “stone-ness.”
The stone was observing me as much as I was
observing her. Then I understood.
Many of Massimo Bartolini’s works are structured
in such a way as to provide trees and nature with an
audience, companionship, and a serenade. I confess
59
that these works seemed to me as to be about us—hu-
man beings— and not much about music, until I met
that stone. The precise and careful way the circum-
stances are designed—on a beautiful square made of
earth taken from the very ground where the Museum
was built, in Monchengladbach, with Rüdiger Carl
playing Goodbye Party (2003); the beautifully designed
stage around a tree in Sambhaji Park in India (Audi-
ence for a Tree, 2016); the concerts for a tree (Ballad for
a Tree, 2003, 2004, 2007, 2011…). These are not the
only examples of works that address the need to be
ready for the encounter. In meeting that stone, I
missed the precise, architectural, constructive readi-
ness capable of creating a set of conditions from
which we—humans and non-humans—can begin to
talk. Talk? Exactly! Who wants to get caught talking
to a stone? Well, now is more accepted, but still…
Massimo Bartolini seems to understand that it’s
not much about talking as it is about facing. A silent
but expressive facing. An expression that may not
respond to a reason, but the reason is the very fact
that we are now together. In contact with a patch of
earth. Together with a tree. Together with that stone.
Only time can ensure an understanding of what
communication between us can be, and it seems
logical to offer sound, rhythm, and music as a bond.
Mutuality—or co-species evolution, in the words of
Donna Haraway—can emerge through the synchroni-
zation of rhythms present in all living organisms. The
dissolution of the boundary between culture and
nature can occur through a musical answer and
response between the two, as happens with singing in
vernacular cultures, where nature starts and culture
responds or vice-versa, until the two dimensions
become one.
II. Medieval more than Modern
The above-mentioned situations may formally reso-
nate with/echo a development of the languages of
Modern conceptual art, but the sentiment of those
works has deeper roots and resonates with philosophi-
cal ideas and conceptions already expressed in the
early Middle Ages. I am not saying that this is a
conscious act, but more of an energy that is present is
the research his work presents around the question of
emotional bonds that trascend human relationships.
Ramon Llull, the most outstanding thinker of Medie-
val Catalan culture, studied and renewed all the
sciences as to build a new cosmic vision and, along
with it, a new spirituality. According to this, music
and love share a characteristic (as in theories of
Pythagoras and Plato): the ability—through their
emotional force—to transform human and non-hu-
man personalities (as Lull wrote extensively about ani-
mals). Llull conceived music as the force that changes
the spirituality of all living creatures and in doing so it
creates a channel, a bond that connects us all—and
the cosmic music, and the beauty of the universe
(“Musica Universalis.”) For Ramon Llull, human-made
music constitutes in fact a mirror of cosmic harmony
and beauty, and this is way it is logical to think that it
can transform animal and human life, bringing us all
closer to a mystical experience.
III: Mistic Care
The work of Massimo Bartolini is not oriented
toward mystical experience, unless we accept that the
ancient desire to transcend all the binaries defining
the difference between us and nature, us and the
divine, us and the stars, has taken on a new life in a
contemporary art practices that aim to deliberately
seek this state of non-binarism. We could say that in
Massimo Bartolini’s universe we are not spectators,
but seekers. The reason for many of these works is
not to thematize nature, but to create a design that
makes visible the need to seek its presence, to become
spontaneous with nature. In other words, presence
training and exercising the senses is a necessary if we
want to reach each other. Since it is not us, or not
only us, who are seeking for nature, those trees are
also seeking for us. The works with a performative
dimension constitute a channel and a guide. Take, for
example, Flowerbeds (1995-2007) [fig. 2]. We see a
group of people lying on the floor and holding each
other’s feet creating a human chain that acts as a
border or protection for a piece of earth. Is it a
flowerbed? That’s what the title says. It must be. The
reaction of the humans around it indicates a state of
alertness. A collective action embracing the earth that
contains the seeds of future plants. Flowers. They
02
60
may not be there, but the only way is to trust and
believe they are. By offering our bodies, we offer our
warmth and care. Is it mystical? Yes. A mystique that
has gone through centuries of training in collective
action and a raising awareness of the logic of interde-
pendency. “Care” names the mystical belief that
entanglements exist, and our bodies actualize them
daily by showing our willingness to be exposed to
others, to their pain, to their needs, to their potential.
IV. Now I came to you full of future. And
from habit we began to live our past.1
The constant appeal to presence as well as the
presence of music can be understood as both a
matter of nature and a matter of History. I would say
that in Massimo Bartolini’s works there is a tension
between all forms and matters that help us—par-
ticularly him, as an artist—to express and present
possibility and how the possible can easily nourish/
fuel a feeling of sadness and nostalgia. We constant-
ly live between promises and a behavior that almost
automatically—too automatically—reproduces the
past. We learn and relapse.
In his works, even nature reminds us that we may
not be able to understand, but only to reunite. But,
isn’t it enough? From the ancient Greek tragedies to
Shakespeare, sadness has been valued for its inevita-
bility, and considered as a part of life, fundamental in
helping people to accept and even anticipate the
common misfortunes of sorrow, injustice, and loss. A
major research experiment currently underway is
using technology and deep learning to understand
the language of whales. It is an old dream of the
humans to be able to decipher what these animals are
saying. The idea is to use cutting-edge technology to
help humans see the underwater world from the
perspective of those who call it home. However,
human attempts are never disinterested. Knowing
what other species say may “help” us—clearly, the
colonial effort of imposing the norms of the Western
culture surpasses the human sphere. In the works of
Massimo Bartolini, there is an aura of sadness, a
space where goals are suspended and one focuses
only on listening. Listening to the trees, listening to
whales, continuatively, seated for hours and daily
exposed to their being, striving to perform music for
them, may enhance a yet unknown mutuality.
I address sadness and nostalgia here in a non-per-
sonal way. More as a mistrust of the intentions we
have now as a species. Bartolini’s works, however, are
not tied to our biological temporality. They present
an invitation that can be repeated endlessly. We may
then reach a different wisdom and, finally, be able to
communicate.
V. Waves and landscapes and wilderness
For the dOCUMENTA 13, Massimo Bartolini exhibit-
ed a tamed wave. A caged wave, that washed over the
sides of a pool onto the ground and irrigated the
barley field that surrounded it [fig. 3]. The fact that
the wave had this irrigating purpose reflects the
artist’s subtle sense of humor. By attempting to tame
a wave, by extension he is attempting to tame the
Ocean. Right, it’s not a proper taming, but that’s
what it’s about. A situation of control over nature
that allows us to observe it under carefully designed
conditions. The artist is at the service of science. But
also of agriculture, as the wave’s movements spread
water to the benefit of the plants. That caged wave
responds to the key elements of Western culture.
03
Creating of a rational way of naming, ordering, and
locating the real implies suffering, but it can also
have some unexpected beneficial side effects.
Landscape, and not only nature, constitutes an
important element in Massimo Bartolini’s work.
Landscape is a relationship. A device invented to
make pleasant what we see around us. Talking about
landscape already implies talking about us, about
our way of perceiving. There is no “independent
landscape” of us, although we tend to use it meta-
phorically, as if it exists independently of us. But this
also means that we are always an active part of the
landscape, we are and don’t just see it. This is an
important aspect to consider in observing the wave.
1 Rainer Maria Rilke and Lou and Michael Winkler (New
Andreas-Salomé, Rilke and York and London: W.W.
Andreas-Salomé. A Love Story Norton & Company, 2006), 25.
in Letters, trans. Edward Snow
61
We are this wave. This wave is a result of our read-
ing of the Ocean; without us, it doesn’t exist.
Of course, this is a rhetorical game the artist
plays with nature and the fact that it is so difficult
for us to imagine our total lack of control and
influence over it, unless we are faced with a natural
disaster. Works that deal with nature deal with form.
Art is about selecting and forming, placing and
enabling an experience that exceeds the sum of all
these elements. Nature knows about form and yet it
doesn’t share its knowledge with us. Coming closer
is a way to learn but also a way to reflect on how we
invest so many resources to get to know her. As
Thoreau wrote in Walden, “whenever I sat, there I
might live, and the landscape radiated from me
accordingly.” To know nature, we need to un-known
landscape. Isolating one is already a Modern exer-
cise that reveals our extractivist mentality. How
many waves are there in the ocean? If there is one,
there must be many. Does wave modelling exist?
Indeed. Some scientists interpret waves as signs, as
indices of climate change, and, perhaps, of the
human-modulated climate future. For this reason,
the form of a wave matters.
Wilderness, behavior, language, forms of mutuali-
ty—these are fundamental themes in Bartolini’s
works. Nature, though, represents the potential
dissolution of all forms of identity defined by cul-
ture. His work is somewhat like a vessel approaching
a sea inhabited by sirens. Sirens. There are certain
cultures, such as those surrounding the sea, that are
blessed with the idea of “freedom” and yet not with
the possibility of gender equality. From the twelfth
book of Homer’s Odyssey, the story is well known:
men are warned of the irresistible power of the
Sirens’ song and are advised to plug their ears with
wax—and so, in a sense, they are until today!—or/
and be closely tied to the mast. So much has been
said about this myth, yet one fact remains clear: one
reason to bridge/dissolve the nature-culture divide is
to transcend gender. And this is also an important
political exercise that can be performed through
Bartolini’s works—abandoning our bodies, and
becoming a rainbow on a beautiful flowerbed.
CAPTIONS 02 Flowerbeds (Valencia),
2001.
01 Maruishi, Massimo Barto- 03 Untitled (Wave),
lini Collection. 1997-2001.
Projects for the exhibition
Zwei Inseln, Rügen
2013 62
66 67
 Organ Loft:
DAVID TOOP
the Listening Sensibility of
Massimo Bartolini
Van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece, the Adoration of the
Mystic Lamb. Depicted in one of the upper panels of
this complex work (likened by Dr. Sally Hickston to
the excess of 1970s rock operas)2 an angelic choir
sings, accompanied by voluminously cloaked organ-
ist while other instrumentalists, players of fiddle and
bray harp, await their cue, their expressions studied
vacancy. The organ has twenty-one visible pipes, the
tallest of which rises to only a fraction below God’s
beard. By comparison with other objects depicted in
the panels—books, suits of armor, ecclesiastical
furniture and fig leaves—the organ is the most
technologically sophisticated by far [fig. 1].2
01
Pipe organs were in fact formidable accomplish-
ments of engineering. Those built on a larger scale
to the Altarpiece’s instrument embodied solutions
to three key questions: how to produce and store
voluminous quantities of air, how to precisely direct
that air into a resonating vessel and how to accu-
rately tune and give distinctive timbre to each
individual column of air. For centuries, at least until
the development of the telephone exchange, pipe
organs were rivalled only by clocks as the apex of
machine complexity. Consider the example of the
ornate sixteenth century organ of Churburg Castle,
Sluderno, owned by the Trapp family (regrettably
not the same Trapp family made famous by The
Sound of Music). Driven by two sets of bellows
folded seven times, lead weighted, the nine ranks of
pipes include a filomena, or nightingale stop, a trill
pipe immersed in water containers, and a Ge-
zwitscher, or twittering stop, a pipe that produces a
whirring triad. Implicit within the construction of
the organ was the desire to encase all of the sound-
ing world in one machine, from brass and wood-
69
winds to percussion, human voices (vox humana)
and the songs of birds.
Massimo Bartolini’s work with sound in general,
organs in particular, situates itself among these
spiritual and technical capacities in order to explore
the world of phenomena in which organology (the
science of musical instruments) reaches its extremi-
ties. To say “work with organs” is perhaps a misdirec-
tion. Perhaps better to say, “work with the ghosts of
organs,” which is also to say, an organology without
bodies (to flip the Deleuze and Guattari formulation,
bodies without orgaåns). Bartolini’s organs are
skeletal, hidden in walls, pruned out into colorful
branches or reduced to a squat furniture template of
boxes or cupboards without contents, other than air
and hidden allusions. In the case of the skeletal, an
organ constructed from scaffolding, the aspiration is
not so different from Van Eyck’s portrayal of an
organ, pipes rising up to God’s facial hair. A pipe
organ rises upward in search of the maximum archi-
tectural and spiritual height. Ascension, in other
words, as angels ascend to heaven. Ascension, as John
Coltrane titled his breakthrough LP of 1965 [fig. 2],
the intention made clear that his music was now
dedicated to a higher being. L’ascension, as Olivier
Messiaen titled his organ work of 1933–34 (a version
of an existing orchestral composition), in which the
sustained final chord drifts upward into disembodi-
ment as if dispersing through sacred nothingness.
02
By contrast with this celestial upreaching, a
more earthbound biographical reality emerges. “I
am the son of a small building contractor,” Bartolini
writes. “As a child, scaffolding and houses under
construction were a huge and wonderful play-
ground for me. The scaffolding were bars to hang
from, to climb, to do balancing games. I still have a
couple of scars on my head as a reminder of those
times of exciting games. Then I graduated as a
surveyor and worked on scaffolding with joints-pipe
system, like a giant Meccano that measured the
building and hid it at the same time.”3
 Sound is just a disturbance of the air, we might
say, but then emergent life itself is, similarly, just a
disturbance of the air. Within a space, a field of
possibility, a moment, something is different. The air
has moved, is moving, and from its imperceptible
flowing comes a shifting of states that we call living.
Organs understand air. They move great quantities
of it. I am reminded of a concert in New York City, a
performance of music composed by Toshi Ichiyanagi
for reconstructions of ancient instruments stored for
1,300 years in Shosoin treasure house of Todaiji
temple, Nara. One of these instruments, the U, was a
larger version of the Japanese sho, a free-reed
bamboo mouth organ. After the concert I asked
Ishikawa Ko, the player, what it was like to play the
U. He came close to passing out, he admitted, be-
cause the design demanded so much air. So it is that
the limits of the human body are entwined in the
imperatives of invention, optimization and stand-
ardization, but how many arcane tones are lost to us,
for the sake of convenience?
All musical instruments are in some sense house,
cave, shell, tunnel, well dug into the ground or
funnel, their sheltering enclosure state compro-
mised and aerated by apertures that gape, yawn,
open and close, or surfaces that amplify and distrib-
ute. They are boxes, wardrobes, coffins, storage
trunks for the phantoms that soundings in their
nature generate and decompose. A piano lid opens,
to allow these phantoms to emerge with greater
lucidity, or shuts, a useful flat surface on which to
place a family photograph, cut flowers, a glass of
wine, a candelabra. The scaffolding organ ascends,
as it must, not only architecture without architect
(an idea whose time was the 1960s–70s, when
vernacular architecture became a serious subject of
study) but architecture without architecture.
Of the Four Organs of Massimo Bartolini, an
exhibition of four different organs shown at Fondazi-
one Merz in 2017, there is this to say: of the first of
these organs (Otra Fiesta, 2007–2008) there is an
assemblage of scaffolding, gaunt black and flat-faced,
a wooden wind chest, an engine, a gear wheel, a fan,
the height and acoustic character of the room and, a
little distance away so as to be almost something else,
four maracas activated by revolving drum brushes.
The scaffold/organ pipes are modified to play an
original composition by Edoardo Marraffa. An earlier
version of this scaffolding organ (Organs, 2008, Galle-
ria Massimo De Carlo, Milan), looped the first three
70
bars of John Cage’s composition, Cheap Imitation,
based on the accordion version by Teodoro Anzellotti.
This referential aspect, siting the works within a web
of twentieth century experimental music, is a distinc-
tive feature of Bartolini’s practice. The overall title of
the Fondazione Merz exhibition, for example—Four
Organs—is taken from the name of Steve Reich’s 1970
piece for four electric organs and maracas. In the
sleevenotes to the 1973 record release of Four Organs
(paired with John Cage’s Three Dances for two ampli-
fied prepared pianos) Reich wrote of the experiments
that preceded this composition, whereby he had
developed a phase shifting process using a pulse gate
developed in collaboration with an engineer from Bell
Laboratories. “Since I was becoming disenchanted
with electronic devices,” he wrote, “largely because of
their mechanical sounding rhythms and pitches and
the lack of bodily involvement in making music with
them, I began to think instead of simply holding
down individual notes longer and longer on an
organ. Instead of a digital clock to count and produce
regular pulses, I began to think of a musician playing
a steady pulse with a rattle (maracas) which the
organist could then count together from.”4
Reich defines himself in these notes, in effect
announcing a manifesto. He distances himself from
music that lacks human physicality, and distances
himself from Cage. What compelled him, he wrote,
was a music in which the process could be heard at
the surface, unlike Cage’s processes, which were to
some degree concealed or buried. An example of the
latter was Cage’s Cheap Imitation, composed in 1969
for Merce Cunningham after permission was denied
to use the intended music, Erik Satie’s Socrate. Why
was Cage attracted to Socrate? Perhaps because, as
James Harding writes in his biography of Satie:
“There is no period charm about it. Reticent, austere,
dignified in its rejection of the obvious, Socrate keeps
its colouring untarnished and its clear lines unmud-
dled.”5 The same might be said of Cage’s In a Land-
scape, an ideal of music somewhat remote emotion-
ally, in constant movement, its flow never disrupted,
its place in the history of music ambiguous.
By the time Satie’s publisher disallowed usage of
Socrate, Cunningham had already plotted choreogra-
phy based on structural aspects of the piece. Cage’s
answer was to keep those structural aspects but then,
as David Revill wrote in his Cage biography, “...
would use chance operations to determine pitches,
transpositions and continuity, thus circumventing
the copyright problem but retaining all the markers
on which Cunningham was relying.”6 The result was
profoundly odd, as if sporadically familiar tune
fragments, half-recognized banalities and moments
of serenity emerged in randomized sequences that
refused to coalesce. Though the brittle, brisk stepping
of the piano version is slowed and softened to treacle
by Bartolini’s Organs, the unsettlement survives.
Inevitably, given the ecclesiastical atmosphere to
which a pipe organ is condemned, enhanced by
cathedral acoustics in art galleries, the sound of
Bartolini’s organs is a reminder of ruminative
improvisations played by church organists before a
service begins. As a contrast to this meander, occa-
sionally the maracas of Otra Fiesta come to life, in
rhythmically oblique echo of Reich’s Four Organs.
Reich wrote of bodily involvement, and yet pipe
organs question this necessity, since their mecha-
nisms are prosthetic, to a degree. Prior to the use of
electrical power, air would have to be generated with
a manually operated bellows. If the organ was large
then more than one person would be required to
produce sufficient air, an economy of servitude that
hovers close to the construction of hydraulic and
pneumatic automata for which humans were surplus
to requirement. As examples, there were the water
organs of Italian villas or Athanasius Kircher’s
inventions [fig. 3], such as his design for a hydraulic
organ and automatic harp. Kircher, a seventeenth
century Jesuit priest by profession, conceived of the
organ as universe, the player as God, though in my
theological naivety I wonder about this placement of
God, dwarfed by mighty organ pipes and committed
to a position at the keyboard as if a mere human.
03
71
Sound originates in a specific place, generated by
confrontations of materials and energies, but then
disperses into other places as invisible vibrations.
Athanasius Kircher’s acoustical experiments took
magical pleasure in moving sound over distance,
drawing long pipe shapes and spiraling shell forms
into the walls of buildings or deploying speaking
pipes in the countryside in the mistaken belief that
these tubes amplified voices or music.
In Bartolini’s world, spaces connect to other
spaces; the parameters of music transmute (mute
mutations of mute notations of physical phenomena)
into the dimensions of a platform on which that
music (John Coltrane’s Impressions, as an example) is
played (Impression, 2008). Sound is portable, mobile,
invasive. A trumpet is played in one room, heard in
another, the body of the instrument penetrating the
divider we call a wall as it might in a cartoon like
Tom & Jerry (Music and Player, 2005). A story is read
on one room, picked up and amplified by a micro-
phone in another, a kind of eavesdropping in which
the microphone listens to what is separate from itself
(Heart in Hand, 2011). A drummer plays in a bell
tower; Rova Saxophone Quartet play with him, in a
different space, a cloister (Sun of Today, 2009). A tree
is surrounded by red banked seating so that audienc-
es can sit and listen to a tree as they would a musi-
cian (Audience for a Tree, 2016-17). A saxophonist
plays for a tree (Ballad for a Tree, 2003). Then Hand-
rail (2014), homage to baroque Rome, a handrail
hybridized with a trumpet, a four-belled trumpet of
shells for bells, twisted in Neptunian echo of the
conch trumpet, blown by the Tritons, who sounded it
to control the winds [fig. 4]. This handrail reminis-
cent of the shell-like tubes drawn by Kircher, a device
to transport an audible voice from room to room.
Of the second of Four Organs (Voyelles, 2017),
there is this to say: five pipes, splayed against a wall,
like severely pruned and trained fig tree, ornamen-
tally, or heating pipes running up a wall, functional-
ly, black, white, red, green, blue, differing heights
and dimensions. These thin, somewhat comic figures
are the five vowels, each with its color, as if synaes-
thesia were something other than a deeply subjec-
tive instinct about the vibrational nature of sound
and its impression on the body. Here, a reference to
Arthur Rimbaud’s poem, Voyelles, in which he
described U as waves, divine shudderings of viridian
seas, O as sublime trumpet full of strange piercing
sounds. There is another history, related incompre-

04
hensibly by these solitary pipes whose chord of
approximate vowels blares in stasis, like a bagpipe
drone, or quartet of cantu a tenore singers from
Sardinia. This is the story of speaking machines,
including Wolfgang von Kempelen’s manually
operated speech synthesiser of the late eighteenth
century, an organ, in effect, operated manually by a
bellows from the kitchen, a story in our time repre-
sented by Alexa, probably also in the kitchen,
heeding our commands and speaking in her turn.
The third of Four Organs (Three Quarter-tone
Piece, 2009), occupies space as if furniture, one
wall-mounted, one tall against a wall, one lying on
the floor, all blonde plywood, lacking in adornment,
only the functional apertures over which air blows,
generating sounds. Rectangle mouths in blank faces.
The sound—insistent throb of difference tones—ref-
erences a Charles Ives composition, Three Quar-
ter-tone Pieces. Ives composed a quarter-tone piece in
around 1913-14; then in 1925 he composed two more,
for two pianos tuned a quarter-tone apart. Ives was
strongly influenced by his father, who began experi-
ments in stretching and tuning violin strings and
microtuning musical glasses after hearing a church
bell in a thunderstorm. “I’ve heard a chord I’ve never
heard before,” he said, all night at the piano hoping
to replicate the combination of pitches. “It comes
over and over but I can’t seem to catch it.”7
The fourth of Four Organs (In a Landscape, 2017)
is a well, black and glossy, vertical tube set into the
ground, air pump squatting on its floor like a toad,
playing notes of John Cage’s In a Landscape (cus-
tomarily performed on piano though occasionally
harp). The light in this room is pale blue, twilight
perhaps, a stained-glass window as I see in my
memory of singing in the choir as a boy, hearing
organ tones in the gravity and dread of the Chris-
tian church. The night sky is pale, starless, as if
moonlight reflecting in a well. The room is starless
and Bible black (a King Crimson LP title, hidden
somewhere down the well).
The fifth of Four Organs is set into a wall, Ghost
Track, a slit. Mouth organ, asking only for air from
a passing human. A secret (until breath betrays).

1 Dr. Sally Hickson, Van
Eyck, The Ghent Altarpiece,
https://www.khanacademy.
org/humanities/renais-
sance-reformation/north-
ern-renaissance1/burgun-
dy-netherlands/a/vaneyck-gh-
entaltar [accessed 28.2.2022].
2 Coincidentally, when
Massimo Bartolini exhibited
his organ piece, Otra Fiesta, at
SMAK, Ghent, in 2013, Van
Eyck’s Mystic Lamb was
moved to the MSK Gent
(Museum of Fine Arts) for
restoration, only a short
distance from SMAK.
3 Personal communication
with Massimo Bartolini,
email, 08.03.2022.
4 Steve Reich, sleevenotes to
John Cage, Three Dances, Steve
Reich, Four Organs, Angel LP,
USA, 1973.
5 James Harding, Erik Satie,
(London: Secker & Warburg,
1975), 180.
6 David Revill, The Roaring
Silence, (London: Bloomsbury,
1992), 232.
7 Frank R. Rossiter, Charles
Ives & His America (London:
Victor Gollancz, 1976), 14.
CAPTIONS
01 Altarpieces of Adoration
of the Mystic Lamb by Jan e
Hubert Van Eyck under resto-
ration at MSK, Ghent.
02 Cover of John Coltrane’s
Ascension vinyl.
03 Harmonia Nascentis
Mundi from Musurgia Univer-
salis by Athanasius Kircher.
04 Handrail, 2014.

72
Dust Chaser Dust Chaser (detail)
2016 74 2016 → 75
76 77
 In the Shadow of
ANDREA VILIANI
Another Name, Something
Shimmers. The “Work
Provider” Massimo Bartolini
Imagine passing through space and time (that of
your footsteps), which both separate and connect
two streets of the same city. To do so, you mustn’t
actually pass through another alley but instead
create one, conjuring thresholds and imagining
apertures, creating passageways from one building
to another. In doing so, you are not only passing
through a space separating two streets, but also
through the time that has been spent there in the
past, the time being spent there now and the time
that will be spent there in the future.
In this way you are not alone, because this cross-
ing occurs through various histories, and because
many others have already taken these same steps,
and they are taking them alongside you, as they will
take them in the future too. If this time-space were a
cultural institution, a museum… this means, per-
haps, that it could be (was) possible and that someone
might have (already) tried it: whatever their expres-
sive tool, artists always tell stories, and it is precisely
this story that I would like to tell you, even if it isn’t
just a story, as it actually happened.
In 2005, as the Director of the Fondazione Galle-
ria Civica-Centro di Ricerca sulla Contemporaneità
di Trento, I invited the artist Massimo Bartolini to
redesign the gallery, which had just recently been
established as a foundation. Bartolini, though, is nei-
ther an architect nor a designer but an artist who
tells stories which in his case are reflections, rota-
tions, and revolutions on how space, time, and we
ourselves, are shaped at the intersection of ideas and
materials. My budget wasn’t sufficient to support a
comprehensive and definitive architectural interven-
tion, anyway. Instead, we decided to act step by step,
organizing his interventions like chapters of a novel,
or a serial told in installments. We were aware that
what we were doing was analogous to a personal
exhibition composed of a certain number of unique
works, but we were also conscious that in operating
in this manner this show would take place over an
extended period of time without an inauguration
nor a closing date—appearing within the spaces and
79
times of the museum and coexisting with other exhi-
bitions—and that the works would be, at least until
the project’s completion, in service of, and therefore
in a secondary position with respect to those of the
other artists on display. We knew, then, that Barto-
lini would have acted more than simply as an artist,
or even an architect or designer, but instead as a
“work provider” (more technically a “contractor”),
that is, a subject who stipulates with the client (the
Galleria and therefore, in other words, the museum
in general) an agreement defined as a “provision of
work” or a “work performance” (more technically a
“work contract”), under which he is obliged to carry
out a task or function without the constraint of
subordination in disciplinary, aesthetic, organiza-
tional, or space-time terms. This was the first aspect
of his particular relationship with the museum, to
which he added another, which in the end was the
same but articulated from a different point of view.
If Bartolini was indeed acting in this relationship as
an artist, it would mean attributing him a less
episodic and more ubiquitous, nearly co-directive
role, one that we could define as “artist in residence.”
The beauty is that, amidst this critical and legal
ambiguity, there was no contract signed between
Bartolini and the Galleria, and we limited ourselves
to simply begin the first works of this artist’s resi-
dency, to share the first episodes of this story.
The Galleria Civica is a long and narrow space
that unfurls between the streets Via Cavour and Via
Belenzani in the historic center of Trento. Bartolini
chose the corridor leading to the rear emergency
exit onto Via Cavour as a possible new entrance
area as its “growing” urbanistic, architectural, and
perspective potential made it better suited to
become a performative introduction to the institu-
tion itself. After completing research in the city’s
archives, Bartolini reworked the layout of certain
museum signage, creating them in white neon.
Placed on the façade of Casa Triangi and along the
internal corridor, these markers would accompany
the visitor through the history of the building,
beyond the physical structure itself, by narrating its
change of ownership and various commercial uses
over time. Beginning with the 17th century family
from which the building gets its name (“Triangi,”)
proceeding to the World War II bombings which
razed it to the ground and its subsequent post-war
reconstruction, it was then possible to enter and
exit the commercial activities which took place in
these spaces between the late 60s and late 90s of the
20th century: weaving together the shouts of the
patrons from the Tre Dì pizzeria, the strobe lights
of the Ufo discotheque, the crowds which frequent-
ed the Mirrors Club both in their leisure free time
and as political occupiers (throughout the Years of
Lead, the Sociology Faculty, and the so called
“historic compromise,”) from the billiards players of
the Las Vegas to the clothes and accessories shop-
pers at Marlena. Superimposed upon this final
white neon, placed externally, was the only green
neon of the series, which bore the script Archivio
del Futuro. Fondazione Galleria Civica di Trento.
The Galleria moved its activities here in 2000,
becoming only the latest piece of history of this
urban shift—analogous to the Parisian “Passages”
described by the philosopher Walter Benjamin?—
but as well a history that is ongoing. With the
seemingly oxymoronic term “Archive of the Future”
Bartolini reinterpreted the museum as a space-time
custodian of the past and future—simultaneously—
and therefore also holding a responsibility for
activation of the present. Housing the offices, the
artworks, and the archives of the Galleria Civica,
the “Archive of the Future” was a public and em-
pathic platform which, starting from shared memo-
ries, projected shared future matrices. Its imaginary
motor was a series of bookshelves made of MDF
and green plexiglass (the color of action for Barto-
lini), which the artist placed in a meeting point at
the center of the exhibition itineraries, thus forcing
every following exhibition to consider it. The
shelves’ transparent backing revealed the function-
al mechanisms of the museum’s heating and cooling
ducts, which had originally been concealed behind a
false wall. Placed on the shelves, and freely consult-
able by visitors as an “open bookshelf” library, all of
the publications and primary documents of the
history of the Galleria Civica were made available;
these texts were evidently also intended to be
considered components of the institution’s func-
tioning apparatus, equal to the machines and
technologies which provided the electricity, water,
and gas to the building. Like the “archeologist of
knowledge” Michel Foucault or the philosopher
Jacques Derrida, Bartolini also intended to present
the archive not as an inert, solemn, and static
storage space, but as an exercise in ongoing power
and as an act of foundational reality (its name is
derived from the Greek term ἀρχή—beginning,
80
origin, principal—and ἀρχεῖον, the palace of the
magistrate or Archon who guarded the deeds). He
viewed the archive as the mechanism which permits
the guardianship and diffusion of the communal
“truth” and creates our interpretation of reality,
one that is always susceptible to revisions as soon as
the same “truth” is confronted with or put in crisis
by another “truth.”1
Inspired by the cement chairs designed by the
architect Adalberto Libera and still visible today in
some of Trento’s parks, Bartolini used the wooden
surfaces leftover from the demolition of the false
walls which had previously hidden the museum’s
HVAC system to make a series of modular furni-
ture—chairs, tables, closets—which bore the signs
of their previous function as well as their mutation,
combinable with one another in various positions
to catalyze the future educational activities of the
institution [fig. 1].2 This doubling, in which multiple
01
references or forms coexist, this predisposition to
bend the contents of his research towards moments
of restitution and the sharing of the research itself,
without one aspect contradicting the other or
rendering itself servile to the other, are the reoccur-
ring matrices of Bartolini’s oeuvre; it should be
noted that Bartolini often cites Nadar’s photograph
02
of the first hot air balloon in flight and the fact that
putting together two things or points of view which
are foreign to one another is the most immediate
mode of changing the world. Sala F—a room for
educational activities and encounters3—was one
such work which he designed and realized in 2009
for the Venice Biennale alongside Tobias Rehberg-
er’s bar and Rirkrit Tiravanija’s bookshop. Another
similar piece was the bookshop-bar Circle in a
Square made in 2012 and installed at the Satoyama
Museum of Contemporary Art in Niagata prefec-
ture, Japan. The work was collaboration with the
Milanese Binocle studio and accompanied by a
musical playlist made by Carsten Nicolai.
If Bartolini’s practice is predisposed to incorpo-
rate both the works of other artists as well as the
reactions of the viewing public and is therefore
proximate to the so-called “relational aesthetics”
movement which emerged in the 1990s, it is none-
theless a catalyst for a relational hermeneutics open
to interpretation which is exercised through the
composition of constructive forms which we could
define as “transitional,” in the creation between one
dimension, or condition, and another. Despite the
reference to site-specific interventions by artists
such as Michael Asher, the aesthetic formalization
and intellectual impulse of Bartolini’s installations
recall less the logic of institutional critique of the
1960s than that of its close contemporary Arte
Povera movement, with its procedural and an-
ti-form logic, and the practices of Fluxus including
references to John Cage, which constitute possible
antecedents for Bartolini. More than critique, then,
Bartolini’s oeuvre and his museum form a compos-
ite entity, a reflective and perceptual tool which is
liberated through its constant alteration (in its
intrinsic performative nature) from its standard
use, a lyrical and epiphanic space-time, an architec-
tural “metaverse” that is a polisensory, multifunc-
tional, and synesthetic construct that is simultane-
ously emotional and memorial, conceptual and
symbolic. Bartolini works through approximations
by operating with analog processes which draw on
the body and mind such that the proposed relation-
ship is also freed from any sense of a priori pro-
grammable design. More than the final work, it is
the series of occurrences that the work provokes
which seems to interest Bartolini; I imagine that he
would be more interested in the photograph Man
Ray shot in 1920 of the dust accumulated on Marcel
Duchamp’s Le Grand Verre, than he would in the
original work itself. After all, it was Bartolini
himself who told me that one of his favorite quota-
81
tions is by art historian Roberto Longhi who noted
that the painter Giorgio Morandi made “dust
shimmer” in his still lifes. Acting in the shadow of
other artists, and in those of his own works, Barto-
lini also makes “dust shimmer” in his own way. This
could in fact be the essential function of his work as
a “work provider.”
From 2010 to 2012 Bartolini’s interventions were
accompanied by and expressed alongside the
temporary exhibitions shown at the Galleria Civica,
including those by Robert Kuśmirowski, Melvin
Moti, Gustav Metzger, Roman Ondák, Rosa Barba,
Clemens von Wedemeyer, and Nedko Solakov.
Bartolini used the same MDF with which his library
was built for covering as well the stairs leading to
the offices, where, he had inserted a step made of a
blue marble streaked with white, like a mineral
cloud—perhaps an apotropaic step to ward away
the daily institutional bureaucracy? Drawing on a
memory of a meeting he had during his preparatory
research, Bartolini made a covering for some
service entrances out of a wallpaper adorned with
speech therapy exercise diagrams. He also designed
the lighting for the ground floor exhibition rooms,
using a series of industrial ceiling lamps that
resembled the I Ching, aka The Book of Changes, the
sacred Chinese text consulted to obtain direction
before making a decision [fig. 3 and fig. 4]. Accord-
ing to this tradition, 64 hexagrams—each composed
03
of six complete lines (Yang) or broken ones (Yin),
which can be combined in fixed forms (Yang or Yin)
or mobile ones (Yang and Yin)—can represent the
possible formations of the two opposing forces of
the universe, positive (Yang) and negative (Yin). The
response is rendered following a series of coin
tosses to construct the hexagram which can change
according to each successive toss, altering the final
response. Despite the differences of the lights,
which gave each room its own unique character (as
if each grid of ceiling lights corresponded to differ-
ent tosses and therefore answers), the gradation of
the light was uniform. While they were curious
about the unexpected hexagonal forms of these
lights, not a single artist complained about the
Bartolini’s “handiwork” nor his lighting system.
04
Certain interventions which Bartolini conceived
of in reaction to specific exhibitions were left
imagined, but never executed. After seeing Ondak’s
work Eclipse in 2011—in which the artist trans-
formed the central section of the ceiling of the
basement-level gallery into an inverted roof, turn-
ing the pillars of the room into chimneys pointed
towards the floor rather than the sky—Bartolini
proposed the idea of removing the linoleum floor
under Ondak’s installation to uncover the original
red marble flooring from Verona, into which he
would carve a series of undulations and hollows, a
form of bas-relief. This intervention would have
brought out the old dance floor of the Ufo club,
transforming it into a Martian soil, a surface of
uncertain steps that would have caused visitors to
stumble. This intervention would have been a
reactivation of the disquieting and destabilizing
nature and of the desertification aspects of Barto-
lini’s floor-works (1993-94) and room-works (1996-
2004), while also evoking another of Ondak’s works,
Spirit and Opportunity, 2004. The dialogue between
the two artists would have taken place around a
series of reciprocal and centripetal inversions,
between inside and outside, up and down, here and
there, now and later, one and another… To cite
Bartolini himself: “Ondak inverted the roof and the
sky above. My floor exposed the topography of the
ground beneath. [They were] two opposing forces
82
that should have met one another in the center of copies, reinterpretations and new iterations, and in even if he never offered them a bouquet of flowers.
the museum.” Later, in 2012, on the margins of which each artist was reflected in each other like a Maybe the unrealized project in Trento was
Solakov’s exhibition which had opened the previous palimpsest (perhaps this was the rationale behind instead already contained in this minimal gesture
autumn, Bartolini designed an unrealized floor uncovering all of the gallery floors?). I’m reminded carried out in Florence, which was similar to anoth-
intervention for all of the blind spots and liminal of Apocalypse, a project from 2010 in which Arian- er of Bartolini’s works, one of the most humble and
areas left unutilized by the Galleria, where he na Pieri carried a bouquet of flowers to an image of intimate but also the most holistic and exhaustive
would have removed the floors’ upper surfaces, San Giovanni painted by Lorenzo Monaco held in of his entire oeuvre, simultaneously a “perfor-
uncovering all of the previous flooring layers and the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence. She com- mance” and a “work.” In Double Shell a man shows
creating a progressive and interconnected series of pleted this ritual nightly while the museum was the public a pearl resting in the palm of his hand.
institutional paleo- or archeo-sols. closed throughout the duration of the exhibition. As The pearl is a precious material and process, one
Bartolini’s work as “work provider” was inter- Carlo Falciani wrote, in his own way Bartolini that the clam patiently and invisibly produces in the
rupted when the Galleria Civica became incorporat- evokes the words of anthropologist Ernesto De tiny space of its shell over a long period of time. As
ed into the Mart, the provincial museum of modern Martino on the value of a simplified and sincere Bartolini writes when introducing the work, citing
and contemporary art of Trento and Rovereto. gesture, a non-theatric and non-monumental one the philosopher Martin Heidegger, “to protect is to
Shortly after taking over control of the gallery’s that, rather than being a procession, a dance, a song create,” and the only certainty, in protecting as in
premises, the Mart museum returned those inter- or a game, is instead simply the display of an creating, is the “perpetual mutation” of that which
ventions that were removable to Bartolini while artwork or a visit to a museum, a form of ancestral is protected and that which is created. This is true
commissioning a professional architect to design a devotion to the work of art and the museum itself. as well for those “work providers” who, despite
more standardized and typical renovation of the It seems to me that Bartolini has made a similar everything, continue to unconditionally lend their
spaces. What nobody knows, however, is that gesture towards the artists of the Galleria Civica, handiwork.5
Bartolini had planned his interventions in the
context of, and leading up to, what he intended to
be the final and most paradoxical version of his solo
show which never occurred at the Galleria Civica, a
project that was to be an embodiment of his meth-
odology not only through architectural representa- 1 Paradigmatic of this inter- ment level (-2) up to the exhibi- tions of geometric forms used closed, outside/inside, public/
tion. This final act of Bartolini’s progressive institu- pretation of the archive as tion floor (+3) to create a in cinema to make changes of private, present/absent, physi-
tional presentation called for the Galleria to be creative subject is the 2020 non-hierarchical relationship scene as well as by projections cal/metaphysical fade into one
project On Identikit, the first between the professional and of drawings and texts taken another. For example, in Head
completely emptied of all artworks, for the offices
chapter of the program of internal functioning of the from Investigaçoes Geometricas n° 8, presented in 2004, Barto-
to be closed, and the doors to the museum left open artist’s residencies Through museum and its general public by Gonçalo M. Tavares, Sala F lini built a room to house a
all day and all night, thereby connecting the streets Time: integrity and transforma- use. This intervention went so could also be converted into an single work by the artist
of Via Cavour and Via Belenzani via the restored tion of the work, in which far as to give body and voice to auditorium with a table that Camille Corot; a similar inter-
Bartolini was put into dialogue these multiple declinations and could be used as a stage. A vention was designed in 2007
and illuminated galleries. A museum which was with the artworks of two other interpretations via the actress possible model for this installa- for his solo show at the
closing would instead remain open 24/7, becoming artists, Luigi Ghirri and Lu- Emanuela Villagrossi’s per- tion was the work Impressions, Fundaçao de Serralves, Porto
strewn with muddy footprints and dead leaves, ciano Fabro, housed in the formative reading of the 2008, a “picture” made of a in which Bartolini interacted
Museum-Archive of the CSAC artworks’ labels. Within this retractable metal structure that with a work by Barnett New-
filled with the wasted time of wanderers, adapted of Parma. Interpreting these context there was also the becomes a stage once it is folded man which had been lent by
into a ravine for occasional lovers and a refuge for works not as autonomous or work Collection, in which eight down onto its sixteen legs, Stockholm’s Moderna Museet.
the homeless. It would be a museum with no entry predefined data but as available videos from the permanent which in turn represent the first Room for Mutações Geográficas:
and revisable “truths,” Bartolini collection were shown; the sixteen bars of John Coltrane’s Frontiera Rio-São Paulo, 1969,
tickets, no captions, no wall texts (what sense would redefined them as musical works themselves were not composition, Impression. first presented in 2007, was a
there be to have them, after all, for a library, a step notes, reconfiguring the ar- actually shown but instead 4 Although it refers to a rotating room built to host the
or the ceiling lamps, even if in the form of the I chive itself as a room where recordings of them being partially unrealized project, work of Cildo Meireles, which
“one composes music.” Previ- projected on the museum walls this gesture would have con- stood immobile in the center.
ching?), and above all no opening or closing time, at ously in 2010, during his during the installation of the formed to other installations In Revolutionary Monk, 2007,
least until it was transformed once again into a collaboration with the Galleria exhibition, thus bearing the created by Bartolini such as another sculpture made in an
museum like every other.4 In his project for the Civica, Bartolini opened the traces of the quotidian life of the basement he designed but analogous act of perpetual
exhibition -2 + 3 at the MU- an artwork exhibited within a didn’t execute for the BSI rotation (a liminal operation
Galleria Civica Bartolini effectively defined his SEION in Bolzano, in which, museum collection. collection in 1999-2000 where a between borders and fluid
relationship with the institution, identified by his alongside the artist Stefano 2 Abandoned over the years Fausto Melotti work was to be states, between physical mate-
custodial mission which was not just a legal one but Arienti, he redefined the by the museum, these modular installed on a raised section of rial and spiritual?) Bartolini
an idealized one, in which each work was an ele- experience of viewing the 1380 components are now used as a floor which had been cut out. displayed a copy of an Asiatic
works in the museum’s collec- library in the artist’s studio in Similarly, the rooms of the sculpture from the second
ment in a chain of meditations and transmissions, tion, moving the hanging Cecina. Head series in which the half of the 19th century which
of fiduciary assignments that required restorations, storage racks from the base- 3 Accompanied by projec- distinctions between open/ he has owned since 2004.
83
Or April 25, 1936, presented in
2008 before the opening of the
MAXXI – Museo Nazionale
delle arti del XXI secolo in
Rome.
5 This text reconstructs for
the first time as a case-study
Massimo Bartolini’s project
Archivio del Futuro. Fondazione
Galleria Civica di Trento and
My Sixth Homage: To Mario Merz
2010
recomposes and cites certain
unpublished conversations
between the artist and the
author over the past decade
(2012-2022).
CAPTIONS
01 Sala didattica, Galleria
Civica di Trento, 2009.
84
02 Installation of Camille
Corot’s painting, View of the
countryside near Rome (Ponte
Numentano), 1826 in Head n.8
(Museum), 2004, at Boijmans
Van Beuningen, Rotterdam.
03, 04 Ching Lights, 2009.
FRANCESCA COMISSO,
LUISA PERLO / A.TITOLO Making Place
Massimo Bartolini makes use of many languages to
give substance to the thoughts, images, and words
that are often at the origin of his artistic practice.
Over the years, he has created and altered environ-
ments, choreographed gestures, explored sculpture’s
possibilities for the transformation matter, even in
its most fluid and incorporeal forms, such as water,
light, smell, and sound. Traced in the image of his
erect body in the middle of a rural landscape, with
feet buried in the earth and head high, pointing to
the sky like a tree (Senza Titolo, 1995), is an attitude
that one may define as an existential posture that
combines the empirical dimension of reality with
the immaterial and metaphysical one. Moreover,
expressed in this work is the aspiration to produce
ideas of space, sometimes suggested by an aroma, by
the glare of a light, by the hazy sound of a pocket
radio, which become places when they are inhabited.
This is case whether it be the body of a dancer or of
somebody to whom Bartolini has entrusted specific
actions, often elderly people, or members of the
public. His works are always the fruit of a reflection
on human beings and cannot disregard the condi-
tions of their existence, which constitute their
implicit presupposition: inhabiting, perceiving,
breathing, evolving. This approach remains the
same even when his artistic practice leaves the
context of the museum and the gallery and contends
with the public space, regarding which the artist
suggests with his works a specific mode d’emploi.
In Man and Fountain (2001), Massimo Bartolini
creates a mobile device, a fountain equipped with
wheels and sensors that allow it to move and to
follow a person. The scene that transpires is surre-
al, and, at the same time, logical and functional:
around a fountain one can meet and amuse oneself
with other people. For this reason, the fountain
renders the one who inhabits the urban space the
mobile center of the social life and relationships
that determine the nature of the public space. One
could say that the mobile fountain of Man and the
Fountain creates the public space as a “space of
representation,” according to Henri Lefebvre’s
definition, space “is alive: it speaks. It has an
affective kernel or centre: Ego, bedroom, dwelling,
house; or: square, church, graveyard.”1 A space that
contains lived situations, and therefore time.
87
Like the fountain, which is far from all monu-
mental aesthetics, the garden of A Bench (2003),
created in the magnificent overlook of Florence’s
Forte del Belvedere, also possesses a specific spatial
array that refers back to decentralized, bare urban
areas, where a tree and a bench are enough to evoke
the archetype of the garden, a place of pause and
reconciliation with nature. That temporary work
suggested a use of the city able to redirect the logic
of touristic consumption toward the practice of
inhabiting, creating an unprecedented space,
generated almost magically out of the elevation of a
portion of soil. The very ground on which people
walked, thanks to the separation from the earth of
a portion of its surface, like risen dough, was
transformed into a great collective bench; on its
edges people could comfortably sit down, but they
could also climb up in order to walk across the
surface of what appeared to be an ordinary subur-
ban garden, with street lamps, young olive trees,
and a fountain, and from there acquire a different
point of view. Disaffecting, poetic, and irrevocable,
like other places created by Bartolini, the A Bench
space offered itself up as a stage overlooking the
city, on which every gesture, starting from the most
ordinary, could acquire its own special resonance.
In the projects of a public and context-specific
character, Bartolini has been able to inflect his
language and his poetics in relation to different
requirements and different rules of engagement,
such as those of the experimentation of a civic
commission solicited by a group of teachers active in
the old workers quarter of Mirafiori Nord in Torino.
In 2002, in fact, the curatorial collective a.titolo
engaged Bartolini in the first application in Italy of
the New Patrons (Les Nouveaux commanditaires), a
protocol concerning the production of art for the
public space that provides for the possibility that
anybody, alone or as part of a group, can entrust an
artist with an appeal for an artwork intended for
their own workplace or living space.2 The object of
the teachers’ request was to create a work that could
function as a permanent home for storytelling
projects, developed in schools, on the history and
memory of the neighborhood. An eighteenth-centu-
ry chapel adjacent to the school buildings had been
identified for this purpose, but it was inaccessible
because it was in a condition of serious architectural
decay. A place of great affection for the neighbor-
hood, the Anselmetti Chapel had been part of a
rural complex, and was the only building to survive
its destruction to make way for the school in the
1960s, at a time when the municipality urgently
needed to create the services necessary for the
doubling of the urban population, that had then
come up from the South of Italy to work at Fiat. The
challenge of transforming this small building
composed of three spaces, among which the still
consecrated liturgical hall, into a work with a use
function, lay in the capacity to reflect the value of
the educational project focused on memory intend-
ed as an open process to be actualized in the pres-
ent; to respond to the practical demands of a narra-
tive workshop; and, last but not least, to sanction
the transition from a religious place to a secular
space, from a monument of the past to an artistic
patrimony effective in the present. Entering a space
overloaded with symbols and historical traces, the
instinct to “take away” in order to re-signify the
place had to negotiate with the necessity of conserv-
ing certain elements of strong symbolic value, such
as a devotional painting. When, after many years of
being shut and a few under construction, the
Anselmetti Chapel reopened its doors to the city in
2007, the inhabitants rediscovered the alter, but in a
space without precedent, lined from floor to ceiling
by the shelves of a huge empty bookcase, where they
no longer sit facing the direction of the altar, but
toward each other, surrounded by an emptiness
rendered present and perceptible [fig. 1]. It is pre-
cisely to emptiness that the artist entrusted the
01
possibility of activating a disposition to silence, to
listening, to the experience of calibrating knowledge
awakened by a non-dogmatic spirituality, as a
personal interpretation of the building. In its pas-
sage to the adjoining room, the bookshelf loses its
metaphoric value and goes back to being functional
for the conservation of the documents gathered and
produced during the project’s activities, and the
floor itself is transformed into an archive. It is not
88
the first time that the artist works on the ground, on
what supports our bodies, creating floors that are
sensible to the steps of those who cross them (Drum,
2002). In this case the floor-archive becomes a literal
and metaphorical support for the entire structure,
assigning a foundational value to what could be
preserved, listened to, and reread. Through the
presence of signs with a strong symbolic resonance,
the Laboratorio di Storia e storie is offered as a place
where aesthetic experience has enriched education-
al activity with new pedagogical potential.3 The
small, workshop room on the upper floor, with
convertible structures such as the wide spacious
table that becomes a podium, assumes the role of a
prototype when, in 2009, Bartolini produced on a
larger scale the same device for the Educational
Area located in Sala F of the old Italian Pavilion at
the Giardini of the Venice Biennale on the occasion
of the 53rd International Art Exhibition. The jour-
ney, from empty to full, of the Anselmetti Chapel is
completed with an intervention in the outdoor space
of the garden, a sign that wraps around a large
cedar of Lebanon like an embrace, giving shape to a
table with a seat facing the tree trunk [fig. 2]. It is a
gesture of protection born in response to the possi-
ble eventuality of the tree’s removal during the site’s
02
construction; it is relived in Audience for a Tree, an
inhabitable work created in India for the Pune
Biennale (2017) and curated by Luca Cerizza and
Zasha Colah in which the artist surrounds an an-
cient tree with a closed ring of stalls facing inwards,
creating a place that can be at the same time inti-
mate, contemplative, and for individual or rather
collective and social use as a public space [fig. 3].
Just as it is common to create fixtures gathered
around natural elements such as water or trees,
bookshelves reappear throughout Bartolini’s work,
alluding to the knowledge stored in the written
word. The artist created an outdoor library for the
art festival TRACK, in Ghent, placing twelve shelves
with hundreds of books on a wide lawn, in perfect
03
continuity with the rows of an ancient vineyard, St.
Peter’s Abbey Vineyard, in the center of the city
(Bookyard, 2012).4 Here, the books, sourced from
public libraries, were available to everybody and
could be borrowed, exchanged, bought, and read
onsite. In this case, too, Bartolini creates an an-
ti-monumental apparatus to give form to a public
space where knowledge and imagination cultivated
through reading can become, in the practices of
everyday behavior, shared goods held in common.
If we think of the minimum necessary materials
for Bartolini, we indeed specifically imagine books:
a book of poetry and an instruction manual. Both
are in fact connected, in different ways, with the
deeper substance of things and with their workings,
as the starting points for connecting worlds, for
“traversing by foot the whole road of the imagina-
tion,”5 as the artist would say, and for defining the
extremes of a very broad range of interests that lie
at the origin of his art, from scientific thought, to
philosophy, to oriental cultures. However, love for
books always goes hand in hand with an interest in
exploring the forms of oral transmission, of circula-
tion and of the passage by word of mouth of infor-
mation, knowledge, and stories. Such is the case for
a project carried out in 2013 at Schlosspark Panse-
vitz on the German island of Rügen,6 a public park
in which there are two small islands. Here, the
artist intervenes with four projects, bringing about
transformations such as the relocation to a meadow
of the small bridge that connects the lovers’ islet,
which thus lies inviolable, or the bringing together
in dialogue of the center of a pond’s small island
with the trees that surround it by means of the
sonic and philosophical alternation of the words
existenz and leben, existence and life. The word is
again the protagonist, between presence and
absence, of the work that sees the artist republish a
text by Thomas Bernhard (Goethe schtirbt [Goethe
Dies], 1982), which he cuts off when the description
of the places reaches Rügen; the latter is thus
89
removed from the narrative and opened up to new
discourses. In the end, Bartolini confronts the
desire to pass on the story of the trees in the park,
each named after two or even three deceased
people, whose ashes nourished the earth on which
the plants grows. He collects all the names and asks
the writer Fanny Bussche to use them for one of her
stories. He then entrusts them to a man who regu-
larly visits the park with his dog, to whom he gives
a portable CD player that plays a reading of the
story so that passersby may enjoy it. Immaterial,
invisible, but present as a driver of meetings, the
work circulates and places stories, memories, and
imaginaries in circulation.
As we were able to observe previously, the
exploration of the concept of emptiness, in its dual
value as an index of what is lacking as much a space
to be filled, is present in several of Bartolini’s works
in relation to an experience of a spatial kind. In the
public installation tellingly given the title of a date,
25 aprile 1936 (2008), emptiness instead concerns the
experience of time: on the front of the MAXXI, for a
little over a month, when it was still a construction
site, a large light installation bore the phrase “Anche
oggi niente” (Nothing today either)—a statement
that struck one as paradoxical once it became
legible after a destructive act, with the lights surviv-
ing the synchronized collapse of all the lamps that
made up the installation.7 The phrase reproduces
what the artist remembered Cesare Pavese had
written in his diary,8 which in reality on that date in
1936 simply noted down the assessment “Quest’oggi
niente” (Nothing today). In Bartolini’s memory a
more Beckettian version emerges, one that elects
waiting to the center of existence. It is from this
perspective that he interprets, not without irony,
the peculiarity of a place where the museum’s
building site, which, like so many projects in our
country, seemed to never come to fruition, sprung
up a short distance from a church, “the great admin-
istrator of waiting.” The work precipitates as literal-
ly as it does spectacularly that suspended time; this
ushers in the present, causing it to happen, as if it
resulted from a reawakening.
Emptiness also seems to impose upon the center
of Black Circus Square, a work created as part of
Emscherkunst, a project curated by Florian Matzner
that involved international artists in the process of
renaturalizing the territories around the Emscher
River in the North Rhineland that had been devas-
tated by the steel industries. In this wounded land-
scape, Bartolini creates a work inspired by a supre-
matist painting by Kazimir Malevič, an icon of
modernist abstraction enlarged tenfold in order to
take on an environmental scale, where the broad
white square with its black circle is carved out
against the grass of a flat area. In his writings,
Malevič affirmed the value of an art freed from the
representative function and understood as a pure
expression of sensibility, without ulterior aims, in
the context of the great belief in a future of progress,
one that entrusts the function of constructing a new
and better society to steel and industry. Reminding
us of the ambivalent character of every advance,
Bartolini chooses to reactivate a symbol of that
progressive optimism in the present, but without
slipping into easy and liquidating dichotomies: his
Black Circus Square is a water reservoir that serves
as a supply for the fire station of the nearby town of
Castrop-Rauxel. It is a work with a purpose, as
required by the project, which contributes to enrich-
ing its nature as a contemplative place with meta-
phorical and poetic potential. The white square is in
fact a habitable space, conceived like other works by
the artist around water, a living and resurgent
element, which here also takes on the functional
value of aid, care and of every possible remediation
for the damage of our habitat, which the old, uni-
formed miner construed in the installation’s inaugu-
ral performance, continuously cleaning the surfaces
of the installation. Within the course of the same
day, the movement of an aquatic dancer, by virtue of
the tempo of the dance performed inside it, made
the vitality of that black circle exceedingly clear: an
abyss of possibility, a hypnotic center of a gaze that
demands pause as a way to “stay with the trouble,”
as Donna Haraway would say.9 To linger and to feel
a responsible part of the drama of reality as a form
of political action.
It is in this perspective, opened up by the pro-
jects created for the public space, that one can also
read his constant recourse, in terms of self-critical
examination, to a repositioning of the figure of the
artist inside a broader community, one that the peo-
ple involved in the creation of a work are also a part
of, just like the beneficiaries: the so-called public
who, outside the museum, coincide with the broad-
er notion of collectivity. If Bartolini dedicates an
entire book to the former (Realizer, 2002), with
Nuovi Committenti he finds an opportunity to
make clear the profoundly relational dimension of
his practice, far from the demiurgic myth of artistic
creation and looking to propose a non-prescriptive
ethics of the ways of inhabiting places, where the
multitude can experience temporary forms of
community, of singular-plural being.10

1 Henri Lefebvre, The Pro-
duction of Space (Oxford and
Cambridge: Blackwell, 1974),
42.
2 Conceived in the early
1990s by an artist, François
Hers, and promoted for 30
years by the Fondation de
France in Paris, this protocol
has given rise to the produc-
tion of more than five hundred
works by internationally
prominent artists and has
spread throughout Europe
through a wide network of
curators, who function as
cultural mediators, with bases
of operation in several coun-
tries. See www.nouveauxcom-
manditaires.eu.
3 The reader is referred to
the reflections of the teachers
who commissioned the work
and of the artist documented
in the film The New Patrons of
Turin (35’), by François Hers
and Jérôme Poggi and pro-
duced by the Fondation de
France. See www.nouveaux-
commanditaires.eu/en/video/
films.
4 The Belgian festival
TRACK. A Contemporary City
Conversation is a SMAK
production curated by
Philippe Van Cauteren and
Miram Varadinis.
5 This is a phrase from the
artist, quoted in the catalog of
the project and exhibition
10/09/08 - Proposal XXIII,
curated by a.titolo, Piedmont
Region 2008.
6 In the context of Massimo
Bartolini’s solo exhibition,
Zwei Inseln, curated by Camil-
la Wegener and Luca Cerizza
(2013).
7 Massimo Bartolini’s April
25, 1936 was the first event in
the program MAXXI Dialogues
With The City, curated by
Laura Cherubini (13 Febru-
ary-30 March, 2008).
8 C. Pavese, Il mestiere di
vivere, diario 1935-1950, Einau-
di, 1952.
9 Donna Haraway, Staying
with the Trouble: Making Kin in
the Chthulucene (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2016).
10 An expression that refers
to the title of Jean-Luc Nancy’s
volume, Being Singular-Plural
(Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2000).
CAPTIONS
01 Laboratorio di Storia e
storie, 2003-2007. View from
the Anselmetti Chapel.
02 Laboratorio di Storia e
storie, 2003-2007. Table in the
courtyard of Franca Mazzarello
and Alvaro-Modigliani schools.
03 Audience for a Tree, 2016-
2017.

273 Hours
90 91 2014 →
92 93
100 Hours 100 Hours
2013 94 2013 95
 Massimo Bartolini:
FIONA BRADLEY
Little Moments of Happiness
On 4 May 2021, I opened an email invitation from
the Cairn Gallery, a small gallery run by poet
Thomas A. Clark and artist Laurie Clark in their
home in Pittenweem, a village on the east coast of
Scotland. The email consisted of an image of Massi-
mo Bartolini’s Time to Unroll (2011), with his de-
scription of the work and a message from the
gallery laid out underneath like a poem:
A sheet of paper
that has been rolled up
for many years
takes a long time
to unwind entirely.
During the time of unrolling, the gallery
will be closed.1
The invitation detonated in my lockdown study
with an explosive charge I recognized, bringing a
wry smile and a blast of pure potential into my day.
Time to Unroll is a work about time. Past time—
the paper has, (if we believe the artist, and why
should we not?) been rolled up for a long time.
Present time—we are invited to watch it unroll,
should we care to stay for long enough. And future
time—at some point in the future, this roll of paper
will become a sheet of paper. But primarily, the
work is a proposition, something we can imagine
happening but something that we probably won’t—
and in the genius of the Cairn Gallery’s exhibition,
taking place when the UK was locked down with
Covid-19 restrictions, can’t—actually see.
Like so much of Bartolini’s work, Time to Unroll
is a realization—a distillation—of an idea. It
functions like a battery: a little package of energy
ready for when we need it.
Massimo Bartolini makes sculpture that unset-
tles our perception of the world. His work exists in
a variety of materials and on different scales, and
each encounter with it brings the unexpected. For
example Untitled (Wave), a wave in a pool in a field
of barley made for dOCUMENTA 13 in Kassel in
2012. The work is a sequence of propositions: what
if you could capture a wave? Not merely freeze one,
but capture its energy. And what if, in doing that,
you could stop time, could confine the wave to the
97
perpetual motion of the present tense? And finally,
what if you could completely transform water, a
normally formless material, into a series of endless-
ly changing shapes? Untitled (Wave) did all this and
more (it also nurtured a crop of barley from seed to
harvest). It was a literalization of energy. Energy
itself, and the energy of the artistic imagination.
There is perhaps a question as to whether
Untitled (Wave) actually needed to be made in order
for it to function as a work of art. As a set of propo-
sitions it exists so happily in the realm of the
hypothetical that there might be an argument that
it could stay there—that thinking through what it
might be like for a sculpture to do what it does
might be enough. That’s not quite right though.
Whether or not one actually got to see the work, the
fact that the questions at its heart were answered in
material form enlists complicity in Bartolini’s trans-
formational project. He’s out to change the way we
see and experience the world.
This is obvious in the work for which the artist is
best known; the large scale, immersive installations
like that change space and our experience of it and
which acknowledge, in their finished form, the
processes by which they are made. But it is similarly
the case with works like Time to Unroll, a small
work that is almost entirely an idea, but one that—
because the idea is realized, whether or not you get
to see it being so—creates and captures the energy
that infects all of Bartolini’s sculpture.
Bartolini has always made small, private works.
He showed a selection of them for the first time in
the exhibition Studio Matters +1 at the Fruitmarket,
Edinburgh and S.M.A.K, Ghent in 2013. These small
works were not models or maquettes and bore no
direct relation to the larger, more immersive, more
obviously affective works also in each exhibition
(The Street Below [2011] at the Fruitmarket, Organs
[2008–2013] at S.M.A.K). Rather, they were “studio
matters,”2 uncertain objects whose status and
meaning are in flux. Bartolini explained that his
small works started as games to play with his son
or by himself, but became containers for thought,
or maybe initial impulses toward thought: “Here in
the studio is where I really think. But since I’m not
a conceptual artist, I need something to do while
I’m thinking…”3 [fig. 1].
At the Fruitmarket, the small works were dis-
played in the first floor gallery, on a working table
built over the main staircase in such a way that

01
viewers to the exhibition climbed up into the upper
floor through a trap door in the table, emerging
with their eyes (and minds) on a level with the
sculptures. The table sealed the staircase off, while
also opening it up, the artist playing a game with
his sculptures, with the gallery and with us: “this
out-of-scale piece of furniture/architecture is like
an autofocus camera that cannot find the focus,
whose lens keeps going back and forth. The table
‘cleans the room,’ and provokes in the public a
different way of perceiving the space, like entering
an attic that is bright and airy.”4
It’s almost impossible to attempt a typology of
these small works that play with serendipity and
juxtaposition, with chance, accident and sleight of
hand. There are almost as many kinds of them as
there are examples. But they share a delight in
something realized, a proposition played out.
Indeed, often the object sometimes seems to come
before the proposition: it is often in making some-
thing, or in recognizing that in playing around he
has made something, that Bartolini realizes what
the proposition was.
Some of the small works are objects that need
only to be named to turn into sculptures, their title
rhyming with their materiality in the hope we’ll
play along. So Torso (2003), a branching piece of
eucalyptus wood in a glass; or Fence Smile (2010); a
plastic model fence curving like a smile; or Wedge
02
98
Ramp (2010–12), a triangular section of cypress
wood that, if we were for one second to stop hold-
ing in our mind the proposition that could indeed be
a ramp, albeit a tiny one, might revert to its former
identity as a useful piece of wood for holding open
the door. Others have an inescapable material
presence that barely needs a title to hold our atten-
tion—Seat (2008), a bicycle seat encrusted with earth;
Fondamenta (2007) [fig. 2], three core samples from
the foundations of the artist’s studio; Bottom Off
(2005) [fig. 3], the fluted rim of a ceramic plate hung
on the wall with a nail through the empty circle
03
where the actual plate should be. And still others
have been made very carefully and with great skill:
Airplane (1994–2002) is no ordinary paper aeroplane,
but has been carved from alabaster. You can’t look at
it without imagining that it has been folded like a
paper aeroplane from a sheet of alabaster, however
impossible you know this to be. And Involvement
Figures (2001) are alabaster again, this time painted
and carved to look like apricot stones, though as
large and as apricot colored as the fruit itself. “A
misunderstanding,” says the artist in the description
that goes along with the work.
As in other works by the artist, metamorphosis
is common to them all, whether the transformation
is down to Bartolini’s skill in making, choosing or
juxtaposing. And for the metamorphosis to work,
the works need to be seen—whether in recognition
or bafflement. What these studioworks do, what
makes them artworks rather than games played
solely for the artist, is that they make space for the
viewer—they are for us, not just for him.
The space they make may be one of bafflement,
one where uncertainty takes the upper hand. The
Sheep Smile (2012) [fig. 4] is one such sculpture; a
clamp with six pearls in its jaws, whose descrip-
tion—should we read it—makes us none the wiser:
“From a story that struck me in elementary school.
A carcass of a sheep with beautiful teeth.” But if we
can sit with the uncertainty, if we can enjoy the
04
space of bafflement, then perhaps we may even
begin to share, however subconsciously, the artist’s
understanding of how pearls function: “the pearl is
a protection against irritation—the oyster makes
the pearl around something in its shell that irritates
it. It’s the solution to a problem […] Pearls are
problem solvers and that’s why I use them.”5
The bafflement may be brought about by juxta-
position, the space of uncertainty the tension
between the individual elements brought together
to make the object. Chair (1997) is such a sculpture,
the very function of the chair undermined by the
placement of the prickly plant on its seat. The fact
that the chair is made of precious alabaster only
adds to the confusion and to the sense that some-
thing is not quite right.
Often, though the space the small works make
for their audience is one of recognition, indeed
enlisting the recognition of the viewer is one of
their primary modes of operation. The aforemen-
tioned prickly teasel is actually forming a perfectly
recognizable function, once we understand that the
chair is made from alabaster—it is there to stop
people sitting on it. And Cameo (2008–2012) scarce-
ly needs its title or the artist’s explanation that the
piece is “a crack on dry clay taking part in a draw-
ing of a woman’s profile” for us to recognize a very
particular kind of female portrait drawn by acci-
dent in the drying clay.
Whether united in bafflement or smiling in
complicity, the viewer finds themselves participat-
ing in these works, invited to join in until the burst
of energy they contain is released. The sense of
being invited is reinforced by the artist’s descrip-
tions, as in the small sculpture I started with, Time
to Unroll. The descriptions are displayed alongside
the works, and, although their original intention is
simply informative, their affect is often poetic and
always appealing: “I wanted to make a sign of
infinity from a rubber band, but the elastic always
decomposed very quickly so I drew it”; “a stone
99
which could not stand upright without the aid of a
pearl. The pearl that protects from irritation here
acts as a prosthesis of lameness”; “a device for
beginners that alludes to a vertical climb.”
In the conversations in Bartolini’s studio that led
to the exhibition of the studio matters in Edinburgh
and Ghent, we talked of surrealist objects and of the
surrealist image in which theory the surrealist
object is inscribed. The surrealist image was identi-
fied by André Breton in his preface to the catalogue
for Max Ernst’s first exhibition in Paris in 1921.
Equating poetry and collage, Breton compared
collage to the poetic metaphor—the comparison of
like with unlike to achieve inspiration and under-
standing: “it is the marvellous faculty of attaining
two widely separate realities without departing
from the realm of our experience; of bringing them
together and drawing a spark from their contact.”
The paradigmatic and best known surrealist image
was taken from Les Chants de Maldoror, the most
celebrated work of the nineteenth century poet
Isidore Ducasse (the self-styled Comte de Lau-
tréamont)—“beautiful as the chance encounter of
an umbrella and a sewing machine on a dissecting
table.” This standard of beauty is the one that ruled
over the objects that began to appear in surrealist
art in the 1930s. Objects such as Salvador Dalí’s
Lobster Telephone (1936), dream-like, metamorphic
objects that depended for their affect and their
energy on seemingly illogical juxtaposition but
which often had an appealingly and amusingly
logical underpinning. (Dalí justified his most
famous object by noting the similarities between a
lobster and a telephone from the 1930s—they are
the same shape, have a similar texture, and make a
squealing noise when roused).
Bartolini speaks of his studio matters in a way
that seems to owe something to the surrealist image
in its Bretonian formulation: “Sometimes it’s just a
question of time. You have two things that have
been here for two years, and then suddenly they say
something to each other. You put them next to each
other and some sparks happen.” But when asked,
Bartolini did not recognize the comparison between
his work and that of the surrealists, protesting “But
my work is not surrealistic. I find in these works of
mine, compared to those of the surrealists, always a
minimum amount of common sense.” It is precisely
this that justifies the comparison though, I think:
that minimum amount of sense common to both,
 the justification for the juxtaposition, the rigor
that stops either artist and viewer from “depart-
ing from the realm of our experience” and the
all-important spark that ensues. The spark is the
energy that lights the fire, that disturbs our
perception of the world so that we might experi-
ence it anew and, in doing so, understand more
about it. With the work of Bartolini, whether it is
large or small, complex or simple, the spark is a
spark of the happiness that comes when some-
thing feels right—the happiness that hit you
when you emerged through the table into the
realm of the studio matters in the upper gallery
of the Fruitmarket back in 2013; the happiness
that flooded my study that morning in May 2021:
“They don’t lead anywhere, they just stay where
they are. But they have this kind of ‘jump,’ this
kind of little happiness with them.”6

1 The organizers here quot-
ed Closed Gallery Piece (1969),
the work by Robert Barry that
consisted in sending an
invitation card announcing
that, at a certain art venue,
“During the exhibition the
gallery will be closed.”
2 The term “studio matters”
is used by Bartolini in refer-
ence to the term “studio
works” coined by Briony Fer,
writing on Eva Hesse’s so
called “test pieces” in Eva
Hesse, Studiowork. Edin-
burgh: The Fruitmarket
Gallery, 2009. Exhibition
catalogue.
3 Massimo Bartolini, Studio-
matters +1. Edinburgh: The
100
Fruitmarket Gallery and 6 Bartolini, Studiomatters
Ghent: S.M.A.K, 2013, 4. +1, 10.
Exhibition catalogue.
4 This description is the CAPTIONS
artist’s, remembering the
installation in a recent email 01 Studio Matters in the
exchange with the author, artist’s studio.
22.02. 2022. 02 Fondamenta, 2007.
5 Bartolini, Studiomatters 02 Bottom Off, 2005.
+1, 7. 04 The Sheep Smile, 2012.
My Left Drawing,
My Right Drawing
101 2020 →
LAURA CHERUBINI Books Forgotten
By Heart
Massimo Bartolini asked me for a gift (appreciated, I
hope) for him and for those who will read this book.
They are books that we have spoken about, or that we
would like to read, or that we may perhaps never read,
or that I would like to reccommend to him. This list
(incomplete and potracted towards infinity according
to the vertigo of which Umberto Eco speaks) is para-
doxically a non-catalogue − more sentimental than
systematic − of books that we would like to gift one
another, and that seem to open up alternate avenues;
it is a secret key to understanding the artist’s work. It
is also an identikit, an indirect portrait/self-portrait
created through our books. Books that are listed all in
a jumble, as they are often found on the shelves of our
bookcases: an endless library...
«Si l’œuvre d’autrui traduit mon rêve, s
on œuvre est mienne»1
Francis Picabia
Valéry, Paul. Cahiers / Notebooks 4: Translated and
edited by Brian Stimpson, Paul Gifford, Robert
Pickering, Norma Rinsler, and Rima Joseph. Berlin,
Germany: Peter Lang Publishing, 2010.
Valéry, Paul. The Graveyard by the Sea. Illustrated
and translated by Emlen Pope Etting. Philadelphia:
The Centaur Press, 1932.
Valéry, Paul. Degas Dance Drawing. New York: Lear
Publishing, 1948.
Valéry, Paul. Eupalinos: or, The Architect. Translated
by William McCausland Stewart. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1932.
Calvino, Italo. Six Memos for the Next Millennium.
Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press, 1988.
Venturi Ferriolo, Massimo. Nel grembo della vita. Le
origini dell’idea di giardino. Milan: Guerini e Asso-
ciati, 1989.
Venturi Ferriolo, Massimo. Giardino e filosofia.
Milan: Guerini e Associati, 1992.
Venturi Ferriolo, Massimo. Giardino e paesaggio dei
Romantici. Milan: Guerini e Associati, 1998.
Assunto, Rosario. Ontologia e teleologia del giardino.
Milan: Guerini e Associati, 1988.
Moore, Charles W., William J. Mitchell, and William
Turnbull Jr. The Poetics of Gardens. Cambridge
(MA): The MIT Press, 1993.
105
Cazzato, Vincenzo, Fagiolo dell’Arco, Maurizio, and
Giusti, Maria Adriana. Teatri di verzura. La scena
del giardino dal Barocco al Novecento. Florence:
EDIFIR, 1993.
Zuylen, Gabrielle van. The Garden: Visions of
Paradise. London: Thames & Hudson, 1995.
Lichačev, Dmitrij Sergeevič. La poesia dei giardini e
dei parchi. Il giardino come testo. Turin: Einaudi,
1996.
Scotini, Marco, and Vecere, Laura, ed. 1996. Dopo-
paesaggio. Figure e misure dal giardino, Castello di
Santa Maria Novella. Pistoia/Siena: Maschietto e
Musolino.
AA.VV. La Ville/Le Jardin/La Mémoire. Catalogue of
the exhibition at Villa Medici, Rome, curated by
Laurence Bossé, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, and
Hans Ulrich Obrist, M/M (Paris), Accademia di
Francia, Rome 2000.
Nemitz, Barbara, Trans plant. Living Vegetation in
Contemporary Art, Berin: Hatje Cantz Publishing,
2000.
Lodari, Carola. Che cos’è il giardino. Turin: Umberto
Allemandi, 2000.
Cattabiani, Alfredo. Florario. Miti, leggende e simboli
di fiori e piante. Milan: Mondadori, 1998.
Pizzetti, Ippolito, ed. Enciclopedia dei fiori e del
giardino. Milan: Garzanti, 2001.
Wolkstein, Diane, and Samuel Noah Kramer, ed.
Inanna: Queen of Heaven and Earth: Her Stories and
Hymns from Sumer. New York: Harper & Row, 1983.
Dickinson, Emily. The Complete Poems. Edited by
Thomas Herbert Johnson. London: Faber & Faber,
2016.
Deleuze, Gilles. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.
Severino, Emanuele, Tecnica e architettura. Milan:
Raffaello Cortina Editore, 2003.
Melville, Herman. Bartleby the Scrivener. A Story of
Wall Street. London: Melville House, 2004.
Hoet, Jan, Roelstraete, Dieter, and Verstegen, Ton,
ed. Sonsbeek 9: Locus Focus. Arnhem, June–Septem-
ber 2001.
Walser, Robert. The Walk. Translated by Susan
Bernofsky. New York: New Directions, 2012.
Dalì, Salvador. Le mythe tragique de l’Angélus de
Millet. Interprétation “paranoïaque-critique.” Paris:
Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1963.
Didi-Huberman, Georges. Fra Angelico: Dissemblan-
ce and Figuration. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1995.
Didi-Huberman, Georges. Ninfa fluida : essai sur le
drapé-désir. Paris: Gallimard, 2015.
Borchardt, Rudolf. The Passionate Gardener. New
York: McPherson, 2006.
Meister Eckhart, Sermons and Treatises. Shaftes-
bury: Element Books, 1987.
Luzi, Mario. L’inferno e il limbo. Milan: SE, 1997.
Pontalis, Jean-Baptiste. L’enfant des limbes. Paris:
Gallimard, 2000.
Del Giudice, Daniele. Atlante occidentale. Turin:
Einaudi, 1985.
Cherubini, Laura, ed. Quaderno. Rome: Edizioni
Magazzino d’Arte Moderna, 2003.
Macchia, Giovanni. Vita avventure e morte di Don
Giovanni. Turin: Einaudi, 1978.
Macchia, Giovanni. Il teatro delle passioni. Milan:
Adelphi, 1993.
Greene, Brian. The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time,
and the Texture of Reality. London: Vintage Books,
2003.
Gowers, Timothy. Mathematics: A Very Short Intro-
duction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Wunenburger, Jean-Jacques. Philosophie des images.
Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2001.
Wunenburger, Jean-Jacques. La vie des images.
Grenoble: PU GRENOBLE, 2002.
Franz, Marie-Louise von. The Feminine in Fairy
Tales. Berkeley (CA): Shambhala, 2001.
Franz, Marie-Louise von. Alchemy: An Introduction
To The Symbolism And The Psychology. Toronto:
Inner City Books, 1982.
Diderot, Denis. Traité du Beau. Paris: République
des Lettres, 2012.
Diderot, Denis. Lettres sur les aveugles à l’usage de
ceux qui voient. Paris: Gallimard, 1951.
Diderot, Denis. Paradoxe sur le comédien. Paris:
Flammarion, 2000.
Foucault, Michel. This Is not a Pipe. Edited by James
Harkness and translated by James Harkness.
Berkeley (CA): University of California Press, 2008.
Ciampi, Paolo. Il sogno delle mappe. Piccole annota-
zioni sui viaggi di carta. Portogruaro (Italy): Ediciclo,
2018.
Clair, Jean. Méduse (Contribution à une anthropolo-
gie des arts visuels). Paris: Gallimard, 1989.
Baudrillard, Jean. The Intelligence of Evil: or, the
Lucidity Pact. Translated by Chris Turner. London:
Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013.
Vernant, Jean-Pierre. Figures, idoles, masques. Paris:
Juillard, 1993.
106
Vernant, Jean-Pierre. L’immagine e il suo doppio.
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heit. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1956.

1 “If somebody else’s art-

work translates a dream of
mine, it is mine too.” Francis
Picabia, Letter dated 23
November 1921, Dossiers
Picabia, vol. 7 (Paris: Biblio-
thèque Littéraire Jacques
Doucet), 530. Untitled (in collaboration
with Ettore Spalletti)
108 2000 109
110 111
 The Threshold
MARCO SCOTINI
as Method
Massimo Bartolini and the Space of
Difference
As threshold, the boundary stretches across streets; a
new precinct begins like a step into the void – as
though one had unexpectedly cleared a low step on a
flight of stairs.
Walter Benjamin1
A threshold is a higher, wider step which changes the
pace of the stair itself and modifies the length of your
stride, thus presenting a real and actual stumbling
block: you are awakened by this obstacle.
Massimo Bartolini2
The Map of Empire
Jorge Luis Borges’ story about the paradoxical
nature of a certain map made in 1:1 scale—being,
therefore, coextensive of the territory mapped—is
all too well known. There is no book on the problem
of cartographic reasoning which does not cite the
brief text “On Exactitude in Science,” to not so much
endorse the idea of cartography’s impossible fidelity
to reality, as affirm the fundamental gap that exists
between representation and the real world, between
names and places. Isn’t a geographic map, in es-
sence, a spatial model predicated on the belief that
everything can be assigned a unique and exclusive
placement, each term a singular meaning? Is it not
true that the assumptions of this correspondence
between representation and reality only become
possible following a prior, agreed upon reduction of
all that is real to a graphic table? Only in the case of
Borges’ map is the connection between two-dimen-
sional representation and the physical earth perfect-
ed. Metaphorically, their extension is identical; one
becomes the superfluous duplication of the other.
“In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained
such Perfection that the map of a single Province
occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the
Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those
Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the
Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire
whose size was that of the Empire, and which
coincided point for point with it.”3 While the hypo-
113
thetical spatial relationship (point for point) be-
tween these two entities is taken to an extreme
conclusion, the suspicion remains that there is little
irrationality in both the story as well as the map it
describes, contrary to the majority of commentary
attributed to it. Today, the map and the territory
demarcated have become indistinguishable from
one another, considering that the former (in its
modern outcome) was initially defined starting from
Euclidean space, then transforming itself into
graphic abstraction.4 Modern cartography has
inverted the relationship between the map and the
terrain: rather than being an image reflecting
existing “geographic boundaries” and “political
borders,” modern mapping operates as a representa-
tion which produces effects upon reality, anticipat-
ing future geopolitical configurations. There is yet
another more profound and less modern reason why
Borges’ story could become metaphorically plausi-
ble. Space always predetermines history which, in
return, reifies that space, settling into it.
If it is true that power has always been inscribed
onto physical and social space, it is equally true that
there is an implicit geometry which has spatially
informed our Western thought, its metaphysicality.5
The dialectic between high and low, inside and
outside, open and closed, limited and unlimited,
Eastern and Western, physical and metaphysical,
can be considered not only as a spatial matrix but,
more radically, as an intimate geometry which
attempts to circumscribe being, condense it, anchor
it in place, and make it sedentary, in order to
control and dominate it. Considering that the
origins of the Greek term nomos, which we use to
indicate law, signified measurement, it becomes
clear how our language is inextricably connected to
geometric space. In the same way, the terms region
(from the Latin regere) and province (from the Latin
verb vincere) are revealed to have spatial metaphors
hidden within them, insinuating both their geo-
graphic and strategic meanings. Writing a phenom-
enology of spaces therefore would mean nothing
more than allowing an entire history of power to
emerge—from habitat to nature, from sacred space
to the geopolitical—as Michel Foucault never tired
of repeating. Essentially, one finds not only the
representation of space resonating within car-
tographic terms, but also its very production.
Returning now to the story of the Map of the
Empire, if “The following Generations, who were
not so fond of the Study of Cartography,” as Borges
writes, “saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not
without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered
it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters,”6 their
reason is epistemological in nature. The image has
become reality to the point where it becomes impos-
sible to recognize its artifice. Or rather, contempo-
rary man has lost his geometric homeland.
The 1960s witnessed the birth of William Bunge’s
“radical cartography” in the United States and the
creation of “psychogeography” by the Situationist
movement in Europe, both of which sought to do
nothing more than completely shred that map,
leaving it to be destroyed in “the deserts of the
West.”7 These projects aimed to challenge and
abandon established cartographic conventions, to
use artistic practices, to make legible those move-
ments and processes that had been invisible (or
hidden) by imperial maps, to definitively reject the
notion of cartography being a faithful reflection of
reality. It is, perhaps, from the ruins of that mythi-
cal Borgesian map, that every contemporary coun-
ter-mapping practice originates.
11 Rue Larrey Paris
The most elemental and primary dialectical opposi-
tion of our spatialized thought is the distinction
between inside and outside. As Gaston Bachelard
writes, “It has the sharpness of the dialectics of yes
and no, which decides everything.”8 What is the
external if not what one supposes to exist, regard-
less of the knowledge one may have of it? It is said
that the external is what is (or appears) outside. But
outside of what? With respect to what? Before any
possible determination, this outside implies a
preliminary spatial separation: a boundary that
separates our internal being (circumscribed to a
finite place and body) from everything else: any-
thing that automatically (ideologically?) becomes
“other.” The inside, then, corresponds to the estab-
lishment of a space that is definitively fixed in
position and firmly attached, in some way, to the
earth (or the heavens). The ancestral mark left by a
plough in the earth creates an original demarcation
which transforms an undefined expanse into a
unique place, giving it dimension and attributes as
a foundational act capable of deciding who is inside
and who is outside. To delimit a space, be it physi-
cal, existential, psychic, or gendered, is to attempt
114
to eliminate the possibility of something unplanned
occurring within it. In fact, the most violent and en-
during oppositional categories are defined precisely
starting from this separation. At times called
boundaries, borders, or limits (physical as well as
conceptual, psychic, and political), these distinc-
tions create individuals who are excluded, made
foreign, marginalized, and exiled.
Amongst all the spatial representations of
demarcation, only that of the threshold can break
the idea of the boundary—of previously established
limits—without subjugating the differences be-
tween two spaces. The threshold, in fact, defines a
third space in which the relationship between the
internal and the external is defined in complemen-
tary rather than oppositional terms. It is a space in
which the differences do not reciprocally exclude
one another, but live and coexist together. As Georg
Simmel writes: “By disengaging two things from
the undisturbed state of nature, in order to desig-
nate them ‘separate,’ we have already related them
to each other in our awareness. We have differenti-
ated them both, together, from everything that lies
between them. And vice-versa: we experience as
connected only what we have previously isolated in
some way.”9
This porous boundary which in Italian we call
soglia (threshold)—and which maintains within its
etymology both il suolo terrestre (the soil), and la
suola del calzare (the sole of a shoe)—is not only the
subject at the center of Massimo Bartolini’s work
but actually constitutes a modus operandi for the
artist. For Bartolini the threshold is both a figure (of
space) and also a process (of thought). The environ-
ments within his oeuvre, which may appear to be
cellular, are nothing more than thresholds, interme-
diate zones, interstitial spaces. They must always be
read according to what precedes or follows them,
never as units closed in on themselves.
If so many floors and altered surfaces (both
natural and artificial) appear in Bartolini’s work,
should we assume that they are simply a collection
of objects, or rather a theory, a repeating concept?
Nearly thirty years separate his execution of the
tiled floors he made in Untitled (casa Sorace), 1993
and Morbido Ground, 1994, and the floating surface
of Floating Floor (Raft), 2020. While in the first piece
the floor is subtly raised to let the preexisting furni-
ture in the space emerge, as if they been planted
there, in Morbido Ground the soft and tilting
surface transforms the usual static nature of a floor
into a performative device on which the viewer,
while walking, perceives a fundamental instability
and vulnerability. For Floating Floor (Raft), con-
ceived for the second Bangkok Art Biennale follow-
ing my invitation, Bartolini produced a surface of
painted tiles which floated on the pond in Benjasiri
park, in the center of the city. Using a bamboo raft
as a support—the kind that many refugees in
Thailand use for survival—Bartolini created an
anonymous floorplan out of the tiles, reproducing
the footprint of a two-room living space. Some tiles
were covered with bird drawings by Galileo Chini,
forming a tessellated flock in flight when viewed
aerially. Sketched by Chini in 1911 when he came to
the court of Siam Rama VI in Bangkok, seeking an
escape into the exotic and exploring his fascination
with the Orient, these images are transformed by
Bartolini in Floating Floor (Raft) into a depiction of
the daily struggle for survival.
But other types of ground and surface also
appear in the work of Bartolini. From the topsoil in
Cecina, where he planted himself in a field up to his
knees for Untitled (Plantations), 1995 to the liquid
surfaces of his rectangular pools in which an
uninterrupted wave moves rhythmically and hyp-
notically forwards and backwards as in Untitled
(Wave), 2000. From his recreation of a clay tennis
court for his first version of Desert Dance, 2003, at
the Centro Pecci in Prato, to the sand of the Gobi
Desert which he placed within the circular tower/
library for the final version of the same work,
presented in 2018 at the second edition of the
Yinchuan Biennale [fig. 1]. In A Cup of Tea, 2000, the
01
center of the installation is a horizontal plane
which divides a small living space (a surveyor’s
studio) from an empty white room above, in a
spatially unfathomable manner. While in the
115
Anselmetti chapel in Turin, Bartolini constructed a
floor in the form of an archive made of wooden
filing cabinets illuminated from within, which
contained documents and memories of the work-
ing-class neighborhood of Mirafiori, leaving the
bookshelves lining the walls empty. There was also
the rotating floor he made at the Museu Serralves,
2005–2007, and another which tilts and lists with
the steps of the viewer, allowing walnuts to roll at
their feet and make noise—Drum, 2002. In another
similar work, Pavimento ad occhi chiusi, 1997,
Bartolini covered a floor with two Venetian blinds
made of Ramin wood. These phenomena of altered
grounds are infinite in Bartolini’s oeuvre, but what
interests us here most is their function as a “contact
zone,” where each is a place demarcating difference
without being absorbed in either the space that
precedes it nor that which follows.
This digression about threshold spaces (where
the threshold loses its linear quality) would be
incomplete without adding the key figure (the
image princeps) of the entire sequence: the door.
How does one experience this limit-point in which
separating and connecting are but two sides of the
same act?10 One is reminded of the carpentry work
that Duchamp made in 1927 in his Parisian studio
on Rue Larrey [fig. 2]. Contradicting the French
saying Il faut qu’une porte soit ouverte ou fermée (lit.
“A door must necessarily be either open or closed,”)
02
Duchamp constructed a wooden door that, when
closed in one direction, opened another entrance,
and vice versa, thereby creating a door that opened
and closed simultaneously. The French proverb
suggests that when confronted with a problem we
mustn’t seek a compromise but instead make a
singular decision. Duchamp’s door, on the contrary,
when faced with two opposite solutions, creates a
“third space,” a “space-between.”
Rites of Passage
natural being which we call “a door” acquires value he reestablishes fluid connections between inside between artist and the Old Masters (his numerous
Simmel affirms that “The wall is mute. But the door precisely from its movement which crosses a and outside, where now the interior is brought Homages), we realize that the threshold is essentially
speaks,”11 even if, in Bartolini’s work, the wall also boundary. This sort of observation can be applied to outside. This action can be seen with the enormous a mode of thinking and acting, which is born out of
becomes porous; it can be passed through. This is Bartolini’s ceaseless intervention within the liminal linear bookcases he arranged in the rows of a vine- the rejection of the classical dialectic and the refusal
the case in Music and Player, 2005, where the sound zones of buildings such as Window on Window, yard at St. Peter’s Abbey in Ghent, or the space of of the esoteric. Despite the reciprocal nature of
of a horn appears to be embedded within a wall, 2002–2003 [fig. 3 and fig. 4], O som também…, 2004, connectivity he created between a tree and a small- things, this side-by-side theory opens a space of
heard throughout a room while being played in an Untitled (Biella), 2003, Head n. 5, 1997, and others. scale theater in the Sambhaji park in Pune, India. If co-existence, of mutual interdependence, of psychic,
adjacent one. However, unlike the closed geometry Here the relationship between inside and outside is we consider all the connections that Bartolini’s work social, and environmental biodiversity beyond any
of a wall, a door is a device that activates a continu- creates, again and again, between space and sound geographic demarcation. Ultimately, “the horizon-
ous and reciprocal exchange. To pass through a door, (Ballad for a Tree, 2002), between man and earth (the tality of the threshold,” closes Bartolini, “is the
or cross a threshold, is to undergo a sort of rite of Flowerbed series), between representation and secular and pantheist contrast to the vertical mono-
passage that accompanies the shift of a subject’s reality, between the individual and the collective, theism of the staircase.”15
status: to pass from one space to another, to cross a
border, is to complete a symbolic exchange. The
anthropologist Arnold Van Gennep defines a tripar-
tite scheme within this ritual process: the prelimi-
nary phase of separation; the liminal phase of
transition; and the final phase of incorporation.12 He
identifies the intermediate phase as limen, that of
03
the threshold, where the individual lingers in a zone
of subjective uncertainty and social limbo beyond translated into real terms, where the external
normative society, where distinctions become mixed environment becomes incorporated into the interi-
and confused with one another. This space of or via apertures which allow for the circulation of
passage (fluid, metamorphic, liminal) is found in the unscheduled sounds and images, as well as variable
performance piece Run Ibrahim, 2000, an iconic climatic and light conditions. This occurs without
example of Bartolini’s research: it is a process of the threshold function disappearing entirely, as it
transformation, not a mere representation of becomes translated into windows, windowsills, and
demarcation. In fact, it is the performative act, even other architectural diaphragms. “My minimal
if at times indirect, that is the defining trait of all contribution to the history and formation of thresh-
Bartolini’s work, the one constant in the continuous olds,” notes Bartolini, “is to try and isolate them
shift of his oeuvre. from architecture and observe their activity, to
In Mixing Perfums, 2000, where languages extend them, to live in them and prolong that
already blend in the title, an illuminated rotating amenable, perplexing sensation which can perhaps
door puts two spaces, and two fragrances, into
contact, forming an amalgamation of earth and
jasmine. Meanwhile, the yellow light inside sus-
pends the space-time coordinates of the environ-
ment, leaving it unspecified. In My Third Homage,
1 Walter Benjamin, The fia: Un’introduzione ai modelli inside,” in The Poetics of 12 Victor Turner, Dal rito al
2001—a tribute to Franz Marc—a door is assem- Arcades Project, trans. Howard del mondo (Torino: Einaudi, Space: The Classic Look at How teatro (Bologna: Il Mulino,
bled with recycled pieces of wood previously used in Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin 2003), 201. We Experience Intimate Places, 1986).
forms to make reinforced concrete. The scent of (Cambridge, MA: Harvard 5 Michel Foucault, “Doman- trans. Maria Jolas (Boston, 13 Simmel, “Bridge and
University Press, 1999), 88. de a Michel Foucault sulla MA: Beacon Press, 1969), 211. Door.”
earth emanates from the door which also “contains” 2 Vincenzo de Bellis, ed., geografia,” in Microfisica del 9 Georg Simmel, “Bridge and 14 de Bellis, Here, 57.
green light. In Three Steps Away from the Landscape, Here, Now and Elsewhere: potere: Interventi politici, eds. Door,” in Essays on Art and 15 de Bellis, Here, 57.
04
1998, a double swinging door (lit with a strong Site-Specific and Thereabouts, Alessandro Fontana and Aesthetics, Austin Harrington,
“WATGO. Una conversazione tra Pasquale Pasquino (Torino: ed. (Chicago, IL: University of
yellow light) is placed at the end of a corridor. It lead to other thoughts. A rolling threshold, a float- Massimo Bartolini e Eva Fab-
CAPTIONS
Einaudi, 1977), 147–161. Chicago, 2020).
opens onto a dark room where one can hear the ing threshold, a self-sufficient architectural ele- bris”, (Milan: Mousse Publishing, 6 Borges, Collected Fictions, 10 Mauro Ponzi and Dario 01 Desert Dance (Yinchuan),
sound of water rushing in a fountain, while the air ment.”14 2015). 705. Gentili, eds., Soglie. Per una 2018.
is filled with the smell of roots. The inverse process is also present when Barto- 3 Jorge Luis Borges, Collect- 7 Borges, Collected Fictions, nuova teoria dello spazio 02 Marcel Duchamp. 11 Rue
ed Fictions, trans. Andrew 705. (Milan: Mimesis Edizioni, Larrey, 1927.
“Through this finite unit the limited and unlimit- lini makes work outside, in natural spaces, such as Hurley (New York, NY: Pen- 8 Gaston Bachelard, “The 2012). 03, 04 Window on Window,
ed are limited in turn.”13 That fragment of the Bookyards, 2012, or Audience for a Tree, 2016. Here, guin, 1999), 704. dialectics of outside and 11 Simmel, “Bridge and 2002-2003.
4 Franco Farinelli, Geogra- Door.”

116 117
Photo of the cimitero dei Cani e dei
Gatti of Lucio Piccolo, Villa Piccolo, Lois and Lucio
Capo d’Orlando, Messina. 119 2011-2018 →
120 121
122 123
124 125
 “…there is an
JEREMY MILLAR
ecstatic mechanism in birds
that makes them fly upwards
in spite of worms…”*
There is something curious in the fact that the last
completed work by the American writer William
Gaddis was also one he had been unable to finish.
Throughout his entire professional life he had
worked on it, collecting materials, cuttings from
newspapers and magazines, scribbled notations in
the margins, perhaps a hundred pages of drafts and
notes, all gathered together in numbered cardboard
boxes. The work was to be known as Agapē Agape, a
title as double-take, and was to be “a satirical
celebration of the conquest of technology and of the
place of art and the artist in a technological democ-
racy,” although the work was never published.1 Or
not quite. Although Gaddis was still trying to sell
the work in the early 1960s—the description above
is taken from the first line of a project summary
written for his agent—at some point over the
following decade the project was set to one side, or
rather, transformed, absorbed into his second novel,
J R, published in 1975. Here a schoolteacher, and
would-be author, Jack Gibbs, works in the chaos of
his small, shared apartment, on a manuscript,
Agapē Agape, sporadically, ill-temperedly, although
when he reads parts from it to his flat-mate, fellow
teacher and would-be composer Edward Bast, he is
actually reading from Gaddis’s earlier manuscript of
the same name, a curious form a self-plagiarism (a
subject with which Gaddis was somewhat obsessed).
The subtitle of the manuscript—or should that be
manuscripts?—was “The Secret History of the
Player Piano,” for this was the object which Gaddis
thought best exemplified the “social history of the
mechanisation of the arts.” For Gaddis this was no
good thing, a “false democratisation” which enabled
those to play music who could not, in fact, play
music. As Gaddis noted in “Stop Player. Joke No.4,”
(his first nationally published piece), “There was a
place for everyone in this brave new world, where
the player offered an answer to some of America’s
most persistent wants: the opportunity to partici-
pate in something which asked little understanding;
the pleasures of creating without work, or the taking
of time; and the manifestation of talent where there
127
was none.”2 No longer would someone have to spend
time learning their art, or labour at it, but could
now produce it instantly. The artist had been re-
moved from the art, and perhaps the art had, too.
Massimo Bartolini shares a lot with Gaddis—a
love of contemporary art and literature, obviously,
and of music, and its study; a fascination with
Glenn Gould, also—although we can be less certain
that they might share a view on the unintended and
indifferent consequences of the mechanization of
the arts. Bartolini’s work is full of mechanisms,
mechanisms which either are the work, or which
have helped to make it. They are to be found, quite
clearly, in the four organs gathered together for his
exhibition at the Fondazione Merz, Torino, in 2017:
Otra Fiesta (2013), a large structure made from
scaffolding which contains an organ, also made of
scaffold pipes; Voyelles (2017), a wall-mounted organ
consisting of five pipes; In a Landscape (2017), an
organ shaped like a black well of uncertain depth
which plays the John Cage work with which it
shares a title; and Three Quarter-Tone Pieces (2009),
in which some rather beautiful wooden furniture—
wardrobes, cupboards—have been turned into
instruments. Mechanisms are to be found in works
in which rooms are transformed or otherwise
altered, such as Head (1997), in which a solar-pow-
ered radio plays in a room with rounded corners, or
Shaking Ceiling (1995–2004), in which engines move
a suspended ceiling deafeningly. They are even to
be found in works with human performers, from
the very earliest, such as Drum (1989–90), in which
a ballerina dances on a tilting floor to the sound of
a solo saxophone, to more recent works such Black
Circle Square (2016) in which a musician sits by the
side of a specially designed pool, and accompanies
the synchronized swimmer performing within it. (A
cleaner plays his part as required.) Even improvisa-
tion is a mechanism of habit and learnt procedures,
as Cage well knew.
All artworks are made of mechanisms seen and
unseen, and nearly all borrowed. To these new
elements might be added, the circumstances
changed, but the basic mechanism remains, whether
the redemptive voyage and return of a flawed hero,
or a “Cosa fa…?” joke. Indeed, jokes are amongst the
most mechanistic of all cultural forms, and many of
them depend upon an understanding of such mech-
anisms in order for them to work. One of the most
important mechanisms within humor is the “incon-
gruity theory,” or “incongruity tradition,” which was
described by the Scottish Enlightenment philoso-
pher Francis Hutcheson in his Thoughts on Laugh-
ter, first published in 1725. In this he notes that:
Generally the cause of laughter is the bringing together
of images which have contrary additional ideas, as well
as some resemblance in the principal idea; this contrast
between ideas of grandeur, dignity, sanctity, perfection,
and ideas of meanness, baseness, profanity, seems to be
the very spirit of the burlesque; and the greatest part of
our raillery and jest is founded upon it.3
Although the most obvious examples of this are
satirical—the homophobic politician caught cruis-
ing bathrooms, or the priest dead-drunk on com-
munion wine—perhaps such incongruity might be
found more often in the absurdity which constitutes
much contemporary humor. It is here, when certain
elements are put together in ways which are sur-
prising or illogical, or an object or person is found
in an unexpected situation, that a degree of uncer-
tainty is created which can only be resolved through
humor, or perhaps more often is left in a state of
comic irresolution. Such absurdities can be found
easily in Bartolini’s work—a saxophonist playing
music to a tree; waves lapping the length of what
seems to be a garden pond; the floor in a room
raised by 40 cm, everything that would stand upon it
now sunk below it—although perhaps the clearest
example is in Man and Fountain (2001). The work is
one that must have been difficult to make, and yet is
simple to describe (and there is something funny
about that, too): a drinking fountain follows a man
as he walks through a public park. This is a both a
public sculpture, and a sculpture about the public,
about what it means to be public. Instead of being
fixed in place, and serving all who come to it, wheth-
er rich or poor—even a squirrel, somewhat ungrate-
ful, as one might recall from a scene in Vladimir
Nabokov’s Pnin (1957)—Bartolini’s fountain is
rather more private, following an individual man,
like a servant, at a discreet distance.
There is another mechanism of humor at work
here, and it is one—or a variation of one—which
the philosopher Henri Bergson described in his
influential study on humor, Le Rire (“Laughter,”
1900). Although in this essay Bergson insists that “it
would be idle to attempt to derive every comic effect
from one simple formula,” he does admit that such
a formula “exists well enough in a certain sense,”
128
and it is not long before he describes comedy,
rather simply, as ‘[s]omething mechanical encrusted
on the living.”4 To some extent this is a version of
the “incongruity tradition” mentioned earlier, and
Bergson remarks that “[w]e laugh every time a
person gives us the impression of being a thing.”
But what we seem to have here is something like its
inverse, where a thing gives the impression of being
a person, where something mechanical acts as if
something living. The fountain does not simply roll
down a hill, or topple unbalanced, but rather
follows one person, with deliberation, moving when
they move, stopping when they stop. The fountain
responds not simply to physical forces, as any object
might, but decides to act in the world, even if that
entails a selfless devotion to another.
Let us consider mechanisms within another
work of Bartolini’s, one just mentioned, Voyelles.
One mechanism can clearly be seen and heard: the
five colored organ pipes attached to the wall, a fan
and control unit the means by which they are
sounded (here, in the Vox humana register, a reed
stop which can evoke the impression of a singing
human voice). But there are other mechanisms at
work here, too, at once seen and unseen, not least
the very title of the work. (Titles are one of the most
interesting, most complex, most overlooked mecha-
nisms in visual art, but this is something for anoth-
er time.) If we are aware of the title—have read it
upon a wall label, or within a catalogue, for it is not
visibly part of the work itself—and are able to
understand its meaning, then we might then attrib-
ute each of the five organ pipes to one of the five
vowels, and if we have read more, here or else-
where, we might also know that the title and colors
of the pipes had been taken from the famous
synaesthetic sonnet written by French poet Arthur
Rimbaud—then aged only sixteen—in 1871. The
first line reads:
A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu, voyelles,
What becomes clear, then, is that this line, from
perhaps the most studied poem in the French
language, is also the mechanism for making a
sculpture almost one hundred and fifty years later,
and not merely its inspiration. The poem’s spoken
form suggests the type of organ construction which
might replicate it, and the colors of the respective
pipes, also; it is a system by which the work is
brought into being. Of course, the poem—like every
artwork—is the mechanism which brings itself into
being, the means by which it brings about its affect,
and this is perhaps even more apparent in a poem of
synaesthesia, whereby one quality takes the place
of—or takes place as—another. If we know more
about Rimbaud’s short, brilliant life, then we might
also know that but a few months earlier he had
written what has become known as the Lettre du
Voyant, or “Seer Letter,” in which he imagined a
future “universal language” which would be experi-
enced by all the senses at once, and so perhaps the
poem had been brought about by this earlier, textual
mechanism. Or perhaps there’s another, one which
would situate it ever more appropriately within
Bartolini’s practice. During this time Rimbaud was
living in the Hôtel des Étrangers, where he became
close to—and perhaps a lover of—the hotel pianist
Ernest Cabaner, over twenty years his senior.
(Manet made a pastel portrait of him, now in the
Musée D’Orsay, his eyelids seemingly the heaviest
thing about him, the mat of dense black beard both
hiding and emphasizing his sunken cheeks; Verlaine
said he looked like Christ after ten years of ab-
sinthe.) [fig. 1] Cabaner had his own synaesthetic
system, and believed that each note of an octave
corresponded to a particular color and vowel and, as
such, he stuck little squares of colored paper to his
piano keys. It was by such an unconventional meth-
od that he taught the young poet to play the piano, a
mechanism by which one could make music.5
01
(I am reminded here of Hum [2012], another
synaesthesic work, by Bartolini this time. The artist
made use of a color chart upon which various
musicians, scientists, and writers had assigned
colors to musical notes, and used this to determine
thirteen colors which corresponded to the notes in
the dominant motif of the Goldberg Variations; this
129
became the means by which he then created a
large-scale graphic mural which covered the space
in which a recording of baritone Nicholas Isher-
wood recreating Gould’s “humming” was being
played. Sometime later, Bartolini read a biography
of Gould which recounted the story of his tuner,
Charles Verne Edquist [fig. 2], a blind man, men-
tioning to the pianist that the color of the Variations
was orange; Gould calmly answered, “I know.”
Bartolini then made a variation himself, the music
now being played against an orange wall.)
02
The importance to Bartolini of music as a means
by which to make work is clear, literature less so, but
I would suggest that its importance may be the
greater. In interviews, the artist speaks often of
writers important to him, such as Rimbaud and
Baudelaire (another poetic synaesthesist), and of the
narrative impulse within his work, even when the
work is largely sound-based: “For me music is used
to write the story; not as a soundtrack, however, but
rather as a screenplay.”6 For example, Otra Fiesta,
one of the organ works mentioned above, takes its
title from a poem by Roberto Juarroz. Aus Schlafes
Bruder (Brother of Sleep, 2006) [fig. 3] takes its title
from a 1992 novel by the Austrian writer Robert
Schneider about Elias, a gifted organist, although
Bartolini borrows more from it than just this, the
five hundred sounds being played in the room taken
from a list of those heard in an acoustic hallucina-
tion by the young man. (The novel, in turn, uses the
work of another as a mechanism within it, J.S.
03
Bach’s cantata Ich will den Kreuzstab gerne tragen important, and one which Bartleby himself makes which is not yet complete. As such it is a work eighty-four-page manuscript was sent to Gaddis’s
[1726], the playing of which leads to Elias’s death). clear. When the lawyer asks Bartleby to go to the which returns to itself the condition of potentiality agent after the author’s death, an act of remem-
For Das Nämliche (2013) Bartolini asked the German post office, he replies in his usual manner; the which its completion had otherwise denied. The brance which remains unfinished.
writer Fanny Bussche to write a story using family lawyer responds, “You will not?,” but Bartleby softly,
names—found upon gravestones in the local ceme- firmly corrects him: “I prefer not.”8 As Agamben
tery—which were also nouns; the author read the notes, “The scribe who does not write (of whom
story, the recording of which was then played back Bartleby is the last, exhausted figure) is perfect
on a portable device carried through the park by a potentiality, which a Nothing alone now separates
man walking a dog (the very personification of a from the act of creation.”9 (And here we might now
digressive narrative). And Existenz / Leben (2013) be reminded of Gaddis once more, who saw that the
was shaped by the short story “Goethe schtirbt,” or entire mechanization of modern life was based on
‘Goethe Dies’ by Thomas Bernard (a writer of great such nothings, the sprockets on film strips, and the
importance to Gaddis, too, and another obsessed by holes punched through cards for the Jacquard
Glenn Gould) in which the great German polymath, looms, the mechanism on which modern computers
on his deathbed, wishes to have summoned to him are based, the small gaps which make everything
the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who possible.) Bartleby’s response is neither a refusal
in fact would not be born for nearly sixty more nor an agreement, neither positive nor negative,
years, but in the story is a contemporary. Perhaps and so situates him in a place of pure potentiality,
what their work allows, for Bernhard and Bartolini or pure contingency, where it might be considered
alike, is the possibility of bringing together those to be both simultaneously.
who would otherwise remain apart—living and Agamben draws upon the work of the German
dead, real and fictional—in order that they might theorist Walter Benjamin (to whom Gaddis also
work with and upon one another. turned towards the end of his life), and the possibil-
Bartolini’s art is one of potentialities, then, and ity of redemption which is afforded by the act of
he uses the art of others similarly. In conversation remembrance, in which the incompleteness of
recently, he mentioned an essay “Bartleby: La happiness can be made complete, and the complete-
formula della creazione,” (1993, translated as ness of pain can be made incomplete. The past is no
“Bartleby, or On Contingency”) by the Italian longer irrevocable, but rather is made open to
philosopher Giorgio Agamben, and Herman Mel- change. “Remembrance restores possibility to the
ville’s scrivener might be seen as an important past, making what happened incomplete and
figure by which we might consider Bartolini’s completing what never was,” Agamben goes on.
practice. Agamben begins by taking the image “Remembrance is neither what happened nor what * The title of this essay is and far earlier, Marcus Tullius hovel. It is very different in Heller-Roazen (Stanford:
which had been suggested by earlier philosophers did not happen but, rather, their potentialization, taken from a line in Lawrence Cicero noted in De Oratore (55 intent, but I could not help but Stanford University Press,
Ferlinghetti’s Her, (Cambridge: BCE) that “The most common be reminded of Bartolini’s O 1999), 244.
as that which best represents the potentiality of their becoming possible once again.”10 New Directions, 1960), 24. kind of joke is that in which som também… (2003–2004) in 8 Agamben, “Bartleby, or
thought, the empty sheet, or, in its earlier, more Bartolini’s artworks might then be considered 1 William Gaddis, “Agapē we expect one thing and which a list of all the noises a On Contingency,” 254.
common incarnation, the writing tablet: “the nous similarly, as acts of remembrance which restore Agape: The Secret History of another is said; here our own white wizard could distinguish 9 Agamben, “Bartleby, or
[the intellect or potential thought] is like a writing potential to the references from which they draw, the Player Piano,” in Agapē disappointed expectation in the wind—taken from César On Contingency,” 247.
Agape, and Other Writings makes us laugh.” Calvo’s Three Halves of Ino 10 Agamben, “Bartleby, or
tablet on which nothing is actually written,” he and which allow this potential to persist within (London: Atlantic Books, 4 Henri Bergson, “Laughter,” Moxo: Teachings of the Wizard On Contingency,” 267.
quotes from Aristotle’s De Anima.7 For Aristotle, them, too, as waves, as forms, as sounds, as experi- 2002), 242. in Wylie Sypher (ed.), Comedy of the Upper Amazon (1995)— 11 Bartolini, Four Organs.
this represents pure potentiality, and this means ences, none recalled, but all made new. As such, we 2 Gaddis, “Stop Player. Joke (Baltimore and London: Johns was cut out of a large gallery
No.4,” Atlantic Monthly (July Hopkins University Press, window. CAPTIONS
not only the possibility to be or to do, but also not might reconsider something which the artist said in 1951): 102. 1980), 84. 6 “Sculptures that make a
to be, or not to do. (If this were not the case then an interview in a somewhat different light: “I am a 3 Francis Hutcheson, Reflec- 5 On Cabaner, his curious noise: Massimo Bartolini in 01 Edouard Manet, Portrait of
each potentiality would have already been made would-be writer” is no longer a statement of regret, tions on Laughter (Glasgow, piano lessons, and Rimbaud, conversation with Luca Ceriz- Ernest Cabaner, 1880.
1750); reprinted in John Morre- see Graham Robb, Rimbaud za” (Turin, July 26–27, 2017) in 02 Charles Verne Edquist
actual in some way, and so have been extinguished but one of great possibility.11 all (ed.), The Philosophy of (London: Picador, 2000),132– Massimo Bartolini, Four tunes a piano.
as such.) It is Bartleby, of course, whom we might In the end William Gaddis did publish Agapē Laughter and Humor (New 136. Robb also notes that the Organs (Turin: Fondazione 03 Installation of the work
York: SUNY Press, 1987), 32. Rimbaud would enact “affec- Merz, 2017), 125. Aus Schlafes Bruder for the
consider to be the most perfect example of someone Agape. It was not in the version he had imagined exhibition Registres i habits.
This passage is also quoted in tionate acts of violence” on 7 Quoted in Giorgio Agam-
who does not, the lawyer’s clerk who responds to for perhaps fifty years, but rather as a novella in Noel Carroll, “Horror and Cabaner, such as one winter us- ben, “Bartleby, or On Contin- Maquina de temp / imatges
every request not with a refusal, but perhaps with which an elderly man, dying, and without much Humor,” in The Journal of ing a glass cutter to carefully gency,” (1993) in Potentialities: d'espai, 2006.
something approaching a request of his own: “I time, considers what he might do with the vast Aesthetics and Art Criticism remove all the panes from the Collected Essays in Philosophy,
57, no. 2 (1991): 153. Similarly, window of Cabaner’s freezing ed. and trans. by Daniel
would prefer not to.” The difference is slight, but collection of notes he has toward a manuscript

130 131
Blessing (detail)
2003 132 133
1989–2020
Hagoromo
1989-2002 137
Drum Drum
1989 138 2002-2008 139
Il frutto
1990 141
Untitled
(Casa Sorace)
1993 142 143
Strongbox Morbido Ground
1994 144 145 1994 →
146 147
The Studio at 3
1994-2002 149
Flowerbeds (Pisa) Flowerbeds (Cecina) Flowerbeds (Oporto) Untitled (Plantations)
1995 150 2000 2007 151 1995 →
153
Untitled (Plantations) Irrigation Shaking Ceiling
1995 154 1995 155 1995-2004 →
156 157
Untitled (Montagna)
2004 158 159
Man and Mountain
1996 160 161
Head n.3 (Library)
1996-1997
164 165
← Untitled (Out of Order) Untitled (Wave)
1996 166 1997-2000 167
Untitled (Wave) Untitled (Wave)
1997-2001 168 1997-2012 169
Head n.1 Speaking Chair Head n.2 (Studio)
1996-1997 170 1996 171 1997-1998 →
172
Head n.5
(Waiting Room) Head
1997 174 175 1997 →
177
Head (detail) Talking with Vittorio
1997 179 1997 →
180 181
Ouverture Untitled (Four Mountains)
1998 1998 183
Kwatz! Recall
1997-1998 184 1998 185
Three Steps from Head n.7
the Landscape (Garden)
1998 1998 186 187
Take Off Treshold
1998 188 189
Head
1999 190 191
A Cup of Tea
2000 192 193
My First Homage: My Second Homage:
to Emily Dickinson to Cristina Campo
2000 194 2001 195
My Tenth Homage: My Fifth Homage:
to Terry Adkins to Attilio Maranzano
2015-2019 196 2008 197
My Fourth Homage:
to Carmine Carbone Mixing Parfums
2003 198 199 2000 →
201
40 cm Higher
2001 202 203
Figure of Involvement Time to Unroll Contre Durée
2001 204 2011 2014 205
Shock Absorbent Drop Dark Dark Eyes Rubik’s Cubes Video Protection
2011 206 2014 2011 207 2014
View of the exhibition
Studio Matters +1
2013 208 209
Good Morning
2000 210 211
Run Ibrahim
2000 212 213
Cezanne’s Leave
2000 214 215
216
← My Third Homage:
to Franz Marc Man and Fountain Windowsill
2001 218 2001 219 2001 →
220 221
Double Shell Der Seemacher
2001-2003 222 223 2002 →
225
Or Should I Stay Bedside Wave
2002 226 2002 227
View of the exhibition
La California frazione di Cecina
2002 228 229
Laboratorio di Storia e storie
Table in the courtyard of
Franca Mazzarello and Laboratorio di Storia e storie
Alvaro-Modigliani schools Anselmetti Chapel
2003-2007 230 231 2003-2007 →
233
Conveyance
2003 234 235
Conveyance (Vitalia)
2006 236 237
Flowerbeds Goodbye Party
2003 238 2003 239
A Bench
2003 240 241
Ballad for a Tree Ballad for a Tree Ballad for a Tree Ballad for a Tree
(Florence) (Antwerp) (Berlin) (Oporto)
2003 2004 242 2008 243 2007 →
 Untitled (Biella)
244 2003 245
Desert Dance
2003 246 247
To Place an Island
on the Horizon
2004 248 249
Untitled
(Wave and Tree)
2004 250 251
O som também... / Senti risuonare anche le piante, i vegetali: la katáwa dalla linfa velenosa, la chambira che ci presta le sue
foglie per fabbricare corde, il pan-de-árbol che chiamano pandisho, e l’alto makambo dalle grandi foglie e dai frutti come
testa d’uomo, la ñejilla spinosa che cresce nelle zone paludose, il rugoso pashako, il machimango maleolente, la chimicúa i
cui rami si spezzano al minimo soffio, il wakapú più solido dello stesso palosangre, l’itininga, il witino, la itahúba, il wikingu
dagli aculei neri e quell’albero dritto che si chiama espintana, che quando cade puó essere usato per sedercisi e parlare, e la
wakapurána ottima per legna da ardere, e la chonta, cuore di alcune palme: la wasái, la cinámi, la pijuáyu, la hunguráwi.
E l’hunguráwi il cui frutto espelle un’olio che fa crescere i capelli. E la wayúsa rampicante le cui foglie contengono un tonico
potente che elimina la stanchezza. E il sapote dal frutto color verde scuro. E il tawari durissimo. E la shiringa, la shiringa,
quel caucciú che senza volerlo ci ha portato tante disgrazie... E la quinilla, e il timaréo, e la shapája dai frutti oleosi, e la
wiririma, e lo shebón gigantesco che ci offre le sue foglie per i tetti delle case, e quell’avorio vegetale che noi chiamiamo
tágua, e il situlli, quel banano rarissimo dai grandi fiori rossi, e il wingu, arbusto il cui frutto diventa contenitore di bevande,
detto tutúmo, e il pitajáy, la pona nera e dura, e l’aguaje immenso, e la andiroba, e il caimito dai frutti simli a seni di
adolescente, e la waqrapona, palma panciuta, e l’anona saporita, e il cashú che fuori è come mandorla ma dentro piú dolce
e succoso, e la apasharáma la cui linfa serve per, conciare il cuoio, e il barbasco dalla radice velenosa, e il camucámu citrico,
semiacquatico, e la capirona unica per fare legna e carbone, e la aripasa dal frutto schiacciato, scuro e rotondo che non si
deve mangiare, e la cumala, e la punga, e la cumacéba, e la cashirimuwéna, e l’ashúri che protegge i denti dalla carie, e la
catirima per i cui frutti alcuni pesci litigano e si divorano, e la bella cocona, e quel tubero che, si mangia crudo e che si
chiama ashipa, e il pukaquiru dal cuore rosso, durissimo, e il punqúyu frondoso, fitto di foglie, sotto la cui ombra nessuno
sopravvive perché espelle veleno dai suoi rami, e l’ancora più frondoso parinári dal frutto allungato e rosso che si chiama
súpay-ocóte, culo-del-diavolo. E la lupuna, l’albero più grande di tutta l’Amazzonia, che sta sulle rive, con le sue ali immobili,
252
bianche o rosse, adagiate sulla superficie della terra. E quell’altro che gocciola come grondaia d’inverno. E quell’altro ancora,
nella parte più interna della selva, che si gonfia ed esplode come nella notte centinaia di proiettili, e il renaco più esteso di un
bosco senza foglie e senza fiori, e il garaoatokasha che cura diversi tipi di cancro e ridà vigore agli arti che invecchiano, e il
tamshi che ti difende dal freddo, e la coca che si usa con l’ayawaskha per divinare, e la kamalonga che serve per fare
diagnosi, e la renakilla che distrae gli invalidi, e la wankawisacha che quarisce gli alcolizzati, e il chamáiro che aiuta a
masticare la coca, e il tornillo-negro che galleggia sott’acqua, nei gracili fiumi più insidioso del succo di tohé, quando la luna
è verde e la stagione è buona per abbattere il cedro senza spaccare la corteccia. E la paka che risuona simile a un tunnel sul
bordo del fiume scomparso, e la zarzaparrilla che cura la sifi1ide, e la papaya verde che elimina la rogna è la parassitosi, le
cui foglie avvolgono le carni più dure e le trasformano in teneri animaletti. E la wenáira dall’ombra velenosa come il succo
del fiore del tohé. E il tohé che ti fa vedere i mondi di oggi e di domani che formano il nostro mondo. E la parapára, più nota
come hiporuru, foglia che non perde mai la propria forma come se fosse di gomma, ostinata: tu la tagli dal gambo, la
stropicci, la pieghi, e subito ritorna com’era sul ramo, riprende sempre la sua forma, la sua grandezza, la grandezza e la
forma delle sue due nascite, e non è per questo ma per i poteri che le vengono da lontano che la foglia di hiporuru sa restituire
agli uomini il vigore sessuale. E la quina-quina che da secoli purifica le ferite infette. E la liana-del-morto, ayawaskha sacra,
La Madre Della Voce Nell’Orecchio. Con l’ayawaskha, con l’oni xuma, se te lo meriti, puoi passare dal sogno alla realtà senza
uscire dal sogno... E tante altre ancora, tutte hanno un suono. La abuta, stai ben attento, la abuta, albero di media grandezza
la cui radice rossastra si fa bollire per ottenere un liquido che, se bevuto, elimina, in pochi giorni, ogni traccia di zucchero dal
sangue: scompaiono i diabetici. E la mariquita, metà innamorata e metà fiore, che, sa solo aprirsi nell’ombra più assoluta. E
la tzangapilla, arancione e grande, figlia unica, fiore che scotta più di un febbricitante. Tutte hanno un suono, come le pietre...
2004
253
Head n.8 (Museum) Head n.8 (Museum)
2004-2005 255 2004-2005 →
257
 View of the exhibition
Figure of Involvement Untitled Fountains and Mountain
2004 258 2004 259 2004 →
260 261
Music and Player
2005 262 263
Revolutionary Monk Hagoromo
2005 264 265 2005 →
267
Square Angle
in Black Well
2005
Hagoromo
2005 269
Sala para uma Onda
2005-2007 270 271
 Sala para Mutações Geográficas:
Sala para uma Onda Fronteira Rio–São Paulo, 1969
2005-2007 272 2005-2007 273
Aus Schlafes Bruder
2006 274 275
Ouverture for Pietro A Bench
2006 276 277 2006 →
 A Bench
278 2006 279
A Cinema
2006-2009 280 281
Triple Loop Sphere Sphere (detail)
2006 282 2007 283 2007 →
284 285
Dew Organs
2007 286 2007 287
Organs
2007 288 289
April 25, 1936 April 25, 1936
2008 290 291 2008 →
292 293
Impressions In the Back of My Mind
2008 294 295 2008 →
297
 Las Vegas Biliardi,
Marlena Mirrors Club, Casa Triangi
298 2009 2009 299
Engine
Room Library UFO Disco
2009 2009 300 301
A Landscape from Afar
2009 302 303
Sala F Three Quarter-Tone Pieces
2009 304 305 2009 →
 Three Quarter-Tone Pieces
306 2009 307
Sun of Today
2009 308 309
Bars Radio Alabama
2009-2013 310 311 2010 →
312 313
Reading Apocalypse
2010 314 315 2010 →
316 317
318 319
← Heart in Hand ← Heart Basement La strada di sotto
2011 2011 320 2011 321 2011 →
La strada di sotto
2011 322 323
La strada di sotto
2011-2013 324 325
Dew
2011 326 327
Rock on Pearls Brass A Circle in a Square
2012 328 2012 329 2012 →
330 331
A Circle in a Square
2012 332 333
Hum
2012 334 335
Bookyard Bookyard
2012 336 337 2012 →
339
341
← Two Two (Mercer's Version)
2013 2013-2020 342 343
344 345
← View of the
exhibition Afterheart Otra Fiesta
2013 346 2013 347
Existenz / Leben Belvedere Das Nämliche
2013 2013 348 2013 349
Per Amour Charms Papers
2013 350 2014 351
Airplane (We) Airplane (Basel 1869)
2014 352 2016 353
Voyelles Bets Machine Starless
2017 354 2014 2015 →
357
Scultura
lingua morta Il giocoliere
2015 358 359 2014 →
360 361
362 363
← Clouds' Club
2015
Giacometti Landscape Black Circle Square Black Circle Square
2015 364 2016 365 2016 →
366 367
Black Circle Square
2016 368 369
370 371
 View of the exhibition
← Dews Golden Square Golden Square
2016 2016 372 2016 373
My Seventh Homage:
to Beato Angelico, La Montaigne Primo movimento
2016 374 2016 375
Manca anima
2016 377
Audience for a Tree
2016-2017 378 379
Pensive Bodhisattva
2017-2018 380 381
Do (Der Tiefe Ton)
2017 382 383
 View of the exhibition
The Unknown Glossator Four Organs
384 2017 ← 385 2017 →
386 387
Cera persa
2017 388 389
Handrail Handrail
2017 390 2017 391
In a Landscape
2017 392 393
My Eighth Homage:
to Dan Flavin’s Homage
to Ingrid Nubbe
2018 394 395
Caudu e fridu Caudu e fridu
2018 397 2018 →
398 399
Caudu e fridu sentu ca mi pigla
I terzuri tremu li vvudella
lu cori e lalma m assuttigla 400 401
Conveyance
(Dark Dark Eyes)
2019 402 403
At the Source Ghost Fountain
2019 404 2019 405
For Diario indiano For Diario indiano
(Lectern) (Shooting Stars)
2019 406 2019 407
On the Rock On the Rock
2020 408 2020 409
On Identikit Dew Floating Floor (Raft)
2020 410 411 2020 → 2020 →
412 413
414 415
 IN LÀ
2021-2022
INTRODUCTION TO THE EXHIBITION
Hagoromo is not only the title of the book in your
hands, but also Massimo Bartolini’s exhibition at
the Centro per l’arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci in
Prato, curated by Luca Cerizza with Elena Magini
(September 16th, 2022–January 8th, 2023).
Despite the title’s reference to an early work of
the artist, this exhibition does not intend to serve as
a Bartolini retrospective, much less follow a chrono-
logical or thematic logic, but is rather oriented
towards the more courageous and experimental
presentations of surveys by artists of his same
generation. In fact, it was built around a new sound
installation—the largest ever created by the artist—
conceived especially for the museum’s galleries (In
là, 2021-2022). Hung from a structure that runs along
the museum ceiling and was originally designed to
accommodate the gallery’s lighting system, Bartolini
built a continuous wall of scaffolding tubes which
winds through seven of the ten rooms that form the
original nucleus of the Centro Pecci. Suspended just
centimeters above the floor, this long spiral was
transformed into a musical instrument in which the
tubes, modified for the purpose, became organ pipes.
The English musician Gavin Bryars—one of the most
influential figures of experimental music emerged
between the Sixties and the Seventies—composed a
polyphonic score for the installation, assigning each
room a unique melody.
In this way, the composition creates a richly
layered soundscape that is constantly shifting with
the viewer as they move through the space. As the
title suggests—alluding to the dominant tonality
(La) of the piece—the score is always “beyond,” out
of reach, never experienced in its entirety by a
single listener.
This sound installation also plays an important
architectural role in the exhibition layout. Dividing
the museum’s rooms in half and offering the choice
419
of entering the gallery spaces from two opposite
ends, the work offers viewers four possible routes to
explore the show. At the same time, the work Cera
persa (2017-2022), made of sixty birthday candles
cast in bronze at various stages of burning—the
number corresponding to Bartolini’s age at the time
of the exhibition—alludes to the passage of time.
Installed throughout the double perimeter of the
exhibition like a time loop, the sculpture defies a
linear progression yet still serves as a sort of mea-
suring device for the exhibition visitor.
The two possible entrances to the exhibition are
marked by twin works (Basement, 2011), two mas-
sive pieces of tilled earth which have been cast in
bronze. While their forms contrast starkly with the
hanging scaffolding tubes of In là, the bronzes also
emphasize the non-linear character of the exhibi-
tion design.
A limited number of works made by Bartolini
throughout his thirty-year career, representative of
the varied materials and languages he implements
in his practice, are dispersed throughout the multi-
directional installation defined by the sound piece.
These include: a video of a dancer hanging from a
tree branch; a series of iridescent surfaces covered
in artificial dew; a lightbulb that burns to the point
of exploding, which in turn prompts an audio
performance; a circular bench from which one can
watch a wave of water rise and fall; a sound instal-
lation in which a murmur becomes a chant; a
meticulous wall mural of specs of dust drawn in
pencil; a gallery attendant who shows a carved-out
pearl to visitors. These are just a few of the often
surprising elements that the public might discover
while exploring this non-linear path, determined in
large part by the visitors’ choices and movements
that have always defined an essential component of
Bartolinis’ oeuvre.
LUCA CERIZZA, ELENA MAGINI
Notes on the music for In là
A Rendezvous with In là with The Cross
Channel Ferry
By complete coincidence, the expression “in La”
(but without the accent on the “A” that we have in
the sculptural installation—making it mean “in
there”) had occurred in relation to a work of mine
over 40 years ago.
In 1979 I was asked to do a concert in Paris at
the Festival d’Automne; it was in the Chapelle de la
Sorbonne. There was a series of concerts within the
festival, organized by Josephine Markovits, which
included John Adams, Charlemagne Palestine,
Ingram Marshall and that sort of territory. I wrote
a new piece, The Cross Channel Ferry, specifically
for these concerts. At that time I was heavily
involved with the Collège de Pataphysique, which I
had joined in 1974, during the time that Fred Orton
and I were running our Duchamp project. One of
the authors I read a lot was Raymond Roussel, and
the finest writer on Roussel at that time was Jean
Ferry, who was also a senior pataphysician.
Using the way in which Roussel’s work would be
generated by extensive puns and wordplay, I rea-
soned that, just as (Jean) Ferry was the means by
which France (literature, etc.) came to me, so the
ferry (from Dover to Calais) was the means by
which I came to France.  Dresden to Essen etc….
Most aspects of the piece, like Roussel’s writings,
were generated by puns. For example, Jean Ferry’s
favorite composer was Palestrina, which ends “in
A,” so the piece would end in A. His wife’s name
was Lila, and the end of her name “La” is also the
note “A.” One of Roussel’s major books was
called Impressions of Africa (Impressions d’Afrique),
which involves the shipwreck of an ocean liner
sailing from Marseilles to Buenos Aires—i.e. to
Latin America (LA). So I took the key of “A” as the
tonality of the work.
But I went further and, in addition, I tried to just
have instruments which ended in A: tuba, viola,
piana (!), marimba, maraca (just one), a South
American percussion instrument that is slapped
called a quijada—originally the jaw bone of an ass.
I also used lots of Latin American rhythms that
ended in A: rumba, samba, cha cha, etcetera (!!)...
Almost everything ended in A for this piece and I
was obsessed with those kinds of procedures. When
420
Duchamp gave up painting in 1912 in order to find
another way of working, rather than look at the
kind of art that was being done around him, he
looked at techniques in other art forms, like litera-
ture and at earlier forms of visual art. Roussel and
his literary devices was one of a number of import-
ant sources for this quest and I thought to do a
similar kind of thing.
Between 1972 and 1975 I wrote no music. This
was not a creative block, but rather a period of
research, study, and reevaluation. I was working in
a Fine Art department and spent much of this time
studying the work of Duchamp in great detail and
teaching about it. His work, and the effect of his
encounter with Roussel’s work in 1912, provided a
new direction for me. One way of getting back into
writing music, for example, was to use mechanical
devices, verbal games using puns and people’s
names and coded messages. I was very interested,
for example, in the extensive use that Schumann
made of ciphers and I enjoyed very much the
articles by Eric Sams in various issues of The Musi-
cal Times, which had come out some years earli-
er. Brahms, for example, had been distressed on his
last visit to Schumann in the asylum to find him
poring over a map and creating imaginary journeys
across German that seemed to make no sense. In
fact his routes were alphabetical: from Aachen to
Berlin; Berlin to Chemnitz; Chemnitz to Dresden:
In là
Massimo’s installation consists of scaffolding which
is transformed into organ bars. The scaffolding-or-
gan runs through 7 rooms of the museum with a
total of 36 pipes—5 to each room, with 6 in one
room (Room 3). None of the notes are duplicated.
The range of these organ pipes covers three octaves,
from the very lowest C to B natural (below middle
C). The bottom octave consists of wooden pipes
(stopped), the middle octave of metal pipes
(stopped) and the top octave with open metal pipes.
Stopped pipes are slightly softer than open ones,
but in reality, wooden pipes are quite loud anyway.
The physical situation is such that the music as
whole cannot be experienced in its entirety. A
listener moves from room to room, traveling
through different measures of music in sequence.
The only vantage point from which one can experi-
ence the entire piece would be from a position high
above the whole space, or from a flying drone.
Interestingly, in musical terms, this is not unlike
some experimental/conceptual works I made in the
early 1970s where, in principle, it is impossible for a
listener to ever experience the whole work and only
the composer knows the totality.
At first sight the musical notation looks like an
orchestral score where the top lines (Room 1) might
be the flutes, Room 2 the bassoons, Room 3 the
French horns and so on, down to the bottom line
(Room 7) being the cellos and double basses. Howev-
er, we have an unusual situation here, where the
score differs from the normal practice and is more
like a graph.
As in a traditional orchestral score, the notation
designates two “directions” of sound. One we can
call horizontal, where we move forward in time bar
by bar, with bar 1 at the beginning and bar 12 being
the last one. The other we can call vertical, which
shows all the sounds—the seven rooms—happen-
ing at the same time so all seven rooms in each
Note on revision to In là
Originally, I made some of the lowest bass notes in
the piece quite short to allow for some reverbera-
tion time, as in a church acoustic, and also so that
they didn’t make the sound muddy. However, the
acoustic in gallery is much drier than in a cathedral
and so a number of fundamental notes needed to be
lengthened in order to give sustained support to the
higher melodic pitches. I went through the score
421
column would be heard together, and at the same
dynamic level (but of course in different spaces).
With each room there are two lines of music
with the lower line having the deepest notes. I have
only used the lowest octave (indicated by the sign
“8va”) in rooms 1, 3, 5, and 7, so that those in
between—rooms 2, 4, and 6—would not be over-
whelmed. If every bar had the lowest notes, then
the sound would get very muddy, dense, and uni-
form. And in each bar, there are gaps, allowing
sounds from adjacent rooms, and even further
perhaps, to be heard like echoes from each space.
30 years ago, James Lingwood from Artangel had
set in motion a very different, though comparable,
collaboration between sculptor and composer when
Juan Muñoz and I worked on A Man in a Room,
Gambling, and which resulted in a profound and
lasting friendship. Given that it was James who also
brought Massimo and I together for this project, it is
already clear that the consequences will be the same.
Billesdon, 27 aprile 2022
and noted which ones should be changed, and by
how much. The numbers against the annotation
refer to the numbering of the pipes, from 1 to 36
(lowest to highest) and the musical changes show
the new durations. These modifications were done
by the organ builders, who replaced these shortest
wooden cams with longer ones.
Billesdon, 21 settembre 2022
GAVIN BRYARS
Gavin Bryars, score for
the music of In là
2022 →
426 427
428 429
430 431
432 433

p. 21
Drawing of Trees, 2003. Black
Indian ink on paper, 100x150
cm. Private collection, Milan.
Photo: Alessandro Zambianchi.
p. 22-23
Drawing of Trees, 2005.
Blue ink on paper, 195x286
cm. Private collection,
Mendrisio. Photo:
Alessandro Zambianchi.
p. 24-25
Drawing of Trees, 2008.
Ink on paper, 200x300 cm.
Private collection, Rome.
Photo: Alessandro Zambianchi.
Bartolini has drawn trees
from his garden as they
appear in front of him within
the folds of a sheet of paper
which he has already folded
and unfolded in a haphazard
manner.
p. 41
Airplane, 2008. Pencil on paper,
270x190 cm. Photo: Alessandro
Zambianchi.
p. 42
Airplane, 2006. Pencil on paper,
103x73x4,5 cm. Photo:
Alessandro Zambianchi.
p. 43
Airplane, 2008. Pencil on
colored paper, 270x190 cm.
Private collection, Milan.
Photo: Alessandro Zambianchi.
Bartolini folds a sheet of A4
paper, or larger, to create a
paper airplane. He then unfolds
it, tracing the folds in pencil.
p. 44
Airplane, 2011. Ink on paper,
32x23,5x3,5 cm. Photo:
Alessandro Zambianchi.
p. 45
Airplane, 2011. Ink on paper,
55x42,4x2,5 cm. Photo:
Alessandro Zambianchi.
Bartolini folds a sheet of
A4 paper, or larger, to
create a paper airplane.
He then unfolds it,
revealing forms which he
shades in ink in the style of
a surveyor’s technical
drawing.
p. 52-53
Until It Breaks, 2008. Ink on
paper, 150x159,5 cm. Photo:
Steve White.
p. 54-55
Until It Breaks, 2008. Ink on
paper, 150x159,5 cm. Photo:
Steve White.
Using a set of hypotrochoid
gears which have been organ-
ized ad hoc, Bartolini continu-
ously traces a series of geomet-
ric shapes in ink until the
paper finally breaks where
there have been too many
intersecting lines, at which
point the drawing is finished.
435
p. 56-57
Loco tondo, 2020. Ink on paper,
125x125 cm. Photo: Lorenzo
Lessi.
“Loco tondo” is a term
defined by Dante Alighieri for
purgatory.
g. 63-67
Studies for the exhibition
Zwei Inseln, Rügen, Germany,
2013. Ink on paper, 21x29,7 cm
each.
p. 75-77
Dust Chaser, 2016. Pencil and
ink on paper, 150x200 cm each.
Photo: Steve White.
Drawings of dust and fibers
first made by Bartolini when
he noticed the felt fibers
adhering to the back of an
etching that had just been
removed from the press.
p. 85
My Sixth Homage: to Mario
Merz, 2010. Drawing of Mario
Merz’ Giotto, ink on paper,
golden pins, 52x36 cm, frame
72x56x3 cm.
Four golden pins, deformed by
Bartolini as he pressed them,
secure a drawing by Mario
Merz. When Bartolini worked
as an assistant for Merz, his
primary duty was to pin sheets
of paper to the wall.
p. 92-93
273 Hours, 2014. Graphite on
paper mounted on canvas,
270x320x4,5 cm. Courtesy
Olnick Spanu, New York.
Photo: Giorgio Benni.
p. 94-95
100 Hours, 2013. Pencil on
paper mounted on canvas,
200x301,5x4 cm each.
A drawing of a tangle of plants
made over the course of exactly
100 hours.

p. 102-103
My Left Drawing, My Right
Drawing, 2020. Ink on paper,
21x29,7 cm.
A series of drawings found on
the body and copied onto
paper, these are the lines of
each hand drawn by the other.
p. 109-111
Untitled, 2000. A book made in
collaboration with Ettore
Spalletti. Hardcover, com-
pressed impasto on paper,
pearl inset into compressed
paper, 17,5x12,5 cm. Courtesy
Studio Spalletti.
p. 119
Photograph of Lucio Piccolo’s
Dog and Cat Cemetery, Villa
Piccolo, Capo d’Orlando,
Messina. Courtesy Fondazi-
one Famiglia Piccolo di
Calanovella, Capo d’Orlando.
p. 120-125
Lois and Lucio, 2011-2018.
Pencil on paper, 35 sheets,
21x29,7 cm. Photo: Lorenzo
Lessi.
The first of a series of drawings
titled after Lucio Piccolo’s dogs
which were photographed by
Lois Weinberger before being
removed from the wall of the
Museo della Seta in Ficarra.
Weinberger had then rewritten
on his photograph the name of
each animal in its original
position. Bartolini has enlarged
the photograph with Wein-
berger’s overwriting, copying
the full composition in pencil
on an A4 sheet.
p. 133
Blessing (detail), 2003. Drawing
on paper mounted on alumi-
num, 105x170 cm. Photo:
Alessandro Zambianchi.
p. 137
Hagoromo, 1989-2002. Perfor-
mance. Dance by Lucia Biondo,
music by Edoardo Marraffa.
Courtesy of the artist’s studio,
Cecina.
A dancer performs accompanied
by an improvised saxophone
solo, at first inhabiting and then
wearing an “architecture” that
resembles a shower cabin.
p. 138
Drum, 1989. Tilting floor,
436
hydraulic pump, canvas, wood
laminate floor tiles, walnuts,
252x186x45 cm. Courtesy of the
artist’s studio, Cecina.
p. 139
Drum, 2002-2008. Tilting floor,
hydraulic pump, canvas, wood
laminate floor tiles, walnuts,
645x556 cm. Castello di Rivoli.
Courtesy Fondazione per l’Arte
Contemporanea, Rivoli-Turin.
Photo: Paolo Pellion di
Persano.
Eight lead-filled walnuts are
placed on a floor that shifts and
tilts toward viewers as they
walk on it, creating a noise.
p. 141
Il frutto, 1990. VHS video, 3’.
Dance by Lucia Biondo,
double-bass by Luigi Mosso.
A bassist plays a score respond-
ing to a dancer hanging from a
sycamore tree.
p. 142-143
Untitled (Casa Sorace), 1993.
Wood, ceramic floor tiles,
1520x630x57 cm. Casa Sorace,
Firenze. Photo: Carlo Fei.
The floor of a room is raised 57
cm around the furniture which
remains in their original
position. A space is left
beneath the floor to allow
viewers to move throughout
different parts of the room.
p. 144-145
Strongbox, 1994. Synthetic
pearls, dimensions variable.
Care of Cusano Milanino.
Photo: Mario Gorni.
Continuous chains of 8mm
synthetic pearls are installed in
an existing space, tracing its
perimeter.
p. 146-147
Morbido Ground, 1994.
Mattresses, ceramic floor tiles,
12,5x8,4x20 cm. Casa Marconi,
Milan. Photo: Roberto Marossi.
Inside a private house, ceramic
flooring is glued to a plastic
film and then installed on top
of over thirty mattresses. The
visitor is invited to walk on
this unstable surface.
p. 149
The Studio at 3, 1994-2002.
Mattress, ceramic tiles,
80x180x15 cm. Galleria
Massimo De Carlo, Milan.
Courtesy Castello di Rivoli.
Collezione Fondazione per
l’Arte Moderna e Contempora-
nea CRT, on loan to Castello di
Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contem-
poranea, Rivoli-Turin.
A single mattress placed on the
floor is covered in ceramic
floor tiles taken from Barto-
lini’s old studio.
p. 150-151
Flowerbeds (Pisa), 1995.
Performance. Flowerbeds
(Cecina), 2000. Cibachrome on
aluminum, 120x180 cm. Edition
of 3. Centro per l’arte contem-
poranea Luigi Pecci Collection,
Prato. Flowerbeds (Porto), 2007.
Photograph on aluminum,
120x200 cm. Edition of 3.
Alessandra and Paolo Barillari
Collection, Rome. Photo:
Attilio Maranzano.
A group of performers lying on
the floor create closed forms
with their bodies, inside which
are earth and plants, resem-
bling the beds of an Italian
garden.
p. 152-154
Untitled (Plantations), 1995.
Color print, 120x180 cm and
50x75 cm. Edition of 3.
Sandretto Re Rebaudengo
Collection, Turin.
A photograph of the artist’s
body immersed in the earth,
imitating a plant.
p. 155
Irrigation, 1995.
Cibachrome print on alumi-
num, 100x150 cm. Intesa
Sanpaolo Collection.
A jet of water is photographed
against a cloudy sky, capturing
water in two forms (vapor and
liquid) and “watering” the sky.
The suspended water refracts
the light, changing the color of
the sky.
p. 156-157
Shaking Ceiling, 1995-2004.
Drop ceiling attached to
springs, electric motors, PLC,
1000x2000 cm. Museum
Boijmans Van Beuningen,
Rotterdam. Photo: Bob
Goedewaagen.
A flexible drop ceiling attached
to springs reproduces wavelike
movements through the use of
electric motors.
p. 159
Untitled (Mountain), 2004.
Pietraforte sandstone,
22x58x47 cm. Museo Marino
Marini, Florence. Photo: Dario
Lasagni.
A mountain made of
Florentine Pietraforte sand-
stone inspired by the moun-
tains by Beato Angelico or
Giotto, placed on the threshold
of a doorway that leads to a
darkened room.
437
Earth, irrigation system, golf
ball, dimensions variable. Ex
Fea, Pescara.
Earth covers part of an old bus
depot in Pescara. A golf ball
sits on the earth, around which
spreads a patch of moisture.
p. 160-161
Man and Mountain, 1996.
Pietraforte sandstone, electric
controller, lamp, sensors,
person. Mountain 35x20x18
cm, base 45x45x130 cm.
Galleria Artra, Milan. Photo:
Roberto Marossi.
p. 167-169
A mountain made of Floren-
Untitled (Wave), 1997-2012.
tine Pietraforte sandstone sits
Fiberglass swimming pool,
on a plinth and is lit by light
motor, water, barley,
which fades on and off in
400x700x1100 cm. Villa Medici,
fourteen second cycles. The
Rome. Photo: Claudio Abate;
light is controlled by a switch
PS1, New York. Photo: Nicolas
that someone in the gallery has
Bellewald; Kassel.
placed in the heel of their shoe.
When the person stays still the
A single wave is produced
room goes dark, as if it were
within a tank of water with a
infinite.
moving bottom that has been
set into the ground. As the
water spills out over the edge
of the tank it waters a small
patch of barley plants.
p. 163
Head n.3 (Library), 1996-1997.
Electronic sound system,
speakers. British School at
Rome, Rome. Photo: Mimmo
p. 170
Capone.
Head n.1, 1996-1997. Wood,
fiberglass, electronics, speaker,
A device placed within an
iodide lamp, door, 490x380x240
existing library creates the
cm. Galleria Massimo De
sound of a Macbook turning
Carlo, Milan. Private collec-
on whenever someone passes
tion, Turin. Photo: Studio Blu.
by, while the room’s lights
fade on and off, from complete
A white room with rounded
darkness to maximum intensity
corners is illuminated by an
over a fourteen second interval.
iodide lamp, casting it in a
yellow glow. Its walls vibrate
from the sounds of bass playing
and it has a single door which
can be closed. Inside, two
projections of mouse cursors
move along the walls following
the rhythms of a drum solo,
p. 164-165 dancing with one another; at
Untitled (Fuori Uso), 1996. first each pirouette seems to
take them in different direc-
tions, but watching closely they
spin around each other. Visitors
enter the room one at a time.
p. 171
Speaking Chair, 1996. Wood,
soundsystem, coconut, chair,
115x65x65 cm. Casa Cerizza,
Milan. The work no longer
exists.
A speaker made out of a
coconut sits on a curved
wooden armature which has
been placed on a chair.
p. 172-173
Head n.2 (Studio), 1997-1998.
Wood, fiberglass, iodide lamp,
wooden folding table, soundsys-
tem, projector, 450x425x295 cm.
de Appel, Amsterdam. Photo:
Attilio Maranzano.
A yellow room with rounded
corners is illuminated by an
iodide lamp. Its walls vibrate
from the sounds of bass
playing and it has a single door
which can be closed. Inside, the
computer screensaver Stars is
projected onto a wooden
folding table. Visitors enter
one at a time.
p. 174-175
Head n.5 (Waiting Room),
1997. Wood, fiberglass,
interlocking cement tiles,
lamp, 495x420x295 cm.
Museion, Bolzano. Photo:
Attilio Maranzano.
A yellow room with rounded
corners is illuminated by an
iodide lamp. Its walls vibrate
from the sounds of bass
playing and it has a single door
which can be closed. The floor
is made out of the same
interlocking cement tiles that
can be seen in the piazza from
the room’s window; its
windowsill extends out 2
meters into the same piazza.
Visitors enter one at a time.
p. 176-179
Head, 1997. Wood, fiberglass,
radio, table with solar panel,
soundsystem, 550x525x295 cm.
British School at Rome, Rome.
Photo: Mimmo Capone.
A white room with rounded
corners is illuminated by an
iodide lamp, casting it in a
yellow glow. Its walls vibrate
from the sounds of bass
playing and it has a single
door which can be closed.
Inside, a transistor radio sits
on the windowsill, connected
to a solar panel that sits on a
table outside, visible from the
two windows. The volume of
the radio changes with the
weather. Visitors enter one at
a time.
438
p. 180-181
Talking with Vittorio, 1997.
Cibachrome on aluminum,
35x50 cm. Edition of 3.
Bartolini talks to his friend
who is out of the frame of the
photograph.
p. 183
Ouverture, 1998. Wood, metal,
neon, 205x120x9 cm. Casa
Masaccio, San Giovanni Valdarno.
Photo: Attilio Maranzano.
In the foreground: Untitled
(Four Mountains), 1998. Pietra
serena sandstone, 120x250x28
cm. Casa Masaccio, San
Giovanni Valdarno. Photo:
Attilio Maranzano.
A wooden doorway emits a
yellow light, simulating an
opening. Beyond it though, is a
darkened room. A small
mountain range seem like two
footprints.
p. 184
Kwatz!, 1997-1998. Marker on
Palissandro marble, 30x100x20
cm. Casa Masaccio Collection,
San Giovanni Valdarno.
An existing stair is covered
with a marble step tagged
“Kwatz!”
p. 185
Recall, 1998. Painted brass,
mouthpiece, 950x1 cm in
diameter. Casa Masaccio
Collection, San Giovanni
Valdarno. Photo: Attilio
Maranzano.
A handrail that can be played
like a trumpet.
p. 186
Three Steps from the Landscape,
1998. Wood, glass, neon, black
tempera on wall, fountain made
of cement and ceramic tile,
water, perfume, door 196x94x9
cm, fountain 60x60x40 cm. Casa
Masaccio, San Giovanni
Valdarno.
A double-door with a light gives
onto a darkened room in which
there is a fountain with running
water mixed with the perfume
made out of root extract and
the scent of a single flower.
p. 187
Head n.7 (Garden), 1998.
Fiberglass, wood, plants,
1700x1050x350 cm. Casa
Masaccio, San Giovanni
Valdarno. Photo: Attilio
Maranzano.
A room with a curved
ceiling panel hanging above
an indoor Italian garden with
a variety of plants placed in
wooden, geometric beds.
p. 189
Take Off Treshold, 1998.
Pietraforte sandstone,
140x160x17 cm. Studio
Barbieri, Venice. Private
Collection, Venice. Photo:
Attilio Maranzano.
A plateau in Pietraforte
sandstone modeled on Beato
Angelico and Giotto’s moun-
tains installed as a step at the
entrance of a house, off of
which one can throw himself,
as if it were a precipice.
p. 190-191
Head, 1999. Wood, fiberglass,
iridescent paint, neon, plexi-
glass, 420x380x300 cm. Corderie
dell’Arsenale, Venice. Photo:
Attilio Maranzano.
A shed whose interior room
has rounded angles, is painted
in iridescent paint, and is lit
with an iodide lamp. The floor
is partially covered with reeds
and partially made of a
lightbox that can be walked on.
There is a single closing door;
the space is accessed by visitors
one at a time.
p. 193
A Cup of Tea, 2000. Fiberglass,
wood, furniture, soundsystem,
lamp, 360x360x550 cm.
Rotonda della Besana, Milan.
Guido di Gropello Collection,
Rome. Photo: Ela Bialkowska.
A room with rounded edges,
brightly lit from the ceiling, sits
on top of a wooden structure
which houses the studio of a
surveyor/architect. The lower
room is accessed via a trap door
while the bass tones of music
vibrate the walls of the room
above.
p. 194
My First Homage: to Emily
Dickinson, 2000. Pearls, gold,
2,5x1 cm. Edition of 3. Photo:
Alessandro Zambianchi.
Two cups made of pearls and
gold for a toast of honey in
pearl cups, taken from a verse
of Emily Dickinson’s poetry.
p. 195
My Second Homage: to Cristina
Campo, 2001. Gold, alabaster,
pearl. Earring 35x10 mm, glass
9x10 cm.
439
A pair of earrings made from virtuous force. In My Fourth
two pearls. Two additional Homage, however, progress is
auricles. associated with being station-
ary or, more precisely, being
grounded: the front row is
composed of trees, not people.
p. 196
My Tenth Homage: to Terry
Adkins, 2015-2019. Brass, pearl,
5x3x1,5 cm.
p. 200-201
Mixing Perfumes, 2000. Wood,
A saxophone key with a pearl
glass, neon, perfume, 260x210
placed on it mounted directly
cm MAXXI Collection, Rome.
into a wall. The key was found
in Terry Adkin’s studio in
A yellow room is divided in
Philadelphia.
half by a rotating glass door
with a wooden frame. A
different perfume is diffused in
each half of the room, which
mix when visitors pass through
the revolving door.
p. 197
My Fifth Homage: to Attilio
Maranzano, 2008. Cast gold,
10x1,5 cm. Edition of 2.
Two gold earrings; casts of
earplugs using the lost wax
technique.
p. 202-203
40 cm Higher, 2001. Wood,
ceramic floor tiles, dimensions
variable. Casa Serralves, Porto.
Photo: Rita Burmester.
A room in Casa Serralves
p. 198-199
is decorated with period
My Fourth Homage: to
furniture to match the style
Carmine Carbone, 2003. Print
of the original construction.
mounted on dibond, 126x262
The room’s floor has been
cm. Edition of 3. Giuseppe
raised 40 cm.
Iannaccone Collection, Milan.
Museo del Novecento
Collection, Milan. Photo: Ela
Bialkowska.
A photographic reproduction
of the characters in Pellizza da
Volpedo’s painting, Il quarto
p. 204
stato. The movement shown in
Figure of Involvement, 2001.
the 20th-century picture
Painted alabaster 7x5 cm,
represented a changing world
alabaster slab 21x29x0,5 cm.
that considered progress a
Edition of 3.
Four alabaster sculptures that
mimic the size and color of an
apricot kernel.
p. 205
Time to Unroll, 2011. Paper,
70x30 up to 100 cm. Photo:
Lorenzo Lessi.
A sheet of paper that has been
folded-up for many years and
requires a long period of time to
become completely flat again.
p. 205
Contre Durée, 2014. Marble,
pearls, 32x34x4 cm. Photo:
Lorenzo Lessi.
A pearl necklace without
the string that usually keeps
them together is placed on a
marble slab.
p. 206
Shock Absorbent Drop, 2011.
Silicone, 1 cm diameter.
Photo: Alan Dimmick.
A small bumper that looks
like a tear or a dew drop.
p. 207
Dark Dark Eyes, 2014. Ceramic
cup, postcard, 15x9x8 cm.
p. 211
Photo: Lorenzo Lessi.
Good Morning, 2000. Drills,
wood, hazelnuts, PVC tubes,
Broken objects combined and
electric motor, strap, 40x160x60
separated by image spacers.
cm. Galleria Massimo De Carlo,
In this case, a postcard of a
Milan. Photo: Studio Blu.
Windrush (UK) demon splits
and unites a chinese teacup.
A black piece of furniture
which appears to be a stove
but is actually a machine
that launches hazelnuts at
the window.
pag. 207
Rubik’s Cubes, 2011. Wood,
24,5x24,5x25,5 cm; 23,5x20x24,5
cm. Photo: Lorenzo Lessi.
p. 212-213
Two maquettes of architectural
Run Ibrahim, 2000. Performance.
spaces made of the insides of a
Light switchboard, 35 opales-
Rubik’s cube.
cent, 30 cm diameter lights,
runner.
In a cloister lit by a series of
glass spheres that light up in
sequence, a runner chases the
lights, running in circle. In the
first half-hour is lit to see the
p. 207
runner more than the lights,
Video Protection, 2014.
while the inverse is the case
Alabaster, 31x22x10 cm.
in the second half-hour. The title
refers to the song by the rock
Styrofoam packaging for a
band Area: “run hard young boy,
video projector remade in
run, people say it was you, take
alabaster: fragile protection
everything, don’t stop, the fire
against damages.
burns your virtue [...]”.
p. 208-209
Studio Matters +1, 2013.
Fruitmarket Gallery,
p. 215
Edinburgh.
Cezanne’s Leave, 2000. Photo-
graphic print on aluminum.
440
120x180 cm. Edition of 3.
Paolo and Alessandra Barillari
Collection, Rome.
“The wind has pressed a holm
oak up against the window of
my studio,” Massimo Bartolini.
p. 216-217
My Third Homage: to Franz
Marc, 2001. Reclaimed wood,
perfume, neon, 235x150x9 cm.
Lenbachhaus, Munich. Private
Collection, Bolzano. Photo:
Ernst Jank.
A door made out of old
construction wood used by Bar-
tolini’s father impregnated
with the smell of earth, beyond
which is a green light. Created
for the first time for Franz
Marc’s room (at Lenbachhaus),
one thinks the door leads to a
lightsource of an apparent
color, but it actually leads to a
room of a different color or one
that is entirely darkened.
p. 219
Man and Fountain, 2001.
Performance. Performer, metal
water fountain on wheels,
115x80x103 cm. Sonsbeek Park,
Arnheim, Netherlands.
A robotic golf caddy that’s
been transformed into a water
fountain which follows a
person around.
p. 220-221
Windowsill, 2001. Fiberglass,
flower vases, metal, 120x30x20
cm. Bosco di Orgia, Siena.
Photo: Ela Bialkowska.
Vases of geraniums sitting
on a resin reproduction of a
windowsill which floats on
a lake.
p. 222-223
Double Shell, 2001-2003.
Performance. Hollowed out
pearl, attendant. Fondazione
Teseco, Pisa, 2001. Photo: Ela
Bialkowska; MMK Frankfurt,
Frankfurt, 2003. Photo: Axel
Schneider.
A 9mm pearl that’s been
hollowed out. The gallery
attendant holds a pearl in his
hand and, when he wants to,
shows it to a visitor.
p. 224-225
Der Seemacher, 2002. Color
video, 2’13”.
In the area near Basse di Stura
(Turin), a worker who cleans
residual oils out of tanks is
seated in the center of one with
a puddle of water gathering
under him from a hose.
p. 226
Or Should I Stay, 2002. Mountain
in Pietraforte sandstone, luggage
roof rack, plexiglass, motor,
35x170x100 cm. BASE Progetti
per l’arte, Florence. Courtesy
Giulio di Gropello Collection.
Photo: Carlo Cantini.
A mountain made out of
Pietraforte sandstone inspired
by Beato Angelico and Giotto’s
mountains sits on top of a
luggage roof rack on wheels.
p. 227
Bedside Wave, 2002. Inox steel,
motor, bed, water, lamp. Bed
180x75x40 cm, pool 120x120x40
cm. Frith Street Gallery,
London. Photo: David Morgan.
The bedside table of a sad,
disheveled bed has been turned
into a round tank with a
conical wave continuously
moving inside it.
p. 228-229
Galleria Massimo De Carlo,
Milan, 2002. Photo: Attilio
Maranzano.
p. 228
Left: The Studio at 3, 1994-2002
(p. 149).
441
Center: At the Source, 2002.
Stainless steel, water,
30x30x150 cm.
A stainless steel fountain where
the water flows from the drain
to the faucet. p. 231-233
Laboratorio di Storia e storie,
Right: My Third Homage: to Anselmetti Chapel, Turin,
Franz Marc, 2001 (p. 216-217).
2003-2007. Four bookshelves
508x564 cm and 346x564 cm,
p. 229
painted wooden panels, four
Left: Roberta di spalle, 2001.
lightboxes 192x120x45 cm and
Inkjet print, 21x29,7 cm.
150x102x45 cm, opalescent
plexiglass, painted wood, LEDs.
Center: A New Table, 2002. Courtesy a.titolo and Nuovi
Wood, 80x80x210 cm.
Committenti. Photo: Attilio
Courtesy Tullio Leggeri.
Maranzano.
A table made out of a broken
An empty library has been built
door.
inside the Anselmetti Chapel.
The final shelves turn into
Right: Untitled (con un graffio benches, placing the faithful
sulla sinistra e sei gocce nel where the chorus would be and
mezzo), 2001. Paint on alumi- suggesting a hierarchical
num, lamp, 100x200 cm. inversion.
A monochrome painting with a
lamp. The color changes as the
viewer passes the work thanks
to the use of iridescent paint.
All mistakes made in the
production are recorded in the
work’s title.
p. 235
Conveyance, 2003. Painted Inox
steel, motor, water, mud, 265x40
cm diameter. Tavarnelle,
Florence. Private collection,
Turin. Photo: Yari Mazza.
p. 230
A minimalist circular bench from
Laboratorio di Storia e storie,
which one can contemplate a
2003-2007. Franca Mazzarello conical, organic, perpetual and
Nursery and Elementary
close wave, as well as the others
School and Alvaro-Modigliani
around the bench and the
Middle School, Turin. Two
landscape beyond.
rooms with dimensions
520x520x300 cm, wood, glass,
chalkboard, metal, plexiglass,
neon, clothes hangers. Courte-
sy a.titolo and Nuovo Commit-
tenti. Photo: Giulia Caira.
The two rooms adjacent to the
school’s chapel are reconfigured:
p. 236-237
the ground floor one as an
Conveyance (Vitalia), 2006.
archive and the first floor as a
Steel, motor, water, mud from
classroom for data processing.
the Hudson River, 380x50 cm.
Olnick Spanu House, New
York. Olnick Spanu Collection.
Photo: Marco Anelli.
p. 238
Flowerbeds, 2003. Performance.
Abteiberg Museum,
Mönchengladbach, Germany.
p. 239
Goodbye Party, 2003. Perfor-
mance. Abteiberg Museum,
Mönchengladbach, Germany.
Photo: Albrecht Fuchs.
Rüdiger Carl plays in front of
the 8 gray monochromes by
Gerhard Richter, sitting on top
of a square of earth excavated
from beneath the museum the
previous day.
p. 240-241
A Bench, 2003. Metal, earth,
trees, fountain, street lamp,
800x800x80 cm. Forte Belvedere,
Florence. Photo: Serge Dominge.
A portion of earth has been
raised around a small section
of garden.
p. 242-244
Ballad for a Tree, 2003-2008.
Performance. 2003, Ex Mec-
canotessile, Florence. Photo: Ela
Bialkowska; 2004, Axel Vervoor-
dt Kanal, Wijnegem (Antwerp).
Photo: RAM Roma; 2008,
Mariano Pichler Micamoca,
Berlin. Photo: Nick Ash; 2007,
Serralves Museum, Porto. Photo:
Attilio Maranzano.
The saxophonist Edoardo
Marraffa (in Florence, Antwerp
and Porto) and the bass
clarinetist Rudi Mahall (in
Berlin) play a solo for a tree.
p. 245
Untitled (Biella), 2003.
Metal, glass, 220x120x70 cm
each. Fondazione Pistoletto,
Biella.
The windows of a room are
removed from the wall over-
turned to form tables.
p. 246-247
Desert Dance, 2003. Wood,
scientific and technical
textbooks, neon lights, tennis
courts, red clay, 300x250 cm.
Centro per l’arte contempora-
nea Luigi Pecci, Prato. Photo:
Ela Bialkowska.
A circular library or building
made in 1:5 scale and painted
forest green is filled solely
with technical textbooks. In
the wall there is a hidden
door which provides access to
a reading room.
442
p. 248-249
To Place an Island on the
Horizon, 2004. Pietraforte
sandstone, reinforced concrete,
metal. Mountain 30x40x25 cm,
new terrace 400x80 cm. Pierluigi
and Natalina Remotti Collection.
Photo: Attilio Maranzano.
A terrace is extended in the
same, pre-existing style, jutting
out like a diving board into the
sea. A mountain-island is
placed at the end of the
extension.
p. 251
Untitled (Wave and Tree), 2004.
Fiberglass pool, motor, water,
tree, 645x350x106 cm. Rocca di
Montestaffoli, San Gimignano.
Photo: Ela Bialkowska.
The movement of a vertical
blade creates a single wave in a
tank of water in which a
cypress tree is partially
submerged.
p. 252-253
O som também..., 2004. Laser
cut plexiglass, 450x900x1,2 cm.
Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion,
São Paulo. Photo: São Paulo Art
Biennial.
A quotation from César Calvo
Le tre metà di Ino Moxo e altri
maghi verdi, cut into the glass of
Oscar Niemeyer’s Ciccillo
Matarazzo Pavilion. The
lasercut script renders the space
permeable to the wind, a
reference to the quoted text in
which Ino Moxo hears the trees.
p. 255-257
Head n.8 (Museum), 2004-2005.
Wood, fiberglass, Fernand
Lundgren painting, humidity
monitor, 520x420x295 cm.
MOCA, Los Angeles. Photo:
Brian Forrest.
A white room with rounded
corners is illuminated by an
iodide lamp. Inside hangs
Fernand Lundgren’s painting,
Bastioni del Painted Desert, 1910
(or, in the version installed at the
Bojimans Van Beuningen
Museum, Camille Corot’s View
of the countryside near Rome)
and an air humidity monitor.
Visitors enter one at a time.
p. 258
Figure of Involvement, 2004.
Painted Inox steel, water,
120,7x48x31 cm. Private collec-
tion, Brunico (BZ). Photo:
Alessandro Zambianchi.
A faucet is submerged in an
aquarium full of water that
flows continuously.
p. 259
Untitled, 2004. Painted Inox
steel, water, 85x60x33 cm.
Two jets of water—one
coming from the faucet and
the other from the drain—
meet each other halfway.
p. 260-261
Galleria Massimo De Carlo,
Milan, 2004. Photo: Alessandro
Zambianchi.
A series of fountains made
from painted steel sinks that
fill with water in various
modes.
Left: Untitled (Montagna),
1996-2004. Pietraforte sand-
stone, asphalt, base 60x40 cm,
height variable, mountain
22x58x47 cm.
A mountain made out of
Pietraforte sandstone in the
style of Beato Angelico and
Giotto that’s placed on a raised
piece of flooring.
Eh, 2004. Steel, brass, water,
pump, 54x54x32 cm. Work no
longer exists.
A faucet in the shape of the
letters Eh.
Untitled, 2004. Steel, brass,
water, pump, 54x54x32 cm.
Private collection, Miami
Beach.
Water runs from a drain that
has replaced a faucet to the
drain of the fountain.
Untitled, 2004 (p. 259)
Center: Untitled, 2004.
Inox steel, perfume, water,
18x60x60 cm.
A fountain with the faucet
situated directly into the drain.
p. 262-263
Music and Player, 2005.
Performance. Musée d’art
Moderne Saint-Étienne
Métropole, France. Photo:
Yves Bresson.
In two sound-proofed, adjacent
rooms, there is a trumpet
player and the bell of his
instrument, respectively, with
the trumpet passing through
the wall separating them. In
the room where the trumpet
player is, no music is audible,
while in the other, the music
can be listened to but the
player is invisible.
p. 264-265
Revolutionary Monk, 2005.
Metal, electric motor, wood,
bronze, 133x44x44 cm. Edition
of 3. Museo Marino Marini,
Rucellai Chapel, Chapel of the
Holy Sepulcher, Florence.
Photo: Dario Lasagni.
443
This bronze sculpture is cast of
an original, 19th-century,
Burmese version in teak. The
form is a praying monk in the
kneeling position, typical of
the bodhisattva, and slightly
asymmetrical. The circular
motion recalls the revolution of
the earth around the sun, but p. 270-272
also signifies a revolution of Sala para uma Onda, 2005-2007.
societal change. Refrigerated shipping contain-
er, waterproof lamp, pump,
242x242x640 cm. Serralves
Museum, Porto. Photo: Attilio
Maranzano.
A container which traveled on
a ship by sea has a wave of
p. 266-267, 269 water inside it that submerges
Hagoromo, 2005. Performance. and uncovers a hanging lamp.
Well, PVC sheet, water, dancer:
Elena Dragone. Galleria
Gentili, Montecatini Terme.
Photo: Attilio Maranzano.
A synchronized swimmer
dances inside an ancient well
that’s been lined with black
PVC; the choreography is p. 273
inspired by the story of
Sala para Mutações Geográficas:
Hagoromo (The Wings), a Fronteira Rio-São Paulo, 1969,
classic piece of Japanese Nō 2005-2007. Metal, wood, motor,
theater. The story describes a plexiglass, lights, Cildo
fisherman who steals the Meireles sculpture,
feathers of an angel-like deity 1000x1500x350 cm. Serralves
as she bathes in the river. In Museum, Porto. Photo: Attilio
order to have them returned,
Maranzano.
she must dance for him.
A room suspended inside
another with a work by Cildo
Meireles in the center. The
floor imperceptibly rotates and
thanks to centrifugal force
keeps the viewers away from
the work of art which remains
p. 269 immobile at the center.
Square Angle in Black Well, 
2005. Photographic print on
aluminum, 150x180 cm.
Edition of 3. Photo: Attilio
Maranzano.
p. 274-275
Aus Schlafes Bruder, 2006.
Saxophonist, 500 speakers, 250
MP3 players, electric equip-
ment. Fundació Antoni Tàpies,
Barcelona.
500 different audio tracks
(including talks, interviews,
music, radio and TV transmis-
sions) are simultaneously
played into a single room. The
500 speakers, set into the walls
behind black lycra, appear as if
they are four large speakers,
each taking up an entire wall.
The saxophonist Edoardo
Marraffa plays inside the
room, improvising and
dialoguing with a single voice
that is audible over the din, as
if trying to isolate his thoughts
from the sonic chaos. The piece
is inspired by Robert Schnei-
der’s book, Schlafes Bruder
(1992), in which the protagonist
suffers an acoustic hallucina-
tion and hears all of the sounds
in the world at once.
p. 276-277
Ouverture per Pietro, 2006.
Performance in collaboration
with Pietro Riparbelli. Light,
microphone and mic stand,
audio track. Edition of 2.
Collezione Giorgio Fasol / AGI
Verona; Private collection,
Rome. Photo: Giorgio Benni.
A plexiglass case contains a
lightbulb that turns on and,
upon reaching its maximum
brightness, explodes. The sound
of the explosion is recorded,
sampled and performed live in
a composition by Pietro
Riparbelli.
p. 278-279
A Bench, 2006. Metal, gravel,
trees, fountains, street lamps,
wood, 22x1,5 m diameter.
Messeplatz, Basel. Photo: Santi Galleria Massimo De Carlo, mimic the first sixteen bars of Neon signs of the business 2009. Wood, electric fan,
Caleca. Milan. Helga de Alvear John Coltrane’s Impressions. activities that previously 70x150x50 cm, 240x120x60 cm,
collection, Cacéres. Photo: occurred in the spaces of the 50x150x50 cm. Fondazione
The “A” of “Messe Platz Messe Marco Evangelista. Galleria Civica museum in Merz, Turin. Photo: Renato
Basel” by artist Heimo Trento. Ghiazza.
Zobernig is raised and Scaffolding tubes are trans-
transformed into a fenced-off formed into organ pipes that The work is made up of a
garden-bench, invoking the play a Teodoro Anzellotti’s closet, a trunk and a kitchen
symbol of anarchy: the earliest version of the first three bars cabinet made out of crating
Anarchist Internationals took of Cheap Imitation by John p. 296-297 wood, which have been p. 310-311
p. 283-285
place in Basel. Cage. In the Back of My Mind, 2008. transformed into organs, each Bars, 2009-2013. Aluminum
Sphere, 2007. Brass bocce balls,
Eight spinning metal shelves, with three rods tuned to ¼ tone scaffolding suspended 5 cm
sand, gravel, wood, transistor
eight video projectors, distance from one another. from the ground, 1800x240x120
radio, 1660x400x30 cm. Ikon
120x220x45 cm each. Frith They play simultaneously cm. Hangar Bicocca, Milan.
Eastside, Birmingham. Photo:
Street Gallery, London. La creating a resonant din of Photo: Agostino Osio.
Stuart Whipps.
Caixa collection, Barcelona. p. 303 tones that interact unexpected-
Photo: Alex Delfanne. A Landscape from Afar, 2009. ly and at times in a disturbing The scaffolding is deactivated
Brass bocce set with engraved
Steel, iron, 2400x600 cm. drone that prompts one either as a construction tool, becom-
geometric patterns. The
p. 290-293 Two shelving units, each with MAGA, Gallarate. Collezione to meditate within or escape
pallino (target ball) is a ing instead a playful object, as
p. 280-281 25 aprile 1936, 2008. four video projectors, rotate in MAGA. Photo: Roberto the space. The title is taken
walnut; it guide and attracts a set of gymnastic bars.
A Cinema, 2006-2009. Concrete, Electronic system, 250 Zumto- opposite directions as they Marossi. from a piece by Charles Ives: in
the players’ attention.
wood, metal, lights, audio, bel “Chiaro” lamps, scaffolding, project onto the walls images the Ives family, if one made an
hydraulic lifts, 600x900x440 23x11,70x1,80 m. MAXXI, identified as dreams lived The Gallarate MAGA muse- error while playing a collective
cm. Private collection, Bolzano. Rome. Photo: Roberto Galasso. before being dreamt. um’s gate tripled in height. piece, it was common practice
Photo: Marcus Varesco. to make them recite the piece
A wall of lights are hung on the again in ¾ tone intervals.
An outdoor dance floor with construction scaffolding
benches around its perimeter covering the facade of the
p. 312-313
lifts to reveal a white, subterra- short-end of the old MAXXI
Radio Alabama, 2010. Wood,
nean cinema. When the floor is building which sits between a
plastic bins, speakers,
lifted, a lightpost flashes and a church and the construction
320x320x190 cm. ENAL,
sound system plays the begin- site for the new MAXXI p. 304-305
p. 287 Vercelli. Work no longer exists.
ning of Radiohead’s song Kid A. museum. Certain lamps fall Sala F, 2009. Metal, wood,
Dew, 2007. Iridescent paint on
from the scaffold, revealing the lights, plexiglass, video
wood panel, synthetic dew, Stage created for a portion of
phrase “anche oggi niente” p. 298-301 projector, motorized doors,
50x50x1,2 cm. the Archivi Affettivi conferenc-
("nothing today either,") a Marlena, 2009. Neon, plexi- dimensions variable. Palazzo
es held in Vercelli and Turin
quotation of Cesare Pavese’s glass, 73,3x355x9 cm. delle Esposizioni, Ex Padiglione
A wooden panel (subsequently from 11-13 November, 2010,
diaries from the date of the p. 308-309
in aluminum) is painted with Italia, Venice Biennale Giardini. and promoted by the Associazi-
work’s title Las Vegas Biliardi, 2009. Sun of Today, 2009. Performance.
an iridescent paint whose Collezione Unicredit MAMbo. one Performance Studies
Neon, 25x90 cm. Mirrors Photo: Matteo Frittelli. Palazzo Bellini, Novara, with the
colors shift as the viewer International.
Club, 2009. Neon, plexiglass, Rova playing. Photo: Neocle
changes position in front of
20x136x9 cm. Casa Triangi, Lecture hall and theater from Giordani; Torre Campanaria del
the work. The synthetic dew
2009. Neon, plexiglass, the former Italian pavilion in Conservatorio Guido Cantelli,
drops on the painted surface
p. 282 25x80x9 cm. the Giardini of the Venice Bien- Novara, soloist: Tiziano Tononi.
also shift and melt into one
Triple Loop, 2006. spinning Courtesy Novara Jazz. Photo:
another. nale. A multifunctional room
pedestal, dimensions variable. Engine Room Library, Max Catanzaro.
whose use is determined by the
Ikon Eastside, Birmingham. p. 294-295 2009. MDF, plexiglass, metamorphosis of the elements
Photo: Stuart Whipps. Impressions, 2008. Nickel-plated 870x376x30 cm. A drummer plays the drums
within. A gloomy lecture hall
metal, wood,530x273x250 cm and a gong mounted closely in p. 314-315
below becomes a luminous
A video projector spins on its open. MAMbo, Bologna. A library with a green, a belltower. The drum solo is Reading, 2010. Performance.
carousel above.
axis while projecting a three Courtesy MAMbo. Photo: transparent backing that recorded and transmitted via Museion, Bolzano. Photo:
second loop of Thelonius Alessandra Andrini (with allows one to view the muse- radio to a cloister, where the Ludwig Thalheimer.
Monk spinning. musicians); Matteo Monti um’s boiler room. Rova Saxophone Quartet
(without musicians). improvises alongside it. Emanuela Villagrossi reads
UFO Disco, 2009. Neon, the Archivio di Nuova
Scrittura.
p. 288-289 A folding stage which, when plexiglass, 69x110x9 cm.
Organs, 2007. Scaffolding, folded up against the wall Galleria Civica di Trento,
wind-chest, barrel organ, fan, reveals a nickel-plated Trento. Photo: Hugo Munoz. p. 306-307
wood, motor, 725x670x200 cm. bas-relief: the sequence and Three Quarter-Tone Pieces,
dimensions of the stage legs
444 445
 100x100x1,2 cm. Photo: Design for a restaurant, a radio tined to be discarded were
Alessandro Zambianchi. station, and a cultural center, left on the shelves. Designed
united by a curved library by as a “book crossing” point, the
object crossing. A drop ceiling public was encouraged to take
made of rotating, opalescent, books, exchanging them with
plexiglass disks hovers above ones they had brought. The
the space, reminiscent of the installation substituted well p. 348
p. 316-317 p. 344-345 p. 350
Shinano river and delineating a for the local university li- Existenz / Leben, 2013. Audio
Apocalypse, 2010. Performance. Frith Street Gallery, London, Per Amour, 2013. Two Cesca
p. 321 curved form. The tables of the brary, which was closed systems, speaker, environmen-
Tempera on board by Piero di 2013. Photo: Steve White. chairs with alabaster seats,
Basement, 2011. Bronze, p. 328 restaurant have an inlay and, during that period. tal dimensions. Schlosspark,
Giovanni known as Lorenzo flowers, 80x114x56 cm. Photo:
80x250x270 cm. Galleria Rock on Pearls, 2012. Rock, 9 when united, create a map-like Germany.
Monaco, plastic vase, fresh In the background: 100 ore, Alessandro Zambianchi.
Massimo De Carlo, Milan. pearls. Rock 12x11x24 cm, course of the same river.
flowers, performer. Galleria 2013 (p. 94-95).
Voorlinden Museum collection, 9mm pearls. Voorlinden A dialogue of recorded voices
dell’Accademia, Florence. A sculpture for the film Amour
Wassenaar, Netherlands. collection, Wassenaar, Nether- around the lake made up of
Photo: Carlo Cantini. Center: Afterheart, 2012. Wood, by Michael Haneke.
Photo: Matteo Piazza. lands. Photo: Steve White. only two words: "Existenz"
wind-chest, barrel organ, fan,
(from the center of the lake) and
Everyday of the performance’s 265x265x112 cm. National
Four square meters of plowed A piece of limestone from Suiseki "Leben" (from its perimeter).
duration Arianna Pieri brings Gallery of Canada collection,
earth cast in bronze. placed on top of nine pearls. p. 340-341
fresh flowers to a portrait of Ottawa.
Two, 2013. Bronze,
San Giovanni by Lorenzo
p. 334-335 1120x358x525x910 cm. Italian A wooden stage made up of
Monaco at the Galleria
Hum, 2012. Unique engraving Pavilion at the 55th Venice organ pipes plays a piece by
dell’Accademia in Florence.
on 12” Picture disc vinyl, wall Biennale. Photo: Agostino Osio. Edoardo Marraffa, composed p. 351
painting, record player, using all the notes of Serce by Charms Papers, 2014. Alabaster,
amplifier, dimensions variable. Rubble cast in bronze fills the Janusz Prusinowski. in 4 parts, 21x29,7 cm each.
MARCO, Vigo, Spain. ramp of the pavilion designed p. 348 Photo: Alessandro Zambianchi.
p. 322-325 p. 329 by Franco Purini, leading Left: Handrail (Pensive Belvedere, 2013. Wood, 8,20 m
La strada di sotto, 2011-2013. Brass, 2012. Cast brass, An audio track of baritone ultimately to a white wall. Bodhisattva), 2012. 2012. x160x130 cm. Schlosspark Four sheets of alabaster sliced
Interview between Mauro trombone, 95x270x142 cm. Nicolas Isherwood dubbing Texts by Giuseppe Chiari hang Metal, bronze, 145x39x137 cm. Pansevitz, Rügen, Germany. in the thinnest thickness
Cappotto and Don Valentino, Private collection, Pescara. Glenn Gould’s murmurs as he along the path. The sculpture
p. 318-319 possible. The title refers to
video projector, luminaries, Photo: Matteo Piazza. plays the Goldberg Variations was transformed into a linear A wooden foot-bridge that
Centre of Contemporary Art Daniil Charms, who claimed
light mixer, dimensions of J.S. Bach. The vinyl picture, path and laid on a natural typically connects to a small
Znaki Czasu, Torun, Poland, that glass would break if a
variable. Museo Riso – Museo A brass cast of an olive branch engraved with the image of the incline, leading to a small pond island, referred to as
2011. piece of paper with a poem
Regionale d’Arte Moderna e welded to a brass trombone sleep genie Jagannath, is church. “lover’s island,” is removed written on it were thrown
Contemporanea, Palermo, 2011. (“brass” in English is a synon- played in a space painted with from its original position and
Bottom left: Heart in Hand, against it.
Photo: Mariangela Insana; ymous term for instruments the colors that correspond to installed on a lawn.
2011. Microphone with stand,
Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, made out of the material, G, a dominant note in the
audio file, amplifier, wall,
2013. Enea Righi collection. such as a trombone). piece.
spotlight, dimensions variable.
Photo: Alan Dimmick.
Photo: Wojciech Olech.
Traditional luminaries used in p. 346-347
From inside a wall a micro- Otra Fiesta, 2013. Scaffolding,
Sicilian festivals are laid on the
phone amplifies a reading wind-chest, barrel organ, fan,
ground, forming a rectangle.
of Osvaldo Licini’s Heart in wood, motor, 840x840x760 cm. p. 349
The lights blink with the sound
Hand. p. 343 S.M.A.K., Ghent. Photo: Dirk Das Nämliche, 2013. Perfor-
of Don Valentino’s voice: an
interview with the old light Two (Mercer's Version), Pauwels; Fondazione Merz, mance. Performer, portable
Right: Heart, 2011. Wood, p. 330-333 p. 336-339 p. 352
technician is projected in an 2013-2020. Made from a Turin. Photo: Renato Ghiazza. stereo. Schlosspark Pansevitz,
motor, fan, wind-chest, barrel A Circle in a Square, 2012. Bookyard, 2012. Plywood, Airplane (We), 2014. White
adjacent room. Collaboration with Lorenzo paint, books, 4x (2970x200x40 transformation of Two. Bronze, Rügen, Germany.
organ, 260x260x130 cm. Photo: marble, 20,8x27,8x126 cm.
330x180x1500 cm. Private Scaffolding tubes are trans-
Wojciech Olech. Bini, Bar for the Satoyama cm); 4x (1050x200x40 cm); 4x Private collection. Photo:
collection. Photo: Lorenzo Lessi. formed into organ pipes that A man walking his dog listens
Museum of Contemporary Art, (120x200x40 cm). Garden of Alessandro Zambianchi.
play a piece by Edoardo to a portable stereo which
A stage-organ plays Serce by KINARE, with a playlist Saint Pieter’s Abbey, Ghent.
Mercer is a false prophet in Marraffa. The title is inspired narrates a story written by
Janusz Prusinowski. curated by Carsten Nicolai. Photo: Dirk Pauwels.
Philip K. Dick’s book Do by a poem by Roberto Juarroz. Fanny Busshe. The narrative
Dimensions variable. KINARE,
Tokamachi, Japan. Courtesy Twelve library stacks were Androids Dreams of Electric uses the proper names taken
Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial, constructed in the garden of Sheep (1968). The bronze ramp from a cemetery found in a
Art Front, Tokyo. Photo: Saint Pieter’s Abbey in Ghent, is transformed into a woeful nearby forest as the verbs,
Osamu Nakamura. following the furrows of the path of rubble. adjectives and nouns to
p. 326-327 construct the story.
existing vineyard. Made in
Dew, 2011. Iridescent paint on
wood painted green, the total
aluminum, synthetic dew,
length of the shelves reached
over 100 meters; books des-

446 447

p. 353
Airplane (Basel 1869), 2016.
Imperial Bardiglio marble,
120x28x20 cm. Olnick Spanu
Collection, New York.
Milestones or broken obelisks
where the fracture takes the
shape of an unfolded paper
plane. The titles always have
in parenthesis the date of a
particular occurrence, that
Bartolini finds relevant,
where they are displayed for
the first time.
p. 354
Voyelles, 2017. Five organ
pipes, lead, fan, control switch,
361x32x350 cm. Fondazione
Merz, Turin. Photo: Renato
Ghiazza.
Five colored organ pipes that
try to reproduce the five
vowels in vox humana. The
five colors and five vowels are
associated with the famous
poem Voyelles (1871), in which
Arthur Rimbaud suggests a
shade for each vowel.
p. 355
Bets Machine, 2014. Lights,
speaker, electronic control
switch, dimensions variable.
Galleria Magazzino, Rome.
Photo: Giorgio Benni.
Five different types of ceiling
lamp turn on and off in
sequence, like a slot machine.
An audio track simultaneously
pronounces the vowel associat-
ed with the lamp’s color as it
turns on; the lamps and the
audio track are in a different
sequence such that the audio
corresponds to a different lamp
each time.
p. 356-357
Starless, 2015. Sound system,
luminaries, metal, 150x2000
cm. Marni Roof Market, Hong
Kong. Courtesy of Marni.
Luminaries used in traditional
Sicilian festivals are laid out on
the ground, creating a circle. The
lights move in sync with the
sounds of the market below.
p. 358-359
Scultura lingua morta, 2015.
Performance. Museo Marino
Marini, Florence. Photo: Dario
Lasagni.
Two people read the book
Scultura lingua morta (1945) by
Arturo Martini as they sit
near the museum’s sculptures.
One reads out loud and the
other in silence.
p. 360-361
Il giocoliere, 2014. Plotter print
on blue-back paper, print:
770x1100 cm, wall size:
448
1000x350x50 cm. Museo Marino
Marini, Florence. Photo: Dario
Lasagni.
Marino Marini’s sculpture
Giocoliere, 1940, is scanned
and its coordinates then
printed on 11 700x1100 cm
sheets with a background of
Constable’s Study of Clouds.
The roll sheets are exhibited
like bill postings.
p. 362-363
Clouds' Club, 2015. Papi-
er-mache, 160x430x110 cm.
Galleria Massimo De Carlo,
Milan. Photo: Roberto Marossi.
A garden Hercules’ club
enlarged and rendered in
papier-mache rather than
stone.
Giacometti Landscape, 2015.
Bronze, 60x400x30 cm. Galleria
Massimo De Carlo, Milan.
Photo: Roberto Marossi.
Giacometti’s Femme de Venise
VIII enlarged and set horizon-
tally, filling in the gaps
between the statue and the
horizon.
p. 365-369
Black Circle Square, 2016.
Concrete, water, performer:
Elmer Brücker (custodian),
Florian Walter (musician),
Jessie Porcher (dancer),
permanent installation, water
reservoir reserved for use by
Castrop-Rauxel fire brigade,
10,50x10,50x120x420 cm. City
of Hof Emscher-Auen, Cas-
trop-Rauxel, Germany. Photo:
Roman Mensing (p. 365-367);
photo: Matteo Frittelli (p. 369).
The pool used as a reservoir for
the Castrop-Rauxel park in
Germany, and painted by
Kazimir Malevič in Black Circle,
is enlarged by a factor of ten.
On the day inaugurating the
piece there was a performance
in which a clarinetist played, a
synchronized swimmer danced
in the water, and a custodian
(mine worker) remained seated,
occasionally cleaning the
surface of the structure when
necessary. Malevič was a great
steel apologist, which was
produced in the area where the
work was installed. Bartolini’s
installation appears like a
picture laid down, becoming an
architecture, a container, a
theater, a mausoleum.
p. 370-371
Dews, 2016. Iridescent paint
on aluminum honeycomb
panel, synthetic dew,
212x150x9,5 cm. Galleria
Massimo De Carlo, Milan.
Museum Voorlinden, Wasse-
naar, Netherlands. Photo:
Alessandro Zambianchi.
p. 372
Golden Square, 2016. Vinyl
record, brass, record player,
amplifier, loudspeaker, original
composition by Edoardo
Marraffa, 130x40x30 cm,
music: 15’, 38”. Frith Street
Gallery, London. Photo: Steve
White.
A polished brass cube sits on
top of an overturned glass
which rests on a vinyl that
plays on a record player; the
apparatus sits on a projector
stand. The vinyl is an original
piece by Edoardo Marraffa. Per
Bartolini’s instructions, Mar-
raffa has used the instruments
and words used by Charles
Dickens in his book Nicholas
Nickelby, to describe the
sounds of the Golden Square,
as well as the melody to Ring a
Ring o’ Roses, as inspirations
for the composition.
p. 373
Frith Street Gallery, London,
2016. Photo: Steve White.
In the background: Dust
Chaser, 2016 (p. 75-77).
At right: Monochrome
(Cage), 2016. Painted
aluminum mounted on canvas,
200x200 cm.
A birdcage enlarged to human
dimension and mounted onto
canvas.
At center: Georgious, 2015-
2016. Imperial Bardiglio
marble, metal, fiberglass,
161x300x95,5 cm. Olnick Spanu
Collection, New York.
A marble sculpture of a moun-
tain set on a painted plinth; the
profile of the mountain is
taken from a statue in Golden
Square, London, where the
work was first presented. The
work is an inversion of the
sculptural process: rather than
extracting the figure from the
stone, the figure is set back into
the stone.
p. 374
My Seventh Homage: to Beato
Angelico, La Montaigne, 2016.
Color print on cotton Hah-
nemühle paper, charcoal,
polyptych in five parts (30x30
cm each). Edition of 2 (one in
four and one in five parts).
Private collection, Rome. Photo:
Giorgio Benni.
Photographs made by spinning
around a mountain sculpted in
Pietraforte sandstone, inspired
by those painted by Beato
Angelico, with the sky blacked-
out in charcoal.
p. 375
Primo movimento, 2016.
Performance with Pietro
Riparbelli. Diesel generator,
lights, two speakers, 8 channel
(min.) audio mixer, micro-
phone, four stands. Ponte
Marconi, Rome.
A diesel generator powers all
of the electronics and lights
used for the concert. The
rumble of the generator
becomes part of the music both
as background noise as well as
being sampled and manipulat-
ed live by Pietro Riparbelli.
p. 377
Manca anima, 2016. Neon,
60x10x3 cm. Frith Street
449
Gallery, London. Private
collection. Photo: Steve White.
“Manca anima” (“it’s missing
soul ,") is a phrase of graffiti
found painted on the walls of
Palazzo Steri (Palermo) which
Bartolini has re-written in red
neon. The palace was at one
time used as a prison for victims
of the Spanish Inquisition.
p. 378-379
Audience for a Tree, 2016-2017.
Metal, light, 850x286 cm.
Sambhaji Park, Pune, India.
Photo: Jaykumar Nair.
A red, circular arena in metal is
built around a tree in Sambhaji
Park in Pune, India. The public
is invited to enter and use the
structure.
p. 380-381
Pensive Bodhisattva, 2017-2018.
Metal, bronze, 500x500x250 cm.
Galleria Magazzino, Rome.
Photo: Giorgio Benni (detail);
600x600x300 cm. Reset Home,
Brogloon Belgium. Courtesy
Reset Home. Photo: Gert
Robjins.
Every hour, for five minutes, a
statue of a thinking bodhisatt-
va emerges from the top of a
white, metallic column which is
supported by four metal feet of
the same dimension.
p. 383
(Do) Der Tiefe Ton, 2017.
Enamel on wood, fan motor,
nylon fabric, dimensions
variable, organ pipe: 25x25x342
cm, canvas: 69x95 cm. Galleria
Magazzino, Rome. Photo:
Giorgio Benni.
A column/organ pipe in C
partially obscures a picture
made in orange lycra which
moves thanks to the organ’s
motor. The work is inspired by
a text by Robert Schneider: a
man waits for a woman in a
hotel room with orange curtains.
The man is not alone: he is
accompanied by a deep sound
that vibrates the entire room.
p. 384-385
The Unknown Glossator, 2017.
Inkjet print on poster board,
Pietra serena sandstone
plinths, annotated photocopies
of Italian edition of Witold
Gombrowicz’ diaries (Vol. I),
posters 106x69 cm, stone
plinths 21x30x20 cm. Galleria
Magazzino, Rome. Photo:
Giorgio Benni.
After purchasing a used copy
of Witold Gombrowicz’ diary,
Bartolini discovered it to be
heavily annotated, with the
marginalia surrounding and
covering the printed text.
Bartolini rewrote the annota-
tions in legible form as a work
of archeology or translation.
The first four sentences of the
first page of the diary are
printed on four fluorescent
posters, which serve as the
backdrop of a performance in
which two people, seated one
on top of the other (and on the
three copies of the translation
and the two stones which form
the plinth), read the original
text and the annotations,
respectively.
p. 386-387
Maracas, 2017. Maracas, brush,
motor, metal rod, 59x52x141
cm. Fondazione Merz, Turin.
Photo: Renato Ghiazza.
Four maracas are played by
four spinning brushes connect-
ed to an electric motor: a
rhythmic machine for Four
Organs by Steve Reich.
p. 388-389
Cera persa, 2017. Cast bronze
(each element between 6x4 cm
and 1x6 cm). Photo: Alessandro
Zambianchi.
A series of 54 number birthday
candles, marking Bartolini’s age,
cast in bronze. The wax is “lost”
in the bronze casting process. A
second edition made in 2022 is
made of 60 partially burnt
candles.
p. 390-391
Handrail, 2017. Fine gold chain
and 18kt gold supports, 2,5 mm
x 23 cm each, chain 7 m.
Galleria Magazzino, Rome.
Photo: Giorgio Benni.
A handrail made out of a
seven-meter long gold chain.
p. 392-393
In a Landscape, 2017. Wood,
hand fan, speaker, barrel
organ, 125x190x14 cm. St.
Carthage Hall, Lismore,
Ireland. Photo: Steve White (p.
392); photo: Paul McAree (p.
393).
A black well with fourteen
sides, each of which is an
organ pipe. Inside the well
one finds the apparatus that
produces the music. When the
public leans on the perimeter
of the well they plug the
organ pipes, altering the
intonation of the music.
p. 394-395
My Eighth Homage: to Dan
Flavin’s Homage to Ingrid
Nubbe, 2018. Brown oxide and
egg white on wood, paper
tubes, wind-chest, 180x130x85
cm. Frith Street Gallery,
London. Photo: Steve White.
Three organ pipes situated in
the same positions as Dan
Flavin’s neons in the quoted
work.
450
p. 397-401
Caudu e fridu, 2018. Luminar-
ies, aluminum lattice,
800x1500x450 cm. Palazzo
Oneto di Sperlinga, Palermo.
Courtesy Fondazione Volume,
Rome. Photo: Ela Bialkowska.
A frescoed room in Palazzo
Oneto is lined with the lattice of
Sicilian luminaries which are
turned off. In the adjacent room
one finds a red neon script:
“caudu e fridu sentu ca mi pigla,
I terzuri tremu li vvudella lu cori
e lalma m assotigla” (Hot and
cold I feel it taking me, the fever
makes my guts shiver, my heart
and soul are thinning).
p. 402-403
Conveyance (Dark Dark Eyes),
2019. Cement, water, mud,
inverted pumps, 380x50 cm.
Forte Marghera, Mestre. Photo:
Matteo Frittelli.
A circular, concrete water tank,
filled, with three small eddies
in it; the tank is circled by a
concrete bench.
p. 404
At the Source, 2019. Stone pine,
larch, pump, water, 158x54x143
cm. Forte Marghera, Mestre.
Photo: Matteo Frittelli.
Wooden reproduction of
Heidegger’s fountain in Todt-
nauberg, where water streams
from the drain back up into
the faucet.
p. 405
Ghost Fountain, 2019. Wall,
plumbing, water, dimensions
variable. Forte Marghera,
Mestre. Photo: Matteo Frittelli.
A wall that urinates and
draws at the same time.
p. 406
For Diario indiano (Lectern),
2019. Remote-controlled
music stand, 40x40x130 cm.
Edition of 1 plus 1 display for
the show. Created for Vita
Accardi’s stage adaptation of
Allen Ginsberg’s Indian
Journals, performed in the
Octagonal Hall of Diocletian’s
Baths in Rome, 11-15 Decem-
ber, 2019. Photo: Pierfrancesco
Giordano.
p. 407
For Diario indiano (Shooting
Stars), 2019. Performance.
Created for Vita Accardi’s stage
adaptation of Allen Ginsberg’s
Indian Journals, performed in
the Octagonal Hall of Diocle-
tian’s Baths in Rome, 11-15
December, 2019. Photo:
Pierfrancesco Giordano.
Twenty Bangladeshi men
launching micro-helicopter
LEDs.
p. 408
On the Rock, 2020. Acrylic on
canvas, bronze, 47x45x7 cm.
Voorlinden collection, Wssenaar,
Netherlands, Photo: Alessandro
Zambianchi.
A bronze rock supports a
painting of a landscape.
p. 409
On the Rock, 2020. Oil pastel on
canvas panel, bronze, 34x20x8
cm. Photo: Lorenzo Lessi.
p. 410-411
On Identikit, 2020. Luigi
Ghirri’s record collection, gesso
model of Luciano Fabro’s Lo
Spirato, record player, sound
system. Courtesy CSAC –
Centro Studi e Archivio della
Comunicazione dell’Università
di Parma. Photo: Margherita
Zazzero.
Luigi Ghirri’s record collec-
tion is played in the room
where Fabro’s gesso model for
Lo Spirato is kept. The record
collection was Ghirri’s subject
for his photograph Identikit.
galleries of the museum,
dividing the space in half.
Through various modifications
to the tubing, the structure acts
as an organ. The musician
Gavin Bryars composed a
p. 412-413 polyphonic score for the
Dew, 2020. Iridescent paint installation, assigning each
on aluminum honeycomb room a unique melody, such
that the entire score can never
panel, synthetic dew,
be fully listened to by a single
25,5x54,5x3 cm. Photo:
viewer.
Lorenzo Lessi.
* On the occasion of this
publication the artist has
re-titled some works.
In skimming or reading this
book, the reader may have
come across artworks with
p. 414-415
different or double dating.
Floating Floor (Raft), 2020.
Below is a brief key to orient
Ceramic floor tiles, bamboo,
oneself in this chronology.
700x520x75 cm. Benchasiri
Park, Bangkok. Photo:
- For performances or installa-
Bangkok Biennial.
tions, the two dates indicate the
first and last iterations of the
A bamboo raft in the shape of
same work.
an apartment floor plan, with
- For certain “unique” installa-
ceramic floor tiles painted
tions, the first date refers to the
with swallows after Galileo
production and the second to its
Chini. Originally a means of
final realization.
migration, the raft became a
- If the double-dating refers to
dwelling space for many
an image, the first date refers to
Chinese migrants to Thailand
the first execution of the project
in the early 20th century.
while the second refers to the
date of the photograph.
- When the caption includes a
name in parenthesis, this refers
to the location where the
specific performance or
installation occurred.
p. 424-433
In là, 2021-2022. Aluminum
tubes, clamps, egg tempera on
wood, wind-chest, motor,
barrel organ, dimensions varia-
ble. Photo: Ela Bialkowska,
Okno Studio.
A structure made of scaffolding
tubes hangs from the ceiling
and remains suspended
centimeters above the floor. The
work winds through the
451
BIOGRAPHY
Massimo Bartolini was born in Cecina
(Livorno, Italy) in 1962.
He lives and works in Cecina.
PERSONAL EXHIBITIONS
1993
Massimo Bartolini, Senza titolo & Artra,
Milan, Italy, February 1993. Catalogue.
Massimo Bartolini, Casa di Francesca
Sorace, Florence, Italy, September 12–
December 15, 1993.
1994
Strongbox, Care of, Cusano Milanino
(MI), Italy, October 2–25, 1994.
1995
Massimo Bartolini, Galleria Gentili,
Florence, Italy, 1995.
Massimo Bartolini, Galleria Gió Marconi,
Milan, Italy, 1995.
1996
Massimo Bartolini (with Grazia Toderi),
Artra, Milan, Italy, November 4–Decem-
ber 14, 1996, curated by Giorgio Verzotti.
Catalogue.
Head n.3 (Library), Henry Moore
Foundation, Leeds, U.K., November 27,
1996–January 26, 1997, curated by
Penelope Curtis.
1997
Massimo Bartolini (with Martin Creed),
British School at Rome, Rome, Italy,
April 3–May 3, 1997, curated by Alison
Sarah Jacques.
Viali Kwatz!, Massimo De Carlo, Milan,
Italy, May 28–September 13, 1997.
Head n.4 (da concerto), Fondazione Teseco
per l’Arte, Pisa, Italy, 1997.
1998
Massimo Bartolini, Casa Masaccio, San
Giovanni Valdarno (AR), Italy, March
21–May 17, 1998, curated by Rita
Selvaggio. Catalogue.
Massimo Bartolini (with Mario Airò),
Studio Barbieri, Venice, Italy, 1998.
2000
Massimo Bartolini, Massimo De Carlo,
Milan, Italy, January 20–February 19,
2000.
2001
Senza titolo (Wave), P.S.1 Contemporary
Art Center, MoMA PS1, New York, USA,
March 11–May 20, 2001, curated by
Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev.
Or should I stay, Base / Progetti per
l’arte, Florence, Italy, November 24,
2001–January 20, 2002.
2002
Massimo Bartolini. Altre voci, altre stanze/
Other Voices, Other Rooms, Magazzino
d’Arte Moderna, Rome, Italy, March 8–
April 10, 2002, curated by Cloe Piccoli.
Catalogue.
La California frazione di Cecina, Massimo
De Carlo, Milan, Italy, March 18–April 4,
2002.
Massimo Bartolini (with Wiebke Siem),
Frith Street Gallery, London, U.K., May
9–June 21, 2002.
Sopra cielo, sotto cielo, Associazione
culturale Vistamare, Pescara, Italy,
November 10–December 31, 2002.
2003
Massimo Bartolini, Museum Abteiberg,
Mönchengladbach, Germany, May 11–
August 31, 2003, curated by Veit Loers.
Catalogue.
Desert Dance, Centro per l’Arte Contem-
poranea Luigi Pecci, Prato, Italy,
November 2, 2003–June 20, 2004, curated
by Stefano Pezzato. Catalogue.
2004
Disegni (con Nedko Solakov), Magazzino
d’Arte Moderna, Rome, Italy, October
23–December 6, 2004.
Fountains and Mountain, Massimo De
Carlo, Milan, Italy, November 25, 2004–
January 15, 2005.
453
2005
Massimo Bartolini, GAM – Galleria
d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea,
Turin, Italy, February 3–April 3, 2005,
curated by Laura Cherubini. Catalogue.
Da un lato all’altro del disegno (with
Ettore Spalletti), Vistamare, Pescara,
Italy, May 21–June 30, 2005.
2006
Art 37 Basel, Public Art Project,
Basel, Switzerland, June 14–18, 2006.
Catalogue.
2007
Laboratorio di Storia e storie, Cappella
Anselmetti, Turin, Italy, permanent
intervention inaugurated March 2, 2007,
as part of Nuovi Committenti, a program
for the production of artworks for
public space, curated by a. titolo.
Catalogue. Massimo Bartolini, Museu
Serralves, Museu de Arte Contempo-
rânea, Porto, Portugal, May 5–July 15,
2007, curated by João Fernandes.
Catalogue.
Airplanes and Horizon, D’Amelio Terras,
New York, USA, May 11–June 29, 2007.
El jardí de roses, La font de pedres, Espais
Oberts, CaixaForum, Barcelona, Spain,
May 16–July 29, 2007, curated by Silvia
Sauquet Cisa.
Triple Loop, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham,
U.K., July 19–August 26, 2007, curated by
Jonathan Watkins.
2008
MAXXI Dialoghi Con La Città. Massimo
Bartolini, MAXXI – Museo nazionale
delle arti del XXI secolo, Rome, Italy,
February 12–March 30, 2008, curated by
Laura Cherubini.
Massimo Bartolini, Frith Street Gallery,
London, U.K., May 2–June 1, 2008.
Concert Room with Voices, D’Amelio
Terras, New York, USA, October 4–No-
vember 1, 2008.
Organi, Massimo De Carlo, Milan, Italy,
October 28–November 29, 2008.
01
02
 2009
Three Quarter-Tone Pieces, Magazzino,
Rome, Italy, December 14, 2009–January
31, 2010.
2010
Art Unlimited | Art 41 Basel, Basel, Switzer-
land, June 16–20, 2010. Catalogue.
Dews, ICA-Sofia, Bulgaria, September 10–
October 23, 2010, curated by Iara Boubnova.
-2 +3 Stefano Arienti Massimo Bartolini. La
collezione di Museion, Museion, Bolzano,
Italy, October 30, 2010–October 16, 2011,
curated by Letizia Ragaglia and Frida
Carazzato. Catalogue.
Cor, as part of ROTOR, a project curated
by Siobhan Davies, South London Gallery,
London, U.K., November 3, 2010–January
23, 2011.
2011
Serce na dłoni, Centre of Contemporary
Art Znaki Czasu, Toruń, Poland, May 13–
September 11, 2011, curated by Dobrila
Denegri. Catalogue.
Basements, Massimo De Carlo, Milan,
Italy, September 15–December 17, 2011.
2012
HUM, AuditoriumArte, Rome, Italy,
November 29–December 9, 2012; MARCO,
Museo de Arte Contemporánea de Vigo,
Vigo, Spain, March 1–May 19, 2013,
curated by Anna Cestelli Guidi. Catalogue
(CD and DVD).
2013
Studio Matters +1, The Fruitmarket
Gallery, Edinburgh, U.K., February 1–April
14, 2013; S.M.A.K., Ghent, Belgium, June
22–September 22, 2013, curated by Fiona
Bradley and Philippe Van Cauteren.
Catalogue.
Afterheart, Frith Street Gallery, London,
U.K., February 8–March 28, 2013.
Zwei Inseln, as part of EINSZUEINS Rügen,
Schlosspark Pansevitz, Rügen, Germany,
July 13–September 8, 2013, curated by
03-07
Camilla Wegener and Luca Cerizza.
Catalogue.
2014
Anima Vagula Blandula, Edicola Notte,
Rome, Italy, June 5–September 5, 2014.
Massimo Bartolini, Magazzino, Rome,
Italy, December 17, 2014–January 31, 2015.
2015
Massimo Bartolini, Museo Marino Marini,
Florence, Italy, January 11–March 7, 2015,
curated by Alberto Salvadori. Catalogue.
Whale Inn (with Thomas Grünfeld), Casa
Saldarini, Baratti (LI), Italy, October 10–11,
2015.
2016
Paesaggi, Massimo De Carlo, Milan, Italy,
April 9–May 7, 2016.
Golden Square, Frith Street Gallery,
London, U.K., May 25–July 30, 2016.
2017
Massimo Bartolini, Lismore Castle Arts, St
Carthage Hall, Lismore Co. Waterford,
Ireland, April 4–May 28, 2017. Unlimited,
Art Basel, Basel, Switzerland, June 15–18,
2017. Catalogue.
Massimo Bartolini. Four Organs, Fondazi-
one Merz, Turin, Italy, July 3–October 1,
2017. Catalogue.
Bio Biblio, Galería Bacelos, Madrid, Spain,
September 7–October 31, 2017.
Atlante Occidentale, Daniele Del Giudice,
Einaudi Tascabili, 1998, pag. 78, Magazzi-
no, Rome, Italy, November 29, 2017–
January 31, 2018.
2018
Caudu e Fridu, side event of Manifesta 12,
Palazzo Oneto of Sperlinga, Palermo, Italy,
June 16–September 15, 2018, curated by
Claudia Gioia. Catalogue.
And Other Landscapes, Gert Robijns
RESETHOME Center for Visual Arts,
Borgloon, Belgium, September 16–October
21, 2018.
454
2019
Grotoni e Malocchi. Massimo Bartolini.
Maurizio Maggiani, Museo Carlo Zauli,
Faenza (RA), Italy, December 19–February
28, 2020. Catalogue.
2020
Credits, Frith Street Gallery, London, U.K.,
February 7–June 29, 2020.
Massimo Bartolini. On Identikit, CSAC
Studies Center and Communication Archive
University of Parma, Valserena Abbey,
Parma, Italy, February 16–March 22, 2020,
curated by Marco Scotti. Catalogue.
2022
Hagoromo. Massimo Bartolini, Centro per
l’arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato,
Italy, September 16, 2022–January 8, 2023,
curated by Luca Cerizza and Elena Magini.
Catalogue.
GROUP EXHIBITIONS
1994
Domestic Violence, Casa di Gió Marconi,
Milan, Italy, 1994, curated by Alison Sarah
Jacques.
Turbare il tempo, Museo Archeologico,
Florence, Italy, 1994, curated by Saretto
Cincinelli.
Potato, IAS, London, U.K., 1994, curated by
Alison Sarah Jacques, Gary Thomas, and
Steve McIntyre.
1995
Materiazioni. Nuovi materiali, as part of
Anni ’90. Arte a Milano, Galleria Credito
Valtellinese, Refettorio delle Stelline,
Milan, Italy, March–May, 1995, curated by
Angela Vettese. Catalogue.
Campo 95, Corderie dell’Arsenale, Venice,
Italy, June 7–July 31, 1995; Elcit-Ra-
diomarelli, Sant’Antonino di Susa (TO), Ita-
ly, October 19–December 31, 1995;
Konstmuseum, Malmö, Sweden, February
11–April 8, 1996, curated by Francesco
Bonami. Catalogue.
Aperto Italia ’95, Trevi Flash Art Museum,
Palazzo Lucarini, Trevi (PG), Italy, June
11–September 20, 1995, curated by
Francesco Bonami, Emanuela De Cecco,
Helena Kontova, Gabriele Perretta, Sergio
Risaliti, and Marco Senaldi. Catalogue.
East International, Norwich Gallery and
Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts,
Norwich, U.K., July 16–September 3, 1995.
Moby Dick, Arsenali Medicei, Pisa, Italy,
October 14–November 14, 1995; John
Hansard Gallery, Southampton, U.K.,
November 28, 1995–January 27, 1996,
curated by Rita Selvaggio and Stephen
Foster. Catalogue. Gavin Brown Enter-
prise, New York, USA, 1995.
Multiple Choice, Jibby Beane, London, U.K.,
1995.
1996
Romantico Contemporaneo, Castello di
Bentivoglio (BO), Italy, January 1996,
curated by Alice Rubbini. Catalogue
More than Real, Palazzo Reale di Caserta,
Italy, January–February, 1996, curated by
Galleria Raucci/Santamaria and Massimo
Sgroi. Catalogue.
High-Rise, as part of Space Explorations,
110 Euston Road, London, U.K., May 3–
June 2, 1996.
Orario continuato, Municipality of Peccioli
(PI), Italy, September 7–October 6, 1996,
curated by Alessandra Galasso. Catalogue.
Ultime Generazioni. XII Esposizione
Nazionale Quadriennale d’Arte di Roma,
Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome, Italy,
September 25–November 25, 1996.
Catalogue.
Interiora, una mostra fatta in casa, via Santa
Sofia 18, Milan, Italy, October 15–Novem-
ber 13, 1996, curated by Luca Cerizza and
Mario Milizia.
Fuori Uso ’96, Sotto pioggia e sotto vento, Ex
deposito Fea, Pescara, Italy, December 7,
1996–January 7, 1997, curated by Laura
Cherubini and Gian Ruggero Manzoni.
Catalogue.
Mutoidi, Maschio Angioino, Naples, Italy,
1996, curated by Massimo Sgroi.
Senza Uscita, as part of Niente di Personale
curated by Roberto Pinto, Openspace,
Arengario, Milan, Italy, 1996, curated by
Federico Tanzi Mira. Catalogue.
To Die By One’s Own Hand, Link, Bologna,
Italy, 1996, curated by Marco Samoré.
1997
Critica in opera 16. Interno, Saletta Comunale
d’Esposizione, Castel San Pietro Terme (BO),
Italy, May 24–June 25, 1997, curated by
Cristiana Perrella. Catalogue.
Truce: Echoes of Art in an Age of Endless
Conclusions, SITE Santa Fe, USA, July 18–Oc-
tober 12, 1997, curated by Francesco Bonami.
Catalogue.
Cosa sono le nuvole?, Palazzo Re Rebaudengo,
Guarene d’Alba (TO), Italy, September 28–
November 9, 1997, curated by Francesco
Bonami. Catalogue.
Generazione Media, Triennale Palace, Milan,
Italy, November 5–23, 1997, curated by Sonia
Campagnola, Francesca Alessandrini, Paola
Darra, Laura Ghirardelli, and Federica Rossi.
Jingle Bells 806, Massimo De Carlo, Milan,
Italy, December 1–23, 1997, curated by Uwe
Schwarzer.
Light Slow, Massimo De Carlo, Milan, Italy,
December 1–23, 1997.
Versus 2000, Museion, Bolzano, Italy,
December 6, 1997–March 1, 1998, curated by
Gert Ammann, Gabriella Belli, Dieter
Bogner, Marisa Vescovo, and Peter Weier-
mair. Catalogue.
1998
Habitat, Galleria Valentina Moncada,
Rome, Italy, March 4–April 17, 1998,
curated by Cristiana Perrella.
Seamless, de Appel, Amsterdam, Nether-
lands, April 3–June 1, 1998, curated by
Curatorial Training Programme 1997–98.
Catalogue.
Mostrato. Fuori Uso ’98, Mercati ortofrutti-
coli, Pescara, Italy, June 20–August 2, 1998,
curated by Giacinto Di Pietrantonio.
Catalogue.
455
Indoor (in collaboration with Mario Airò),
Centro Civico per l’Arte Contemporanea
La Grancia Serre di Rapolano (SI), Italy,
June 21–September 30, 1998, curated by
Zerynthia.
Estetiche cannibali: un’altra sceneggiatura,
Triennale Palace, Milan, Italy, June 23–
July 12, 1998, curated by Daniele Pittèri
and Christoph Radl. Catalogue.
Atlantide, Centro per l’arte contempora-
nea Palazzo delle Papesse, Siena, Italy,
1998, curated by Laura Cherubini.
1999
Effetto Notte: percorsi d’arte e di luce nella
Napoli Sotterranea, Napoli Sotterranea,
Naples, Italy, May 20–June 20, 1999,
curated by Ludovico Pratesi and Paola
Magni. Catalogue.
dAPERTutto, 48a Esposizione Internazio-
nale d’Arte, La Biennale di Venezia, Venice,
Italy, June 10–November 7, 1999, curated
by Harald Szeemann. Catalogue.
Selezione Italiana per la partecipazione
all’International Studio Program 1998/1999
e 1999/2000 del P.S.1 Museum New York, as
part of Arte al Centro 99, Cittadellarte -
Fondazione Pistoletto, Biella, Italy, July
3–25, 1999, curated by P.S.1 Italian Bureau,
Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Chiara
Bertola, Laura Cherubini, and Mario
Codognato.
Something old, something new, something
borrowed, something blue, Casa Masaccio,
San Giovanni Valdarno (AR), Italy, October
1–November 21, 1999, curated by Rita
Selvaggio.
L’ultimo disegno del 1999, Zerynthia, Rome,
Italy, December 31, 1999.
Galerie Esca, Milhaud, Nîmes, France,
1999, curated by Roberto Pinto and Mario
Gorni.
2000
Identidades futuras. Reflejos de una colección,
Sala de Exposiciones del Canal de Isabel II,
Madrid, Spain, February 12–March 10,
2000, curated by Rafael Doctor Roncero and

08
09
Francesco Bonami. Catalogue.
Stanze e Segreti, Rotonda della Besana,
Milan, Italy, April 11–May 7, 2000, curated
by Achille Bonito Oliva. Catalogue. Le
Jardin, third exhibition of the series La
Ville, le Jardin, la Mémoire, France Acade-
my, Villa Medici, Rome, Italy, June 21–Sep-
tember 24, 2000, curated by Laurence
Bossé, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, and
Hans Ulrich Obrist. Catalogue.
Futurama. Arte in Italia. Frequenze e segnali
dalle ultime generazioni, Centro per l’arte
contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato, Italy,
July 8–September 3, 2000, curated by
Bruno Corà, Marco Meneguzzo, and
Raffaele Gavarro. Catalogue.
Dopopaesaggio, 4th Edition: Community
Gardens, Castello di Santa Maria Novella,
Fiano (FI), Italy, October 7–8, 2000, curated
by Marco Scotini, Laura Vecere, and Pier
Luigi Tazzi. Catalogue.
The last drawing of the Century, as part of
Ventana Hacia Venus/Window on Venus,
curated by Zerynthia, Teatro Nacional,
L’Avana, Cuba, November 19–21, 2000.
Catalogue.
Il Premio per la giovane arte italiana del
Centro Nazionale per le Arti Contempora-
nee: Migrazioni e Multiculturalità, Centro
Nazionale per le Arti Contemporanee,
Rome, Italy, December 15, 2000–March 18,
2001, curated by Laura Cherubini, Paolo
Colombo, and Anna Mattirolo. Catalogue.
Homo Ludens, Museo de Arte Moderno,
Buenos Aires, Argentina; Centro Cultural
Parque de España, Rosario, Argentina,
2000, curated by Florencia Acevedo.
Werkstatt Europa 2000, Forum Kunst
Rottweil, Rottweil, Germany, 2000, curated
by Jürgen Knubben, Giorgio Bonomi, Ralf
Christofori, Michael Hübl, and Ursula
Zeller. Catalogue.
2001
Primo Piano. Su la testa!, Palazzo delle
Papesse, Siena, Italy, February 3–11, 2001,
curated by Sergio Risaliti.
The Art is a Fifth element, Premio Querini
Stampalia - Furla per l’Arte, Fondazione
Querini Stampalia, Venice, Italy, March
17–May 13, 2001, curated by Chiara
Bertola. Catalogue.
Inonia, quali città d’arte a venire?, conveg-
no-mostra, Cassino University, Cassino
(FR), Italy, May 25–26, 2001, curated by
Bruno Corà.
Atlantide, Museo del Bosco di Orgia,
Sovicille (SI), Italy, June 3–July 3, 2001,
curated by Elisabetta Baiocco and Arabella
Natalini.
Sonsbeek 9: Locus Focus, Sonsbeek Park,
and various locations, Arnhem, Nether-
lands, June 3–September 23, 2001, curated
by Jan Hoet. Catalogue.
Refreshing, among the Special Projects of
the 49. Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte.
Platea dell’umanità. La Biennale di Venezia,
Venice, Italy, June 10–November 4, 2001,
curated by Pier Luigi Tazzi and Fabio
Cavallucci. Catalogue.
El cuerpo del arte, as part of the 1a Bienal
de Valencia. Comunicación entre las artes,
Convento del Carmen, Valencia, Spain,
June 10–October 20, 2001, curated by
Achille Bonito Oliva and Peter Greenaway.
Catalogue.
Squatters 2, Museu Serralves, Museu de
Arte Contemporânea, Porto, Portugal,
June 23–September 16, 2001; Witte de
With, Center for Contemporary Art,
Rotterdam, Netherlands, October 7–De-
cember 2, 2001, curated by Bartomeu Marí,
Miguel von Hafe Pérez, Vicente Todolí,
and João Fernandes. Catalogue.
456
Strategies Against Architecture II, Fondazi-
one Teseco per l’Arte, Pisa, Italy, July 7–
October 7, 2001, curated by Luca Cerizza.
Leggerezza. Ein Blick auf zeitgenössische
Kunst in Italien / Una idea dell’arte italiana
contemporanea, Städtische Galerie im
Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau, Monaco,
Germany, November 10, 2001–January 13,
2002, curated by Giovanni Iovane and
Marion Ackermann. Catalogue.
Public art projects in Peccioli, various
locations (Massimo Bartolini at Hotel
Portavaldera), Peccioli (PI), Italy, 2001,
curated by Marco Scotini. Catalogue.
2002
Manifesta 4. European Biennial of Contempo-
rary Art, various locations (Massimo
Bartolini at the Frankensteiner Hof),
Frankfurt am Main, Germany, May 25–Au-
gust 25, 2002, curated by Nuria Enguita
Mayo, Iara Boubnova, and Stéphanie
Moisdon Trembley. Catalogue.
Verso il Futuro. Identità nell’arte italiana
1990-2002, Museo Del Corso, Rome, Italy,
June–July 2002, curated by Ludovico Pratesi
and Costantino D’Orazio. Catalogue.
Ouverture...Arte dall’Italia, Galleria
Comunale d’Arte Contemporanea, Monfal-
cone (TS), Italy, June 15–July 28, 2002,
curated by Andrea Bruciati. Catalogue.
Paradiso Perduto, Palazzo dell’Arengo,
Rimini, Italy, July 5–August 31, 2002,
curated by Ambra Stazzone. Catalogue.
Collezione permanente. Nuove acquisizioni,
Centro per l’arte contemporanea Luigi
Pecci, Prato, Italy, July 11–September 7,
2002, curated by Bruno Corà. Catalogue.
Polyphonix 40, Centre Pompidou, Paris,
France, October 1–10, 2002, curated by
Jean-Jacques Lebel and Jacqueline Cahen.
Cargo 3, Cargo Series, De Bagagehal,
Stichting Kunstwerk Loods 6, Amsterdam,
Netherlands, 2002, curated by Suzanne van
de Ven.
Freespace Limburg, Provinciaal Centrum
voor Beeldende Kunsten, Begijnhof,
Hasselt, Belgium, 2002, curated by Gert
Robijns.
2003
Working-Insider, Stazione Leopolda Spazio
Alcatraz, Florence, Italy, February 21–23,
2003, curated by Sergio Risaliti. Catalogue.
Tusciaelecta: arte contemporanea nel
Chianti 2002/2003, various locations
(Massimo Bartolini at Tavarnelle),
Tuscany, Italy, April 12–July 6, 2003,
curated by Arabella Natalini. Catalogue.
I Moderni / The Moderns, Castello di Rivoli
Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli (TO),
Italy, April 16–August 24, 2003, curated by
Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev. Catalogue.
Das lebendige Museum, MMK Museum für
Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main,
Germany, May 16–June 29, 2003,
curated by Udo Kittelmann.
Arte pubblica in Italia: lo spazio delle
relazioni, Cittadellarte - Fondazione
Pistoletto, Biella, Italy, June 6–November
2, 2003, curated by Anna Detheridge and
Connecting Cultures.
Spread in Prato 2003, various locations
(Massimo Bartolini at Ugolini Arredamen-
ti), Prato, Italy, June 24–July 24, 2003,
curated by Pier Luigi Tazzi. Catalogue.
Le Opere e i Giorni, 2nd edition, Il Precetto,
Certosa di Padula, Padula (SA), Italy, June
29, 2003–April 30, 2004, curated by Achille
Bonito Oliva. Catalogue.
Belvedere dell’Arte, orizzonti, Forte
Belvedere, Florence, Italy, July 7–October
26, 2003, curated by Achille Bonito Oliva
and Sergio Risaliti. Catalogue.
Catastrofi minime, MAN_Museo d’Arte
della Provincia di Nuoro, Nuoro, Italy,
December 5, 2003–February 29, 2004,
curated by Fernando Castro, Saretto
Cincinelli, and Cristiana Collu. Catalogue.
2004
L’arte dell’ascolto, RAM radioartemobile,
Rome, Italy, January 16–February 27, 2004,
curated by Zerynthia.
Two, Massimo De Carlo, Milan, Italy,
February 5–March 30, 2004.
Sound and Vision, Axel Vervoordt Kanaal,
Wijnegem, Belgium, March 10–April 17,
2004, curated by Janus and Zerynthia/RAM
radioartemobile.
Aligned, Frith Street Gallery, London, U.K.,
May 13–June 25, 2004.
Perception of Space, Museum Boijmans Van
Beuningen, Rotterdam, Netherlands, May
20–August 1, 2004, curated by Jaap
Guldemond.
No principio era a viaxe / In the beginning
there was the journey. 28 Bienal de arte de
Pontevedra, various locations, Pontevedra,
Spain, July 10–September 5, 2004, curated
by Miguel von Hafe Pérez and David G.
Torres. Catalogue.
Arte all’Arte 9. Arte Architettura Paesaggio.
La forma delle nuvole, various locations
(Massimo Bartolini at Rocca di Montestaf-
foli, Campo degli ulivi, San Gimignano),
Tuscany, Italy, September 17, 2004–Janu-
ary 6, 2005, curated by Achille Bonito Oliva
and James Putnam. Catalogue.
Território livre. 26a Bienal de São Paulo,
Pavilhão Ciccillo Matarazzo, Parque de
Ibirapuera, San Paolo, Brazil, September
25–December 19, 2004, curated by Alfons
Hug. Catalogue.
Spazi atti/Fitting Spaces. 7 artisti italiani
alle prese con la trasformazione dei luoghi,
PAC Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea,
Milan, Italy, November 12, 2004–February
20, 2005, curated by Jean-Hubert Martin
and Roberto Pinto. Catalogue.
NONE OF THE ABOVE, Swiss Institute
– Contemporary Art, New York, USA,
November 23, 2004–January 15, 2005,
curated by John Armleder.
2005
Slubfurt City?, various locations, Frankfurt
on the Oder, Germany, and Słubice,
Poland, March 2005, curated by Michael
Kurzwelly with Bernardo Giorgi and
Roland Schefferski.
XIV Quadriennale di Roma. Fuori Tema/
Italian Feeling, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte
Moderna, Rome, Italy, March 9–May 31,
2005. Catalogue.
What’s New, Pussycat? Die Neuerwerbungen |
The Recent Acquisitions 2002-2005, MMK
10
Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt
am Main, Germany, March 19–July 31,
2005, curated by Udo Kittelmann and
Klaus Görner. Catalogue.
Art-chitecture of change, Isola Art Center,
Milan, Italy, April 8–18, 2005, curated by
Marco Scotini.
Domicile: privé/public, Musée d’Art
moderne de Saint-Etienne Métropole,
Saint-Etienne Métropole, France, May
12–August 31, 2005, curated by Lóránd
Hegyi. Catalogue.
Light Lab. Cortocircuiti quotidiani, Museion,
Bolzano, Italy, May 27–August 28, 2005,
curated by Letizia Ragaglia. Catalogue.
NowHere Europe, as part of Trans:it.
Moving Culture Through Europe, side event
of the 51. esposizione internazionale d’arte.
La Biennale di Venezia, Scientific Laborato-
ry of the Special Superintendence for the 11
Venetian Museum Complex at the
Misericordia, Venice, Italy, June 10–July September 24, 2005–January 22, 2006,
10, 2005, curated by Bartolomeo Pietro- curated by Marco Meneguzzo. Catalogue.
marchi. Catalogue. Ecstasy: In and About Altered States,
The 26th Biennial of Graphic Arts Ljubljana. MOCA, Museum of Contemporary Art,
Thrust, Tobačna, Ljubljana, Slovenia, June Los Angeles, USA, October 9, 2005–Febru-
23–October 2, 2005, selection Istituto ary 20, 2006, curated by Paul Schimmel
Nazionale of the Grafica di Roma, curated with Gloria Sutton. Catalogue.
by Luigi Ficacci. Catalogue. Myslivska, Galleria Gentili, Montecatini
Un filo d’acqua, as part of Festival Strade Terme (PT), Italy, 2005, curated by Veit
Bianche, Il Fondo, Casale Marittimo (PI), Loers.
Italy, July 23–August 30, 2005, curated by
Roberta Fossati. 2006
Reception, Büro Friedrich, Berlin, Germa- Eco Oltremonte, Magazin 4 Bregenzer
ny, September–October 2005, curated by Kunstverein, Bregenz, Austria, April 28–
Luca Cerizza. June 4, 2006, curated by Oscar Sandner.
BYO. Bring Your Own. Il MAN presenta In su, nell’azzurro, come una piuma. Cinque
Opere dalla Collezione Teseco, MAN_ Art artisti incrociano i cento anni di Samuel
Museum of the Province of Nuoro, Nuoro, Beckett, Scuola Holden, Turin, Italy,
Italy, September 23, 2005–January 8, 2006, June 14–July 14, 2006, project by a. titolo,
curated by Saretto Cincinelli and Alberto curated by Giorgina Bertolino and Lisa
Mugnaini. Catalogue. Parola.
La scultura italiana del XX secolo, Fondazi- Young Italian Artists at the Turn of the
one Arnaldo Pomodoro, Milan, Italy, Millennium, Galleria Continua Beijing, in
457
collaboration with the Giulio di Gropello
Collection, Beijing, China, July 1–August
20, 2006. Catalogue.
Giardino. Luoghi della piccola realtà, PAN |
Palazzo delle Arti di Napoli, Naples, Italy,
July 6–September 30, 2006, curated by
Lóránd Hegyi. Catalogue.
6th Shanghai Biennale. Hyperdesign,
Shanghai Art Museum, Shanghai, China,
September 6–November 5, 2006, curated by
Zhang Qing, Huang Du, Shu-Min Lin, Wonil
Rhee, Gianfranco Maraniello, Jonathan
Watkins, and Xiao Xiaolan. Catalogue.
Core, Union Works, London, U.K.,
September 15–October 28, 2006, project by
Illuminate Productions.
Registres i hàbits. Màquina de temp /
imatges d’espai, Fundació Antoni Tàpies,
Barcelona, Spain, September 29–December
10, 2006; Centro Galego de Arte Contem-
poránea, Santiago di Compostela, Spain,
February 1–April 1, 2007, curated by Nuria
Enguita Mayo. Catalogue.
Resonance. The Final Exhibition At 59–60
Frith Street, Frith Street Gallery, London,
U.K., November 3–December 21, 2006.
GeneraComunicAzioni.tv, Casa Masaccio,
San Giovanni Valdarno (AR), Italy,
December 9, 2006–January 14, 2007.
Idea. Disegno italiano degli anni Novanta,
Istituto Nazionale per la Grafica, Palazzo
Fontana di Trevi, Rome, Italy, December
15, 2006–January 26, 2007; State Archives,
Turin, Italy, February 1–23, 2007, curated
by Laura Cherubini and Giorgio Verzotti.
Catalogue.
Collezionami. Seconda edizione Biennale
d’arti contemporanee 2006, Cittadella della
Cultura, Bari, Italy, December 19, 2006–Ja-
nuary 17, 2007, curated by Grazia De
Palma. Catalogue.
2007
Arteinmemoria4, Ostia Antica Synagogue,
Rome, Italy, January 28–March 11, 2007,
curated by Adachiara Zevi. Catalogue.
43 Capricci, Former Municipal Pinacoteca,
Assisi, Italy, February 24–March 4, 2007,
curated by Giuseppe Cascetta. Catalogo.
Camera con vista. Arte e interni in Italia
1900-2000, Royal Palace, Milan, Italy, April
18–July 1, 2007, curated by Claudia Gian
Ferrari. Catalogue.
Dalla terra alla luna: metafore di viaggio
(parte II), Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte
Contemporanea, Rivoli (TO), Italy,
May 22–August 26, 2007, curated by
Marcella Beccaria.
Où? Scènes du Sud: Espagne, Italie, Portugal,
Carré d’Art - Musée d’art contemporain de
Nîmes, Nîmes, France, May 23–September
23, 2007, curated by Françoise Cohen.
Catalogue.
Ironia Domestica. Uno sguardo curioso tra
collezioni private italiane, Museion,
Bolzano, Italy, May 26–September 2, 2007,
curated by Letizia Ragaglia. Catalogue.
La città che sale. We Try to Build the Future,
ARCOS, Museo d’arte contemporanea
Sannio, Benevento, Italy, May 28–Septem-
ber 30, 2007; MACRO Future, Rome, Italy,
October 25, 2007–January 31, 2008, curated
by Danilo Eccher with Odile Decq.
Catalogue.
Fatto in Svezia, Röda Sten, Göteborg,
Sweden, June 8–August 5, 2007, curated by
Oscar Aschan.
Signs of the landscape (with Pietro Ripar-
belli and Edoardo Marraffa), installation/
concert, Palazzo delle Papesse Centro
d’arte contemporanea, Siena, Italy, August
23, 2007.
Invito a Palazzo 2007. VI edizione. Una
giornata da non perdere, i palazzi delle
banche aprono per voi, S. Marta Cloister,
Bergamo, Italy, October 6–14, 2007,
curated by Enrico De Pascale. Catalogue.
2008
3 Rooms: Cornelia Parker, Massimo Bartolini,
Dario Robleto, D’Amelio Terras, New York,
USA, January 5–February 9, 2008.
Big Ones, Magazzino, Rome, Italy, Febru-
ary 28–March 2, 2008, curated by Achille
Bonito Oliva.
Una stanza tutta per sé, Castello di Rivoli
458
Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli (TO),
Italy, April 2, 2008–January 18, 2009,
curated by Marcella Beccaria.
Leftovers, Mariano Pichler Collection,
Micamoca, Berlin, Germany, May 2–4, 2008,
curated by Luca Cerizza and Jennifer Chert.
15a Quadriennale d’arte di Roma, Palazzo
delle Esposizioni, Rome, Italy, June 19–
September 14, 2008. Catalogue. Mediterra-
neo 2008. Perna Foundation, Villa Rufolo,
Ravello (SA), Italy, June 27–August 24,
2008, curated by Manuela Annibali and
Perna Foundation. Catalogue.
Italics. Arte italiana fra tradizione e
rivoluzione 1968-2008, Palazzo Grassi,
Venice, Italy, September 27, 2008–March
22, 2009; Museum of Contemporary Art,
Chicago, USA, November 14, 2009–Febru-
ary 14, 2010, curated by Francesco Bonami.
Catalogue.
L’Angelo Sigillato, Museo di Icone Russe F.
Bigazzi, Peccioli (PI), Italy, October 4–No-
vember 16, 2008, curated by Rita Selvaggio.
Catalogue.
Dal corpo alla città. Cinque parole per il
video d’autore, Biblioteca civica, Verona,
Italy, October 5–26, 2008, curated by Mario
Gorni.
2009
Selections, D’Amelio Terras, New York,
USA, February 6–21, 2009.
Maison Hermès. From Cage to Cage,
Hermes Ginza, Tokyo, Japan, March 19–
May 19, 2009.
Colossal. Kunst, Fact, Fiktion, various
locations (Massimo Bartolini at the Schloss
Ippenburg, Bad Essen), Osnabrück district,
Germany, April 25, 2009–December 31,
2011, curated by Jan Hoet. Catalogue.
Fragile. Terres d’empathie, Musée d’Art
moderne de Saint-Etienne Métropole,
Saint-Etienne Métropole, France, May 16–
August 16, 2009; Palazzo Falconieri,
Hungary Academy, Rome, Italy, October
7–November 7, 2009; Daejeon Museum of
Art, Daejeon, South Korea, December 22,
2009–March 21, 2022, curated by Lóránd
12
13
Hegyi. Catalogue.
Loop Barcelona, Video Art Festival,
CaixaForum and various locations,
Barcelona, Spain, May 21–31, 2009.
Massimo Bartolini. Sun of Today (with the
Rova Saxophone Quartet), as part of
Novara Jazz, Guido Cantelli Conservatory,
Novara, Italy, May 29, 2009, curated by
Marco Tagliafierro.
Fare Mondi / Making Worlds, 53. Espo-
sizione Internazionale d’Arte. La Biennale di
Venezia, Venice, Italy, June 7–November
22, 2009, curated by Daniel Birnbaum.
Catalogue.
The Collectors, Denmark and Nordic
Pavilion, 53. Esposizione Internazionale
d’Arte. La Biennale di Venezia, Venice, Italy,
June 7–November 22, 2009, curated by
Elmgreen & Dragset. Catalogue.
Wintry, Magazzino, Rome, Italy, July 23–
September 17, 2009.
The Group Show, GAM Civica Galleria
d’Arte Moderna, Gallarate (VA), Italy,
October 3, 2009–January 31, 2010, curated
by Emma Zanella. Catalogue.
Twister, exhibition event of the creation of
site specific/ site related interventions for
the permanent collections of the museums
of the Reti Musei Lombardia per l’Arte
Contemporanea, various locations (venues
Massimo Bartolini at the GAM Civica
Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Gallarate, VA),
Lombardia, Italy, October 3, 2009–January
31, 2010. Catalogue.
Civica 1989-2009: celebration, institution,
critique, various locations (Massimo
Bartolini at the Fondazione Galleria Civica
di Trento), Trento, Italy, October 10,
2009–January 31, 2010, curated by Andrea
Viliani. Catalogue.
2010
Alla maniera d’oggi. Base a Firenze, various
locations (Massimo Bartolini at the
Galleria dell’Accademia), Florence, Italy,
February 3–April 11, 2010, curated by
Marco Bazzini. Catalogue.
Entre glace et neige. Processi ed energie della
natura, Centro Saint-Bénin, Aosta, Italy,
May 15–October 26, 2010, curated by Laura
Cherubini and Glorianda Cipolla. Catalogue.
Trasparenze. L’Arte per le Energie Rinnovabili,
MACRO Testaccio, Rome, Italy, July 2–Au-
gust 22, 2010; Museo Madre, Naples, Italy,
September 15–October 25, 2010, curated by
Laura Cherubini. Catalogue.
After the Volcano. A Summer Show Of Gallery
Artists, Frith Street Gallery, London, U.K.,
July 3–August 14, 2010.
Italian Genius Now. Casa dolce casa. Home
Sweet Home, Italian Pavilion, Expo 2010
Shanghai, China, July 8–22, 2010; Kaohsiung
Museum of Fine Arts, Kaohsiung, Taiwan,
September 18–November 14, 2010; Taichung
Creative and Cultural Park, Taichung,
Taiwan, December 3, 2010–February 7, 2011,
project for the Centro per l’arte contempora-
nea Luigi Pecci, Prato, curated by Marco
Bazzini. Catalogue.
Oltre il grande rettile. Finestre sull’arte contem-
poranea a Livorno, Museo Civico Giovanni
Fattori, Ex Granai di Villa Mimbelli, Livorno,
Italy, July 15–September 12, 2010, curated by
Stefano Pezzato. Catalogue.
Beyond Entropy: when Energy becomes
Form, side event of the 12. Mostra Inter-
nazionale di Architettura, La Biennale di
Venezia, Fondazione Cini, Venice, Italy,
August 26–September 19, 2010, curated by
Stefano Rabolli Pansera. Catalogue.
Annunciazioni, 4th edition of the review
L’evento immobile, Casa Masaccio and
Museo della Basilica di S. Maria delle
Grazie, San Giovanni Valdarno (AR), Italy,
October 2–November 7, 2010, curated by
Cristiana Collu, Saretto Cincinelli, and
Alessandro Sarri.
Terre Vulnerabili, a growing exhibition,
Hangar Bicocca, Milan, Italy, October 22,
2010–July 17, 2011, curated by Chiara
Bertola with Andrea Lissoni. Catalogue.
Sphères 2010. 7 énergies autour d’une
nouvelle expérience d’exposition, 3rd
edition, Galleria Continua / Le Moulin,
Boissy-le-Châtel, France, October 24,
2010–May 1, 2011.
Premio Terna 03. (+150) Visione: Origine e
Potere. Energia attraverso le Generazioni,
Adriano Temple, Rome, Italy,
December 21, 2010–January 14, 2011,
curated by Cristiana Collu and Gianluca
Marziani. Catalogue.
2011
Spaceship Earth, Centre of Contemporary
Art Znaki Czasu, Toruń, Poland, March
4–May 22, 2011, curated by Dobrila
Denegri. Catalogue.
Arte italiana all’ascolto, NCCA National
Centre for Contemporary Arts, Moscow,
Russia, in collaboration with RAM
radioartemobile, May 17–June 5, 2011 (sub-
sequently at the Todi Festival 2014, Palazzo
del Vignola, Todi, Italy, August 22–31,
2014), curated by Anna Cestelli Guidi.
TRA. Edge of Becoming, Palazzo Fortuny,
Venice, Italy, June 4–November 27, 2011,
curated by Daniela Ferretti, Rosa Marti-
nez, Francesco Poli, and Axel Vervoordt.
Catalogue.
HOME/LESS, Vistamare, Pescara, Italia,
June 10–October 30, 2011, curated by
Olimpia Eberspacher and Ludovico
Pratesi.
Sotto quale cielo?, Palazzo Riso, Museo
d’Arte Contemporanea of Sicily, Palermo,
Italy, June 11, 2011–January 8, 2012,
curated by Daniela Bigi. Final exhibition of
459
artist residency program in Sicily Etico_F. 5
movimenti sul paesaggio. Catalogue of the
residency program.
Silenzio: Zero Assoluto, performative event,
Spazio Concept, Milan, Italy, June 16, 2011,
curated by Pietro Riparbelli.
Yokohama Triennale 2011. OUR MAGIC
HOUR. How Much of the World Can We
Know?, Yokohama Museum of Art, NYK
Waterfront Warehouse and various
locations, Yokohama, Japan, August
6–November 6, 2011, curated by Miki
Akiko. Catalogue.
OH!, Galerie Patrick Seguin, Paris, France,
October 20–November 26, 2011, project by
Massimo De Carlo gallery. Artisti per
Epicentro, Museo Epicentro, Barcellona
Pozzo di Gotto (ME), Italy, December
11–30, 2011, curated by Nino Abbate.
ZIG-ZAG. Opere della collezione comunale
d’arte contemporanea, Casa Masaccio and
various locations, San Giovanni Valdarno
(AR), Italy, December 17, 2011–January 22,
2012.
2012
Asche und Gold. Eine Weltenreise / Ashes
and gold. A World’s Journey, Marta Herford
Museum, Herford, Germany, January
28–April 22, 2012; Museum Schloss
Moyland, Bedburg-Hau (Düsseldorf),
Germany, May 13–August 19, 2012, curated
by Michael Kroeger and Anne Schloen.
Catalogue.
Take The Leap, Peep-Hole, Milan, Italy,
February 29–March 24, 2012.
Forte Piano: Le forme del suono, Auditori-
um Parco della Musica, Rome, Italy, May
2–July 10, and July 19–October 31, 2012,
curated by Achille Bonito Oliva.
TRACK, a contemporary city conversation,
various locations (Massimo Bartolini at the
St Peter’s Abbey vineyard), Ghent,
Belgium, May 12–December 16, 2012,
organized by S.M.A.K., the Museum of
Contemporary Art, curated by Philippe
Van Cauteren and Mirjam Varadinis.
Catalogue.
dOCUMENTA(13), Museum Fridericianum,
Karlsaue and various locations (Massimo
Bartolini at the Karlsaue Park), Kassel,
Germany, June 9–September 16, 2012,
curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev.
Catalogue.
Neon. La materia luminosa dell’arte,
MACRO Museo d’Arte Contemporanea
Roma, Rome, Italy, June 21–November 4,
2012, curated by Bartolomeo Pietromarchi
and David Rosenberg. Catalogue.
Paper, Galerie contemporaine, MAMAC
Musée d’Art moderne et d’Art contempo-
rain, Nice, France, June 30–September 30,
2012, curated by Gilbert Perlein. Catalogue.
Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale, various

14
15
locations (Massimo Bartolini at Echi-
go-Tsumari Satoyama Museum of Contem-
porary Art, KINARE, Tōkamachi), region
of Echigo- Tsumari, Niigata, Japan, July
29–September 19, 2012, curated by Fram
Kita- gawa. Catalogue.
Palermo Felicissima, City Pavilion Project,
9th Shanghai Biennale, Reactivation,
Museum of Contemporary Art of Shang-
hai, China, October 2–December 31, 2012,
curated by Laura Barreca and Davide
Quadrio. Catalogue.
One on One, KW Institute for Contempo-
rary Art, Berlin, Germany, November 18,
2012–January 20, 2013, curated by Susanne
Pfeffer. Catalogue.
Punti di Vista. Identità Conflitti Mutamenti,
Arnone Palace, Galleria Nazionale of
Cosenza, Italy, December 14, 2012–Fe-
bruary 14, 2013, curated by Fabio De
Chirico and Ludovico Pratesi. Catalogue.
Encore!, Magazzino, Rome, Italy, Decem-
ber 18, 2012–January 31, 2013.
2013
The Bronze Age, Massimo De Carlo, Milan,
Italy, January 30–March 15, 2013.
Oltre il giardino. L’idea del giardino nell’arte
contemporanea. Un omaggio a Pietro
Porcinai (1910-1986), Fabroni Palace and “Il
Carbonile” Garden, Pistoia, Italy, March
22–June 2, 2013, curated by Ludovico
Pratesi. Catalogue.
Oltremare, Vistamare, Pescara, Italy, March
24–July 20, 2013, curated by Luca Cerizza.
vice versa, Italian Pavilion, 55. Biennale di
Venezia, Venice, Italy, June 1–November
24, 2013, curated by Bartolomeo Pietro-
marchi. Catalogue.
Artisti nello spazio. Da Lucio Fontana a oggi:
gli ambienti nell’arte italiana, Monumental
Complex of San Giovanni, Catanzaro, Italy,
October 20–December 29, 2013, curated by
Marco Meneguzzo, Bruno Di Marino, and
Andrea La Porta. Catalogue.
Percorsi Nel Contemporaneo, MACRO Museo
d’Arte Contemporanea Roma, Rome, Italy,
December 20, 2013–May 4, 2014.
2014
BOOSTER. Art Sound Machine, Marta
Herford Museum (Gehry Galleries),
Herford, Germany, February 15–June 1,
2014, curated by Friederike Fast and Nik
Nowak. Catalogue.
Numerar, nombrar, pensar (El método
científico) / Number, Name, Think (The
Scientific Method), Carlos Garaicoa Open
Studio 9.0, Madrid, Spain, February 21–28,
2014.
Design Dialogues, 11 Columbia Gallery,
Munich, March 21–May 18, 2014, project
by the Gallery O. (Rome).
Perduti nel paesaggio / Lost in Landscape,
MART, Modern and Contemporary Art
Museum of Trento and Rovereto, Rovereto,
Italy, April 5–August 31, 2014, curated by
Gerardo Mosquera. Catalogue.
La disparition des lucioles. Exposition à la
prison Sainte-Anne, Avignon, Prison Sainte-
Anne, Avignon, France, May 18–November
25, 2014, curated by Eric Mézil. Catalogue.
New Wrinkles (after Judd) 1959-2010,
Massimo De Carlo, London, U.K., Septem-
ber 4–October 10, 2014.
Histoires sans sorcière, La Maison de La
vache qui rit, Lons-le-Saunier, France,
September 22, 2014–March 8, 2015,
realized by Lab’Bel, curated by Gilles
Baume, Laurent Fiévet, and Silvia Guerra.
Ha visto i colori divini del lago di Costanza?,
Spazio Thetis, Venice, Italy, September
24–October 24, 2014, curated by Caterina
Benvegnù. Catalogue.
Arte Italiana oggi. Opere da una collezione
privata, Pescheria Foundation-Visual Art
Center, Pesaro, Italy, October 12–Novem-
460
ber 23, 2014, curated by Ludovico Pratesi.
Silver, Frith Street Gallery, London, U.K.,
October 17–December 17, 2014.
2015
Marni Roof Market, Pier 4, Hong Kong,
March 2015.
Proportio, Fortuny Palace, Venice, Italy,
May 9–November 22, 2015, curated by Axel
Vervoordt and Daniela Ferretti. Catalogue.
I’ll Be There Forever. The Sense of Classic,
Cusani Palace, Milan, Italy, May 15–June 4,
2015, curated by Cloe Piccoli. Catalogue.
Summer Reading, Peter Freeman, Inc.,
New York, USA, June 4–July 24, 2015,
curated by Richard Wentworth.
LIBERI TUTTI! Arte e società in Italia
1989-2001, MEF Museo Ettore Fico, Turin,
Italy, July 9–October 18, 2015, curated by
Luca Beatrice, Andrea Busto, and Cristiana
Perrella. Catalogue.
Padella!!!, Mialn Triennale, Milan, Italy,
August 27–September 6, 2015, curated by
Aldo Colonetti and Alberto Capatti;
section Padelle d’Artista curated by
Ludovico Pratesi.
Ripensare il medium. Il fantasma del
disegno, Casa Masaccio and various
locations, San Giovanni Valdarno (AR),
Italy, October 17–November 15, 2015,
curated by Saretto Cincinelli and Cristiana
Collu. Catalogue.
Ennesima. Qui, ora e altrove: site-specific e
dintorni, Milan Triennale, Milan, Italy,
November 26, 2015–March 6, 2016, curated
by Vincenzo de Bellis. Catalogue.
Taking a Line for a Walk, The McManus:
Dundee’s Art Gallery and Museum, Dundee,
U.K., December 10, 2015–April 17, 2016.
2016
The Pagad, Massimo De Carlo, Milan, Italy,
January 21–March 26, 2016, curated by
Rita Selvaggio.
Anni 80/90. Oggetti, processi, relazioni:
l’incantesimo quotidiano, Gallery of Art
Temple University, Rome, Italy,
January 26–February 12, 2016, curated by
Alberto Dambruoso and Helga Marsala.
Tell It Slant, Frith Street Gallery, London,
U.K., February 12–May 12, 2016.
Emscherkunst, various locations (Massimo
Bartolini at the Hof Emscher-Auen,
Castrop-Rauxel), Ruhr region, Germany,
June 4–September 18, 2016, curated by
Florian Matzner. Catalogue.
Che il vero possa confutare il falso. AGIVE-
RONA Collection, Santa Maria della Scala,
Civic Museum and Academy of Physiocrit-
ics, Siena, Italy, June 25–October 16, 2016,
curated by Luigi Fassi and Alberto
Salvadori. Catalogue.
Full Moon, Museum Voorlinden, Wasse-
naar, Netherlands, September 11, 2016–
March 26, 2017, curated by Suzanne Swarts.
There is no place like home, river landing at
Marconi bridge, Lungotevere San Paolo 48,
Rome, Italy, September 16–30, 2016
(Massimo Bartolini, performance with
Pietro Riparbelli, September 27, 2016).
The Independent. BASE, MAXXI – Museo
nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Rome,
Italy, September 30–December 11, 2016,
curated by Giulia Ferracci and Elena Motisi.
I Would Prefer Not To/Preferirei di no, as
part of the 16a Quadriennale d’Arte. Altri
tempi, altri miti, Palazzo delle Esposizioni,
Rome, Italy, October 16, 2016–January 8,
2017, section curated by Simone Ciglia and
Luigia Lonardelli. Catalogue.
Start up. Quattro Agenzie per la produzione
del possibile, Baruchello Foundation, Rome,
Italy, November 9, 2016–April 28, 2017,
curated by Maria Alicata and Carla Subrizi.
2017
Habit-Co-Habit, Pune Biennale 2017,
various locations (Massimo Bartolini at
Phule Museum and Sambhaji Park), Pune,
India, January 5–29, 2017, curated by Luca
Cerizza and Zasha Colah.
The City, My Studio / The City, My Life.
Kathmandu Triennale 2017, various
locations, Kathmandu and Kathmandu
Valley, Nepal, March 24–April 9, 2017,
curated by Philippe Van Cauteren.
Catalogue.
The Meantime, Museum Voorlinden,
Wassenaar, Netherlands, April 1–Decem-
ber 3, 2017. Catalogue.
And What, for Example, Am I Now Seeing?
(Autodisporsi), Galleria Continua, in
collaboration with Gropello Collection, Le
Moulin, Boissy-le-Châtel, France, April
30–September 30, 2017.
Meteorite in Giardino 10. Ingresso libero su
Marte, ALTEC Aerospace Logistics Technol-
ogy Engineering Company, Turin, Italy,
June 20, 2017, curated by Fondazione Merz.
Installation Art. Walk-in and expansive
works from the Museion Collection,
Museion, Bolzano, Italy, October 7,
2017–September 23, 2018, curated by
Letizia Ragaglia. Catalogue.
2018
Walking On The Fade Out Lines, Rockbund
Art Museum, Shanghai, China, March
24–May 27, 2018, curated by Larys Frogier
and Hsieh Feng-Rong.
Raymond, side event of Manifesta 12,
Grand Hotel et des Palmes, Palermo, Italy,
May–November, 2018, curated by Luca
Trevisani with Olaf Nicolai.
No Man’s Library / La Biblioteca di Tutti, Ex
Biblioteca Universitaria, Sassari, Italy,
May 11–June 30, 2018, curated by Zeryn-
thia. Catalogue.
TBT (To Be Titled, Turn Back Time),
Magazzino, Rome, Italy, May 11–June 15
and June 21–July 28, 2018, curated by
Gabriele Gaspari.
Second Yinchuan Biennale. Starting from the
Desert. Ecologies on the Edge, MOCA
Museum of Contemporary Art Yinchuan,
Yinchuan, China, June 9–September 19,
2018, curated by Marco Scotini. Catalogue.
Summer Breeze: An Ensemble of Prints,
Frith Street Gallery, London, U.K., June
29–August 3, 2018.
Il museo immaginato. Storie da trent’anni di
Centro Pecci, Centro per l’arte contempora-
nea Luigi Pecci, Prato, Italy, September 22,
2018–May 7, 2019, curated by Cristiana
Perrella.
Labyrinth, opere dalla collezione del Centre
of Contemporary Art di Toruń, Kulturpark
Košice, Slovakia, November 15–
December 7, 2018, curated by Krzysztof
Białowicz.
2019
The Collection (I). Highlights for a Future,
S.M.A.K., Ghent, Belgium, March 16–Sep-
tember 29, 2019.
Notti magiche. Arte italiana anni novanta
dalla collezione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo,
Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo,
Turin, Italy, June 5–September 29, 2019,
461
curated by Giorgina Bertolino and Irene
Calderoni.
Mare blu, MUVE Contemporaneo - Fonda-
zione Musei Civici Venezia, Forte Mar-
ghera, Mestre (VE), Italy, June 15–
October 13, 2019, curated by Gabriella Belli
and Alberto Salvadori.
2020
Extra Flags, Centro per l’arte contempora-
nea Luigi Pecci, Prato, Italy, May 21–Octo-
ber 11, 2020.
Come prima, meglio di prima, Massimo De
Carlo, Milan, Italy, September 9–October
28, 2020.
Bangkok Art Biennale 2020. Escape Routes,
various locations (Massimo Bartolini at
Benchasiri Park, Bangkok, Thailand),
October 12, 2020–January 31, 2021, curated
by Dow Wasiksiri, Wutigorn Kongka, Ong
Puay Khim, Kitti Sangkaew, and Sun
Wenjie. Catalogue.
2021
A Summer Show: Surface and Space, Frith
Street Gallery, London, U.K., July 9–August
7, 2021.
Villa Chiuminatto, Turin, Italy, November
3–7, 2021, project by Massimo De Carlo
gallery.
Vita nova: arte in Italia alla luce del nuovo
millennio, Villa d’Este, Tivoli (RM), Italy,
December 17, 2021–February 27, 2022, and
March 5–June 5, 2022, curated by Andrea
Bruciati.
2022
CRAZY. La follia nell’arte contemporanea,
DART Chiostro del Bramante, Rome, Italy,
February 19, 2022–January 8, 2023, curated
by Danilo Eccher.
Le Futur derrière nous, Villa Arson, Nice,
France, May 22–August 28, 2022, curated
by Marco Scotini.
Setouchi Triennale 2022, Autumn, various
locations, Setouchi region, Japan, Septem-
ber 29–November 6, 2022, curated by Fram
Kitagawa.
16
17
01 Massimo Bartolini, inspection for the
exhibition Zwei Inseln, Rügen, Germany, 2013.
02 Elena Dragone performs Hagoromo at the
exhibition Myslivska, Montecatini Terme (PT),
2005.
03 Don Valentino Ricciardi, Ficarra, Sicily, 2013.
04 Gathering around Conveyance, Casa
Olnick Spanu, Garrison, NY, USA, 2014.
05 Massimo Bartolini and Jessie Porcher in
Black Circle Square, Castrop-Rauxel, Germany,
2016.
06-07 Attilio Maranzano and Ela Bialkowska
photograph Flowerbeds, Cecina, Tuscany, 2000.
08 Massimo Bartolini looks at the inlays of the
Shinano River on the tables of A Circle in a
Square, Tokamachi, Japan, 2012.
09 Chandelier in Massimo Bartolini’s studio at
the Penn University di Philadelphia, Pennsylva-
nia, USA.
10 Edoardo Marraffa in duet with Otra Fiesta
at S.M.A.K., Ghent, Belgium, 2013.
11 Massimo Bartolini installs Windowsill in the
Orgia forest, Siena, 2001.
12 Massimo Bartolini and Marco Bartalucci
install Shaking Ceiling at the Museo Boijmans
Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Netherlands, 2004.
462
13 Matteo Frittelli shoots the video Basement
at the Galleria Massimo De Carlo, Milan, 2011.
14 Construction of Sala para Mutacoes
Geograficas: Fronteira Rio–Sao Paulo, 1969,
Museo Serralves, Porto, Portugal, 2007.
15 Massimo Bartolini at Palazzo Abatellis
between Eleonora d’Aragona and L’Annunciata,
Palermo, Sicily, 2018.
16 Valserena Abbey, venue of the exhibition On
Identikit at the CSAC of Parma, Parma, 2020.
17 Massimo Bartolini in the chapel that hosts
Lo Spirato by Luciano Fabro for the exhibition
On Identikit, Parma, 2020.
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
MONOGRAPHS AND CATALOGUES
1993
Massimo Bartolini, catalogue of the solo
exhibition (Milan, Senza titolo & Artra),
Florence: v.i.p.e.r.a. edizioni, 1993. Texts
by Stefano Bongini and Federico Tan-
zi-Mira.
1995
Francesco Bonami, Emanuela De Cecco,
Helena Kontova, Gabriele Perretta,
Sergio Risaliti, and Marco Senaldi (eds.).
Aperto Italia ’95. Catalogue of the
exhibition (Trevi, Trevi Flash Art
Museum, Palazzo Lucarini). Milan:
Giancarlo Politi Editore, 1995.
Francesco Bonami (ed.) Campo. Catalogue
of the exhibition (Venice, Corderie
dell’Arsenale; Sant’Antonino di Susa,
Elcit-Radiomarelli; Malmö, Konstmuseum)
Turin: Umberto Allemandi & C., 1995.
Rita Selvaggio and Stephen Foster (eds.)
Moby Dick. Catalogue of the exhibition
(Pisa, Arsenali Medicei; Southampton,
John Hansard Gallery). Pisa: Bandecchi &
Vivaldi, 1995.
Angela Vettese. “Esiste una nuova arte
milanese?,” Anni ’90. Arte a Milano,
Rolando Bellini (ed.), published on the
occasion of the exhibitions (Milan,
various locations). Milan: Abitare
Segesta, 1995: 64–69.
1996
Francesco Bonami (ed.) Echoes: Contem-
porary Art at the Age of Endless Conclu-
sions. Milan: Monacelli Press, 1996.
Orario continuato. Catalogue of the
exhibition curated by Alessandra Galasso,
Municipality of Peccioli, 1996.
Galleria Raucci/Santamaria and Massimo
Sgroi (eds.) More than Real, catalogue of
the exhibition (Royal Palace of Caserta).
Turin: Progetto Impresa Editore, 1996.
Alice Rubbini (ed.) Romantico Contempora-
neo. Catalogue of the exhibition (Ben-
tivoglio Castle). Bari: Dedalo Libri, 1996.
Federico Tanzi Mira. “Senza Uscita,”
Niente di personale. Catalogue of the
project (Milan, Openspace) curated by
Roberto Pinto. Milan: Openspace, 1996.
Ultime Generazioni. XII Esposizione
Nazionale Quadriennale d’Arte di Roma.
Catalogue of the exhibition (Rome,
Palazzo delle Esposizioni). Rome: De
Luca Editori d’Arte, 1996.
Giorgio Verzotti. Massimo Bartolini –
Grazia Toderi, published on the occasion
of the exhibition (Milan, Artra). Milan:
Artra, 1996.
1997
David Barrett. “High-Rise,” catalogue of
the exhibition (London, 110 Euston Road),
in Space Explorations. London: Space
Exploration, 1997: 73–98.
Gabriella Belli. “Massimo Bartolini,”
Versus 2000, catalogue of the exhibition
(Bolzano, Museion) curated by Gert
Ammann, Gabriella Belli, Dieter Bogner,
Marisa Vescovo, and Peter Weiermeier.
Bolzano: Museion, 1997.
Francesco Bonami (ed.) Cosa sono le
nuvole?. Catalogue of the exhibition
(Guarene d’Alba, Re Rebaudengo Palace).
Turin: Neos, 1997.
Francesco Bonami (ed.) Truce: Echoes of
Art in an Age of Endless Conclusions.
Catalogue of the exhibition (Santa Fe, SITE
Santa Fe). Minneapolis: Janine Sieja, 1997.
Laura Cherubini. “L’Aure d’Abruzzo,”
Fuori Uso ’96, Sotto pioggia e sotto vento.
Catalogue of the exhibition (Pescara, Ex
deposito Fea). Pescara: Umberto Sala
Editore, 1997.
Nicola Gardini. D’erbe e d’animali, photo
by Massimo Bartolini. Turin: en plein
edizioni, 1997.
Cristiana Perrella (ed.) Critica in opera 16.
Interno. Catalogue of the exhibition
(Castel San Pietro Terme, Saletta
Comunale d’Esposizione). Castel San
Pietro Terme, 1997.
463
1998
Curatorial Training Programme (ed.).
Seamless. Catalogue of the exhibition
(Amsterdam, de Appel). Amsterdam: de
Appel, 1998. Text by Luca Cerizza.
Giacinto Di Pietrantonio (ed.) Mostrato.
Fuori Uso ’98. Catalogue of the exhibition
(Pescara, Mercati ortofrutticoli). Pescara:
Edizioni Arte Nova, 1998.
Daniele Pittèri and Christoph Radl (eds.)
Estetiche cannibali: un’altra sceneggiatura.
Catalogue of the exhibition (Milan,
Triennale Palace). Milan: Liguori Editore,
1998.
Rita Selvaggio (ed.) Massimo Bartolini.
Catalogue of the solo exhibition (San
Giovanni Valdarno, Casa Masaccio). Pisa:
Bandecchi & Vivaldi, 1998. Texts by
Francesco Bonami, Cesar Calvo, Joseph
Conrad, and Laura Cherubini.
1999
Laurence Bossé, Carolyn Christov-Bakar-
giev and Hans Ulrich Obrist (eds.). La
mémoire-99. Catalogue of the exhibition
(Rome, Académie de France, Villa Medici).
Rome: Académie de France, 1999.
Ludovico Pratesi and Paola Magni (eds.)
Effetto notte: percorsi d’arte e di luce nella
Napoli Sotterranea. Catalogue of the
exhibition (Naples, Napoli Sotterranea).
Naples: Castelvecchi Arte, 1999.
Giorgio Verzotti. “Massimo Bartolini,”
dAPERTutto, 48a Esposizione Internazion-
ale d’Arte, La Biennale di Venezia.
Catalogue of the exhibition (Venice, La
Biennale di Venezia) curated by Harald
Szeemann. Venice: Marsilio, 1999:
166–169.
2000
24 x 36. massimo bartolini fotografie |
photos. Noale (VE): Teseco, 2000. Text by
Veit Loers.
Achille Bonito Oliva. Italia 2000. Arte e
sistema dell’arte. Milan: Giampaolo Prearo
Editore, 2000.
Giorgio Bonomi. “Massimo Bartolini,”
Werkstatt Europa. Catalogue of the
exhibition (Rottweil, Forum Kunst Rottweil).
Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2000: 54–69.
Laura Cherubini. “Album di famiglia,”
espresso, arte oggi in italia. Project by Sergio
Risaliti. Florence: Electa, 2000: 325–343.
Laura Cherubini. “La camera verde, il tema
del giardino in alcuni artisti italiani,”La
Ville, le Jardin, la Mémoire. Catalogue of
the exhibition (Rome, Académie de France,
Villa Medici) curated by Laurence Bossé,
Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, and Hans
Ulrich Obrist. Rome: Académie de France,
2000: 14–17.
Laura Cherubini. “Una geometria roman-
zata,” Stanze e Segreti. Catalogue of the
exhibition (Milan, Rotonda della Besana)
curated by Achille Bonito Oliva. Milan:
Skira, 2000: 54–69.
Laura Cherubini. “Massimo Bartolini,”
P.S.1 Italian Bureau selection 1998-2000.
Catalogue of the P.S.1 Studio Program
1998–2000 curated by Giovanna Baciocco.
Rome: Castelvecchi Arte, 2000: 6–29.
Bruno Corà, Raffaele Gavarro, and Marco
Meneguzzo (eds.) Futurama. Arte in Italia.
Frequenze e segnali dalle ultime generazio-
ni. Catalogue of the exhibition (Prato,
Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi
Pecci). Prato: Gli Ori, 2000.
Rafael Doctor Roncero and Francesco
Bonami (eds.) Identidades futuras. Reflejos de
una colección. Catalogue of the exhibition
(Madrid, Sala de Exposiciones del Canal de
Isabel II), Fondazione Sandretto Re
Rebaudengo per l’arte. Madrid: Comundi-
dad de Madrid, Consejería de Cultura, 2000.
Arturo Carlo Quintavalle. Carte Italiane:
opere su carta dal 1950 al 2000 della
Collezione “CartaSi.” Milan: Skira, 2000.
2001
Massimo Bartolini. “Massimo Bartolini,”
Squatters. Catalogue of the exhibition
(Porto, Museu Serralves; Rotterdam, Witte
de With) curated by Bartomeu Marí,
Miguel von Hafe Pérez, Vicente Todolí,
and João Fernandes. Porto: Fundação De
Serralves, 2001: 102–103.
Laura Cherubini. “Massimo Bartolini,” Il
Premio per la giovane arte italiana del
Centro Nazionale per le Arti Contempora-
nee: Migrazioni e Multiculturalità. Cata-
logue of the exhibition (Rome, Centro
Nazionale per le Arti Contemporanee) and
of the prize curated by di Laura Cherubini,
Paolo Colombo, and Anna Mattirolo.
Rome: Allemandi, 2001: 22–23.
Giovanni Iovane and Marion Ackermann
(eds.) Leggerezza. Ein Blick auf zeit-genössis-
che Kunst in Italien / Una idea dell’arte
italiana contemporanea. Catalogue of the
exhibition (Munich, Städtische Galerie im
Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau). Munich:
Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, 2001.
Cloe Piccoli. “Intervista a Massimo
Bartolini,” The Art is a Fifth element.
Catalogue of the exhibition (Venice,
Fondazione Querini Stampalia) curated by
Chiara Bertola. Venice: Charta, 2001: 28–31.
Progetto Ansitz Löwengang. Catalogue of
the project realized for the Tenuta Löwen-
gang (Magrè, Bolzano), 2001.
Deiter Roelstraete (ed.) Sonsbeek 9: Locus
Focus. Catalogue of the exhibition (Arnhem,
various locations) curated by Jan Hoet.
Arnhem: Stichting Sonsbeek, 2001.
Luigi Settembrini (ed.) 1a Bienal de Valencia.
Comunicación entre las artes. Catalogue of
the exhibitions (Valencia, Carmen convent,
and various locations). Valencia: Charta
– Generalitat Valenciana, 2001.
Pier Luigi Tazzi and Fabio Cavallucci.
“Refreshing_” 49. Esposizione Internazionale
d’Arte. Platea dell’umanità. La Biennale di
Venezia. Catalogue of the exhibition
(Venice, La Biennale di Venezia) curated by
Harald Szeemann. Florence: Electa, 2001:
306–307.
2002
Massimo Bartolini. Light as a Bird not as a
Feather. Artist book. Paris: Onestar Press,
2002. Texts by Roger Pinnington, Leone
Fronzoni, Massimo Bartolini, Riccardo
Rossi, and Laura Cherubini.
Andrea Bruciati (ed.) Ouverture... Arte
dall’Italia. Catalogue of the exhibition
(Monfalcone, Municipal Gallery of
Contemporary Art). Trieste: Stella Arti
Grafiche, 2002.
Bruno Corà (ed.) Collezione permanente.
Nuove acquisizioni. Catalogue of the
exhibition (Prato, Centro per l’arte contem-
poranea Luigi Pecci). Prato: Gli Ori, 2002.
Tanja Elstgeest. “Jewel Casket,” Squatters.
Catalogue of the exhibition (Porto, Museu
Serralves; Rotterdam, Witte de With) curated
by Bartomeu Marí, Miguel von Hafe Pérez,
Vicente Todolí, and João Fernandes.
Rotterdam: Witte de With, 2002: 14–17.
Angela Madesani. Le icone fluttuanti. Storia
del cinema d’artista e della videoarte in
Italia. Milan: B. Mondadori, 2002: 126, 131.
Nuria Enguita Mayo, Iara Boubnova, and
Stéphanie Moisdon Trembley (eds.)
Manifesta 4. European Biennial of Contem-
porary Art. Catalogue of the exhibition
(Frankfurt am Main, various locations),
Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2002.
Cloe Piccoli. I visitatori entrano uno alla
volta. Published on the occasion of the
exhibition Massimo Bartolini. Altre voci,
altre stanze/ Other Voices, Other Rooms
(Rome, Magazzino d’Arte Moderna).
Rome: Magazzino d’Arte Moderna, 2002.
Ludovico Pratesi and Costantino D’Orazio
(eds.) Verso il Futuro. Identità nell’arte
464
italiana 1990-2002. Catalogue of the
exhibition (Rome, Museo del Corso). Rome:
Charta, 2002.
Ambra Stazzone (ed.) Paradiso Perduto.
Catalogue of the exhibition (Rimini,
Arengo Palace). Bologna: Tipografia
moderna, 2002.
2003
Achille Bonito Oliva and Sergio Risaliti
(eds.) Belvedere dell’arte, orizzonti. Cata-
logue of the exhibition (Florence, Forte
Belvedere). Florence: Skira, 2003.
Laura Cherubini (ed.) Quaderno. Massimo
Bartolini. Artist book. Rome: Magazzino
d’Arte Moderna, 2003.
Saretto Cincinelli. “Ospitare la catastrofe,”
Catastrofi minime. Catalogue of the
exhibition (Nuoro, MAN_Museo d’Arte of
Province of Nuoro) curated by Fernando
Castro, Saretto Cincinelli, and Cristiana
Collu. Nuoro: MAN, 2003.
Luigi Di Corato. “Returning Home,” The
Official Point of View. Giulia Ber Tacchini,
Paolo Calcagni, Lucio LuZo Lazzara, and
Riccardo Rinetti. Milan: Enorme Film
Arts, 2003.
Veit Loers and Massimo Bartolini (eds.)
Realizer. Published on the occasion of
Massimo Bartolini’s solo exhibition at
Abteiberg Mönchengladbach curated by
Veit Loers. Pisa: Bandecchi & Vivaldi, 2003.
Texts by Veit Loers, Giorgio Verzotti, and
Hans Ulrich Obrist.
“Massimo Bartolini - Tavarnelle,” interview
in Tusciaelecta: arte contemporanea nel
Chianti 2002/2003. Catalogue of the
exhibition (Tuscany, various locations)
curated by Arabella Natalini. Florence:
Maschietto Editore, 2003: 32–37.
Stefano Pezzato and Massimo Bartolini
(eds.) Massimo Bartolini. Desert Dance.
Published on the occasion of the site-specif-
ic realization of Desert Dance (Prato, Centro
per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci).
Prato: C.Arte Prato, 2003.
Sergio Risaliti (ed.) Working-Insider.
Catalogue of the exhibition (Firenze,
Stazione Leopolda Spazio Alcatraz).
Florence: M & M Maschietto Editore, 2003.
Marco Scotini (ed.) Cantiere Peccioli: arte
pubblica e progetto urbano. Catalogue of the
public art projects realized at Peccioli, Italy.
Prato: Gli Ori, 2003.
Marco Scotini (ed.) Rapporto confidenziale.
Peccioli - Arte pubblica - Progetto urbano.
Catalogue of the public art projects realized
at Peccioli, Italy. Prato: Gli Ori, 2003.
Pier Luigi Tazzi (ed.) Spread in Prato 2003.
Catalogue of the exhibition (Prato, various
locations), Prato Municipality, Archivio
Fotografico Toscano. Prato: Dryphoto arte
contemporanea, 2003.
William S. Wilson. “Convogliamento,” I
Moderni / The Moderns. Catalogue of the
exhibition (Rivoli, Castello di Rivoli Museo
d’Arte Contemporanea) curated by Carolyn
Christov-Bakargiev. Milan: Skira, 2003:
59–67.
2004
a.titolo (ed.) Nuovi Committenti. Torino
Mirafiori Nord. Turin: Luca Sossella
Editore, 2004.
Achille Bonito Oliva and James Putnam
(ed.) Arte all’Arte 9. Arte Architettura
Paesaggio. La forma delle nuvole. Catalogue
of the exhibition (Tuscany, various
locations). Prato: Gli Ori, 2004.
Jacopo Crivelli Visconti. “Una nota molto
breve sul testo di César Calvo (o sul lavoro
di Massimo Bartolini),” Território livre. 26a
Bienal de São Paulo, artistas convidados.
Catalogue of the exhibition (San Paolo,
Pavilhão Ciccillo Matarazzo) curated by
Alfons Hug. São Paulo: Fundaçao Bienal de
São Paulo, 2004: 62–65.
Miguel von Hafe Pérez and David G.
Torres (eds.) No principio era a viaxe / In the
beginning there was the journey. 28 Bienal
de arte de Pontevedra. Catalogue of the
exhibition (Pontevedra, Bienal de Ponteve-
dra). Pontevedra: Deputación Provincial de
Pontevedra, 2004.
William S. Wilson. “Massimo Bartolini:
coinvolgere i partecipanti-osservatori,”
Spazi Atti/Fitting Spaces. 7 artisti italiani
alle prese con la trasformazione dei luoghi.
Catalogue of the exhibition (Milan, PAC
Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea) curated
by Jean-Hubert Martin and Roberto Pinto.
Milan: 5 Continents Editions, 2004: 48–73.
2005
Francesco Bonami (ed.) BIDIBIDO- BIDI-
BOO. Works from collezione Sandretto Re
Rebaudengo. Milan: Skira, 2005.
Saretto Cincinelli and Alberto Mugnaini
(eds.) BYO. Bring Your Own. Catalogue of the
exhibition (Nuoro, MAN_Museo d’Arte of
the Province of Nuoro). Nuoro: MAN, 2005.
Fuori Tema/Italian Feeling. XIV Quadrien-
nale di Roma. Catalogue of the exhibition
(Rome, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moder-
na). Florence: Electa, 2005.
Lóránd Hegyi (ed.) Domicile: privé/ public.
Catalogue of the exhibition (Saint-Etienne
Métropole, Musée d’Art moderne). Paris:
Somogy éditions d’art, 2005.
Massimo Bartolini. Catalogue of the solo
exhibition (Turin, GAM - Galleria d’Arte
Moderna e Contemporanea) curated by
Laura Cherubini. Turin: hopefulmonster,
2005. Texts by Laura Cherubini, João
Fernandes, and Joseph Rykwert.
Marco Meneguzzo and Arnaldo Pomodoro
(ed.) La scultura italiana del XX secolo.
Catalogue of the exhibition (Milan,
Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro). Milan:
Skira, 2005.
“NowHere Europe,” 51. esposizione
internazionale d’arte. La Biennale di
Venezia, vol. Partecipazioni nazionali.
Eventi nell’ambito. Catalogue of the
exhibition (Venice, La Biennale di Vene-
zia). Venice: Marsilio, 2005: 188–189.
Bartolomeo Pietromarchi (ed.) Il luogo
(non) comune. Arte, spazio pubblico ed
estetica urbana in Europa, published on the
occasion of the exhibition NowHere Europe
(Venice, Scientific Laboratory of the
Special Superintendence for the Venetian
Museum Complex at the Misericordia).
Venice: Actar, 2005: 90.
Flavio Piras (ed.) Art in cooking 3. Como:
Zero Design, 2005.
Letizia Ragaglia (ed.) Light Lab. Cortocircuiti
quotidiani. Catalogue of the exhibition
(Bolzano, Museion). Bolzano: Museion, 2005.
Paul Schimmel (ed.) Ecstasy: In and About
Altered States. Catalogue of the exhibition
(Los Angeles, MOCA Museum of Contem-
porary Art). Los Angeles: MOCA and Mit
Press, 2005.
Sunek/Thrust. 26. Graficni bienale Ljublja-
na/Thrust. 26th Biennial of graphic Arts
Ljubljana. Catalogue of the exhibition
(Ljubljana, Tobačna). Ljubljana: Mednar-
odni graficni likovni center, 2005.
Giorgio Verzotti. “Ultime tendenze degli
anni ’90,” Arte contemporanea. Le ricerche
internazionali dalla fine degli anni ’50 a
oggi, curated by Francesco Poli. Florence:
Electa, 2005: 320–347.
2006
Art 37 Basel. Catalogue of the exhibition
(Basel, Art Basel). Basel: Hatje Cantz, 2006.
Achille Bonito Oliva (ed.) Le Opere e i
Giorni 2002-2004. Catalogue of the three
editions of the exhibitions in 2002, 2003,
and 2004 (Certosa di Padula). Milan: Skira,
2006: 130–133.
Laura Cherubini and Giorgio Verzotti (eds.)
Idea. Disegno italiano degli anni Novanta.
Catalogue of the exhibition (Rome, National
Institute of Design; Turin; State Archives).
Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2006.
Grazia De Palma (ed.) Collezionami.
Seconda edizione Biennale d’arti contempo-
ranee. Catalogue of the exhibition (Bari,
Cittadella della Cultura). Bari: Associazi-
one Lorenzo de’ Medici, 2006.
Lóránd Hegyi (ed.) Giardino. Luoghi della
piccola realtà. Catalogue of the exhibition
(Naples, PAN | Palazzo delle Arti Napoli).
Naples: Electa Napoli, 2006.
Udo Kittelmann and Klaus Görner (eds.)
What’s New, Pussycat? Die Neuerwerbungen |
The Recent Acquisitions 2002-2005.
Catalogue of the exhibition (Frankfurt am
465
Main, Museum für Moderne Kunst).
Frankfurt am Main: Verlag für Moderne
Kunst, 2006.
Gianfranco Maraniello. “Massimo
Bartolini,” 6th Shanghai Biennale 2006.
HyperDesign. Catalogue of the exhibition
(Shanghai, Shanghai Art Museum).
Shanghai: Shanghai Fine Arts Publisher,
2006: 304–307.
Nuria Enguita Mayo (ed.) Registres i hàbits.
Màquina de temp / imatges d’espai.
Catalogue of the exhibition (Barcelona,
Fundació Antoni Tàpies; Santiago di
Compostela, Centro Galego de Arte
Contemporánea). Barcelona: Fundació
Antoni Tàpies, 2006.
Elena Tornaghi and Alessandra Dini.
L’Arcimboldo. Arte e Immagine. Dal XIX
secolo ad oggi, vol. C. Turin: Loescher, 2006.
Young Italian Artists at the Turn of the
Millennium. Catalogue of the exhibition
(Beijing, Galleria Continua Beijing).
Beijing: Galleria Continua, 2006.
2007
Frank Boehm, Friedhelm Hütte, and Claudia
Schicktanz (eds.) Deutsche Bank Collection
Italy. Catalogue of the collection. Milan:
Silvana Editoriale, 2007.
Giuseppe Cascetta (ed.) 43 Capricci. Cata-
logue of the exhibition (Assisi, Ex Pinacoteca
Comunale). Assisi: Metastasio, 2007.
Luca Cerizza and João Fernandes (eds.)
Massimo Bartolini. Catalogue of the solo
exhibition (Porto, Museu Serralves, Museu
de Arte Contemporânea) curated by João
Fernandes. Porto: Fundação de Serralves,
2007. Texts by João Fernandes, Ricardo
Nicolau, Barnett Newman, Luca Cerizza,
and Laura Cherubini.
Françoise Cohen (ed.), Où? Scènes du Sud:
Espagne, Italie, Portugal. Catalogue of the
exhibition (Nîmes, Carré d’Art - Musée
d’art contemporain de Nîmes). Nîmes:
Archibooks, 2007.
Enrico De Pascale and Francesco Rossi
(eds.) Cultura e memoria: le collezioni d’arte
del Gruppo BPU Banca. Catalogue of the
collection. Bergamo: Bolis, 2007.
Enrico De Pascale (ed.) Invito a Palazzo
2007. Una giornata da non perdere, i palazzi
delle banche aprono per voi, opere dalla
collezione di arte contemporanea di UBI.
Catalogue of the exhibition (Bergamo, S.
Marta Cloister). Bergamo: ABI Associazi-
one Bancaria Italiana, 2007.
Danilo Eccher with Odile Decq (ed.) La
città che sale. We Try to Build the Future.
Catalogue of the exhibition (Benevento,
ARCOS, Contemporary Art Museum of
Sannio; Rome, MACRO Future). Florence:
Electa, 2007.
Letizia Ragaglia (ed.) Ironia domestica. Uno
sguardo curioso tra collezioni private
italiane. Catalogue of the exhibition
(Bolzano, Museion). Bolzano: Folio, 2007.
Marco Scotini and Laura Vecere (eds.)
Dopopaesaggio. Spazio sociale ed ambiente
naturale nell’arte contemporanea. Cata-
logue of the project. Florence: Associazi-
one Culturale Castello di Santa Maria
Novella, Regione Toscana, TRA ART
Strumenti, 2007.
Luigi Settembrini and Rachele Ferrario
(eds.) Camera con vista. Arte e interni in Italia
1990-2000. Catalogue of the exhibition
(Milan, Royal Palace). Milan: Skira, 2007.
Adachiara Zevi (ed.) Arteinmemoria4.
Catalogue of the exhibition (Rome, Ostia
Antica Synagogue). Rome: Incontri
Internazionali d’Arte, 2007.
2008
15a Quadriennale d’arte di Roma. Catalogue
of the exhibition (Rome, Palazzo delle
Esposizioni). Venice: Marsilio, 2008.
a.titolo (ed.) 10/09/08. Proposte XXIII.
Catalogue of the exhibition published on the
occasion of the exhibition (Turin, Accademia
Albertina di Belle Arti) born from the
workshop held by Massimo Bartolini as part
of the project Laboratorio, ideated and
curated by a.titolo for Proposte, Piemonte
Region, Assessorato alla Cultura 2008.
Manuela Annibali and Perna Foundation
(eds.) Mediterraneo 2008. Perna Foundation.
Catalogue of the exhibition (Ravello, Villa
Rufolo). Naples: Electa Napoli, 2008.
Francesco Bernardelli. Arte Contempora-
nea. Cinque. Anni Novanta. Florence:
Electa, 2008: 120, 124–125.
Chiara Olivieri Bertola. “Massimo
Bartolini,” Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte
Contemporanea. La Residenza Sabauda. La
Collezione. Catalogue of the collection
curated by Ida Gianelli and Marcella
Beccaria. Milan: Skira, 2008: 116–121.
Francesco Bonami (ed.) Italics. Arte italiana
fra tradizione e innovazione 1968-2008.
Catalogue of the exhibition (Venice,
Palazzo Grassi). Florence: Electa, 2008.
Lisa Parola. “Massimo Bartolini. Laborato-
rio di Storia e storie,” Nuovi Committenti.
Arte contemporanea, società e spazio
pubblico. Catalogue of the works realized
for the program Nuovi Committenti
curated by a.titolo. Milan: Silvana Editori-
ale, 2008: 59–83.
Rita Selvaggio (ed.) L’Angelo Sigillato.
Catalogue of the exhibition (Peccioli,
Museum of Russian Icons F. Bigazzi).
Peccioli, 2008.
2009
Alessandra Barbuto. “Massimo Bartolini,”
Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna &
MAXXI: le collezioni 1958-2009. Catalogue
of the collection curated by Stefania
466
Frezzotti, Carolina Italiano, and Angelan-
dreina Rorro. Florence: Electa 2009: 94–95.
Claudia Battistella. “Massimo Bartolini,”
Fare Mondi / Making Worlds, 53. Espo-
sizione Internazionale d’Arte. La Biennale di
Venezia. Catalogue of the exhibition
(Venice, La Biennale di Venezia) curated by
Daniel Birnbaum and Jochen Volz. Venice:
Marsilio, 2009: 10–11.
Civica 1989-2009: celebration, institution,
critique. Catalogue of the exhibition (Trento,
Fondazione Galleria Civica di Trento and
various locations) curated by Andrea Viliani,
Fondazione Galleria Civica 2009.
“Danimarca e Paesi Nordici,” Fare Mondi /
Making Worlds, 53. Esposizione Internazi-
onale d’Arte. La Biennale di Venezia, vol.
Partecipazioni nazionali. Catalogue of the
exhibition (Venice, La Biennale di Vene-
zia). Venice: Marsilio, 2009: 26–31.
João Fernandes and Ulrich Loock (ed.)
Serralves 2009. The collection. Images.
Porto: Fundação de Serralves, 2009.
Lóránd Hegyi (ed.) Fragile. Terres d’empa-
thie. Catalogue of the exhibition (Saint-
Etienne Métropole, Musée d’Art moderne;
Rome, Hungary Academy, Palazzo
Falconieri; Daejeon, Daejeon Museum of
Art). Milan: Skira, 2009.
Thomas Niemayer. “Massimo Bartolini,”
Colossal. Kunst, Fakt, Fiktion. Catalogue of
the exhibition (district of Osnabrück,
various locations) curated by Jan Hoet.
Osnabrück: Rasch, 2009: 106–115.
Emma Zanella. “Incantamenti. Conversazi-
one tra Massimo Bartolini e Emma
Zanella,” The Group Show. Catalogue of the
exhibition (Gallarate, GAM Civica Galleria
d’Arte Moderna). Edizioni NLF, 2009.
2010
Art Unlimited | Art 41 Basel. Catalogue of
the exhibition (Basel, Art Basel). Berlin:
Hatje Cantz, 2010.
“Beyond Entropy: when Energy becomes
Form,” People meet in Architecture, Biennale
Architettura 2010, 12. Mostra Internazionale
di Architettura, vol. Partecipazioni
nazionali/Eventi collaterali. Catalogue of
the exhibition (Venice, La Biennale di
Venezia). Venice: Marsilio, 2010: 168–169.
Luca Cerizza. L’uccello e la piuma. La
questione della leggerezza nell’arte italiana,
EDIZIONI 2010: 50–53
Laura Cherubini and Glorianda Cipolla
(eds.) Entre glace et neige. Processi ed energie
della natura. Catalogue of the exhibition
(Aosta, Saint-Bénin Center). Aosta:
Musumeci Editore, 2010.
Laura Cherubini (ed.) Trasparenze. L’Arte
per le Energie Rinnovabili. Catalogue of the
exhibition (Rome, MACRO Testaccio;
Naples, Museo Madre). Rome: Edizioni
Carte Segrete, 2010.
Cristiana Collu and Gianluca Marziani
(eds.) Premio Terna 03. (+150) Visione:
Origine e Potere. Energia attraverso le
Generazioni. Catalogue of the exhibition
(Rome, Tempio di Adriano). Milan: Silvana
Editoriale, 2010.
MA*GA, guida alle collezioni del MA*GA.
Catalogue of the collection. Florence:
Electa, 2010.
“Massimo Bartolini,” Italian Genius Now.
Casa dolce casa. Home Sweet Home.
Catalogue of the exhibition (Expo 2010
Shanghai, Italian Pavilion; Kaohsiung
Museum of Fine Arts; Taichung Creative
and Cultural Park) curated by Marco
Bazzini. Prato: Centro per l’arte contem-
poranea Luigi Pecci, 2010: 58–65.
Stefano Pezzato (ed.) Oltre il grande rettile.
Finestre sull’arte contemporanea a Livorno.
Catalogue of the exhibition (Livorno,
Museo Civico Giovanni Fattori). Prato:
Centro per l’arte contemporanea Luigi
Pecci, 2010.
Elena Volpato. “Massimo Bartolini,” Dieci
anni e oltre. La collezione della Fondazione
per l’Arte Moderna e Contempo- ranea –
CRT per Torino e il Piemonte. Catalogue of
the collection curated by Marcella Beccaria
and Elena Volpato. Berlin: Archive Books,
2010: 120–123.
Emma Zanella. “Massimo Bartolini,”
Interview, Twister. Rete Musei Lombardia
per l’Arte Contemporanea. Catalogue of the
interventions realized for the contest and
acquired by the permanent collections of
the Rete’s museums (Lombardia, various
locations). Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2010.
2011
Chiara Bertola and Andrea Lissoni (eds.)
Terre Vulnerabili, a growing exhibition.
Catalogue of the exhibition (Milan, Hangar
Bicocca). Milan: Corraini Edizioni, 2011.
Dobrila Denegri (ed.) Massimo Bartolini.
Serce na dłoni. Catalogue of the solo
exhibition (Toruń, Centre of Contempo-
rary Art Znaki Czasu). Toruń: Centre of
Contemporary Art Znaki Czasu, 2011.
Texts by Dobrila Denegri, Daniil Kharms,
and Osvaldo Licini.
Dobrila Denegri (ed.) Spaceship Earth.
Catalogue of the exhibition (Toruń, Centre
of Contemporary Art Znaki Czasu). Toruń:
Centre of Contemporary Art Znaki Czasu,
2011.
Letizia Ragaglia and Frida Carazzato (eds.)
-2 +3 Stefano Arienti Massimo Bartolini. La
collezione di Museion. Catalogue of the
exhibition (Bolzano, Museion). Milan:
Mousse Publishing, 2011.
Axel Vervoordt (ed.) TRA. Edge of Becom-
ing. Catalogue of the exhibition (Venice,
Fortuny Palace). Milan: Skira, 2011.
Maria Giovanna Virga. “Intervista a
Massimo Bartolini,” Etico_F. 5 movimenti
sul paesaggio. Riso, Museo d’Arte Contem-
poranea della Sicilia, Riso/Annex, i
Quaderni di Riso, vol. V, published on the
occasion of the artists’ residency program
in Sicily, curated by Daniela Bigi. Florence:
Electa, 2011: 68–77.
Yokohama Triennale 2011. OUR MAGIC
HOUR. How Much of the World Can We
Know? Catalogue of the exhibition
(Yokohama, Yokohama Museum of Art and
various locations) curated by Miki Akiko.
Yokohama: Bijutsu, 2011.
2012
Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev (ed.) dO- CU-
MENTA(13), Catalog 2/3: The Logbook.
Catalogue of the exhibition (Kassel, various
locations). Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2012.
Echigo-Tsumari Satoyama Museum of
Contemporary Art, Kinare | 2012 Artworks
Catalog. Catalogue of the collection,
Echigo-Tsumari. Echigo-Tsumari region:
Kinare, 2012.
Fram Kitagawa (ed.) Echigo-Tsumari Art
Triennale 2012, catalogo della mostra
(Echigo-Tsumari region, various locations).
Echigo-Tsumari region: Gendaikikakushit-
su, 2012.
Michael Kroeger and Anne Schloen (eds.)
Asche und Gold. Eine Weltenreise / Ashes
and gold. A World’s Journey. Catalogue of
the exhibition (Herford, Marta Herford
Museum; Bedburg-Hau, Museum Schloss
Moyland). Herford: Wienand, 2012.
“Massimo Bartolini,” dOCUMENTA(13),
Catalog 1/3: The Book of Books. Catalogue
of the exhibition (Kassel, various locations)
curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev.
Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2012: 679.
Neon. La materia luminosa dell’arte.
Catalogue of the exhibition (Rome,
MACRO Museo d’Arte Contemporanea
Roma) curated by Bartolomeo Pietro-
marchi and David Rosenberg. Rome:
Quodlibet, 2012.
“Palermo,” 9th Shanghai Biennale. Reactiva-
tion. DS Inter-City Pavilion Project.
Catalogue of the exhibition (Shanghai,
Museum of Contemporary Art). Shanghai:
The Power Station of Art, 2012.
Paper. Catalogue of the exhibition (Nice,
MAMAC Musée d’Art moderne et d’Art
contemporain) curated by Gilbert Perlein.
Rome: Cudemo, 2012.
Susanne Pfeffer (ed.) One on One. Cata-
logue of the exhibition (Berlin, KW
Institute for Contemporary Art). Berlin:
Koenig Books, 2012.
Eva Scharrer. “Massimo Bartolini,”
dOCUMENTA(13), Catalog 3/3: The
Guidebook. Catalogue of the exhibition
467
(Kassel, various locations) curated by
Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev. Berlin: Hatje
Cantz, 2012: 240–241.
Giulia Tolino. “Massimo Bartolini,” Se
vedo...capisco! Sguardi sull’arte contempora-
nea, curated by Francesco Pellegrino.
Rome: Natyvi contemporanea, 2012: 8–9.
Thibaut Verhoeven. “Massimo Bartolini.
Bookyards (2012),” TRACK, a contemporary
city conversation. Catalogue of the
exhibition (Ghent, various locations),
organized by S.M.A.K., the Museum of
Contemporary Art, curated by Philippe
Van Cauteren and Mirjam Varadinis.
Antwerp: Roma Publications, 2012:
124–127.
2013
Luca Cerizza and Camilla Wegener (eds.)
Zwei Inseln. Massimo Bartolini. Published
on the occasion of the exhibition (Rügen,
Schlosspark Pansevitz). Rügen: EINS-
ZUEINS Rügen, 2013. Texts by Fanny
Bussche, Luca Cerizza, and Camilla
Wegener. Drawings by Massimo Bartolini.
Olimpia Eberspacher (ed.) Punti di Vista.
Identità Conflitti Mutamenti. Catalogue of
the exhibition (Cosenza, Galleria Nazion-
ale Palazzo Arnone). Milan: Silvana
Editoriale, 2013.
Massimo Bartolini. Studio Matters +1.
Catalogue of the solo exhibition (Edinburgh,
The Fruitmarket Gallery; Ghent, S.M.A.K.)
curated by Fiona Bradley and Philippe Van
Cauteren. Antwerp: Roma Publications,
2013. Texts by Massimo Bartolini, Fiona
Bradley, and Philippe Van Cauteren.
Marco Meneguzzo, Bruno Di Marino, and
Andrea La Porta (eds.) Artisti nello spazio.
Da Lucio Fontana a oggi: gli ambienti
nell’arte italiana. Catalogue of the exhibition
(Catanzaro, San Giovanni Monumental
Complex). Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2013.
Oltre il giardino. L’idea del giardino nell’arte
contemporanea. Un omaggio a Pietro
Porcinai (1910-1986). Catalogue of the
exhibition (Pistoia, Fabroni Palace and “Il
Carbonile” Garden) curated by Ludovico
Pratesi. Prato: Gli Ori, 2013.
Bartolomeo Pietromarchi (ed.) vice versa.
Catalogue of the exhibition (Venice, La
Biennale di Venezia, Italian Pavilion).
Milan: Mousse Publishing, 2013: 240–247.
Marco Pustianaz, Giulia Palladini, and
Annalisa Sacchi (eds.) Archivi affettivi. Un
catalogo. Catalogue of the convention/
international event of Performance
Studies (Vercelli and Turin, November
11–13, 2010). Turin: Mercurio, 2013.
2014
Caterina Benvegnù (ed.) Ha visto i colori
divini del lago di Costanza?. Catalogue of
the exhibition (Venice, Spazio Thetis).
Venice: Canova Edizioni, 2014.
Friederike Fast and Nik Nowak (eds.)
BOOSTER. Art Sound Machine. Catalogue
of the exhibition (Herford, Marta Herford
Museum). Berlin: Kerber, 2014.
Gerardo Mosquera (ed.) Perduti nel
paesaggio. Catalogue of the exhibition
(Rovereto, MART, Museo di arte moderna
e contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto).
Trento/Rovereto: Edizioni Mart, 2014.
2015
Luca Beatrice, Andrea Busto, and
Cristiana Perrella (eds.) LIBERI TUTTI!
Arte e società in Italia 1989-2001. Cata-
logue of the exhibition (Turin, MEF
Museo Ettore Fico). Turin: Tai, 2015.
Eva Fabbris. “Una conversazione tra
Massimo Bartolini ed Eva Fabbris,”
Ennesima. Qui, ora e altrove: site-specific e
dintorni. Catalogue of the exhibition
(Milan, Triennale di Milano) curated by
Vincenzo de Bellis. Milan: Mousse
Publishing, 2015: 52–73.
Massimo Bartolini. Alla maniera d’oggi.
Base a Firenze. Galleria dell’Accademia, in
Alla maniera d’oggi. Base a Firenze.
Catalogue of the exhibition (Florence,
various locations, February 3–April 11,
2010) curated by Marco Bazzini. Prato:
Centro per l’arte contemporanea Luigi
Pecci, 2015. Texts by Carlo Falciani and
Massimo Bartolini.
Eric Mézil (ed.) La disparition des lucioles.
Exposition à la prison Sainte-Anne,
Avignon. Catalogue of the exhibition
(Avignon, Prison Sainte-Anne). Avignon:
Actes Sud, 2015.
Cloe Piccoli (ed.) I’ll Be There Forever. The
sense of Classic. Catalogue of the exhibition
(Milan, Cusani Palace). Milan: Electa, 2015.
PROPORTIO. Catalogue of the exhibition
(Venice, Fortuny Palace) curated by Axel
Vervoordt and Daniela Ferretti, MER.
Venice: Paper Kunsthalle & Axel and May
Vervoordt Foundation, 2015.
Alberto Salvadori (ed.) Massimo Bartolini.
Non entri chi non è geometra. Catalogue of
the solo exhibition (Florence, Museo
Marino Marini). Milan: Mousse Publish-
ing, 2015. Texts by Francesco Bonami,
Luca Cerizza, Carlo Falciani, João
Fernandes, Maurizio Maggiani, Arturo
Martini, Alberto Salvadori, and Jonathan
Watkins.
2016
16a Quadriennale d’arte. Altri tempi, altri
miti. Catalogue of the exhibition (Rome,
Palazzo delle Esposizioni). Rome: NERO,
2016.
Massimo Bartolini. “Massimo Bartolini:
Black Circle Square,” Emscherkunst.
Catalogue of the exhibition (Ruhr region,
Castrop-Rauxel) curated by Florian
Matzner. Berlin: Kerber Verlag, 2016:
102–107.
Simone Ciglia (ed.) Il campo espanso. Arte e
agricoltura dagli anni Sessanta ad oggi.
Rome: Crea, 2016.
Saretto Cincinelli and Cristiana Collu (eds.)
Ripensare il medium. Il fantasma del
disegno. Catalogue of the exhibition (San
Giovanni Valdarno, Casa Masaccio and
various locations). Florence: Settore8, 2016.
2017
Luigi Fassi and Alberto Salvadori (eds.)
Che il vero possa confutare il falso. AGIVE-
RONA Collection. Catalogue of the
exhibition (Siena, Santa Maria della Scala,
Civic Museum and Academy of Physioc-
ritics). Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2017.
Silvia Macchetto (ed.) Mozzarella in
carrozza. Ricette d’Artista. Rome: NERO,
2017: 32–33.
Massimo Bartolini. Four Organs. Catalogue
of the personal exhibition (Turin,
Fondazione Merz). Turin: hopefulmon-
ster, 2017. Texts by di Luca Cerizza and
Robert Schneider.
Bartolomeo Pietromarchi (ed.) MAXXI
Arte. Catalogo delle collezioni. Rome:
Quodlibet, 2017: 70–71.
Pune Biennale 2017. Catalogue of the
exhibition (Pune, various locations)
curated by Luca Cerizza and Zasha Colah.
Pune: Pune Biennale Foundation, 2017.
Letizia Ragaglia (ed.) Installation Art.
Begehbare und raumgreifende kunst der
Sammlung Museion / Entrare nell’arte della
Collezione Museion / Walk-in and expan-
sive works from the Museion Collection.
Catalogue of the exhibition (Bolzano,
Museion). Bolzano: Museion, 2017.
Suzanne Swarts (ed.) The Meantime.
Catalogue of the exhibition (Wassenaar,
Museum Voorlinden). Wassenaar:
Voorlinden, 2017.
Unlimited. Art Basel | Unlimited | 2017.
Catalogue of the exhibition (Basel, Art
Basel). Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2017.
Philippe Van Cauteren (ed.) The City, My
Studio / The City, My Life. Kathmandu
Triennale 2017. Catalogue of the exhibi-
tion (Kathmandu and Kathmandu Valley,
various locations). Kathmand: Kathmandu
Triennal, 2017.
2018
Claudia Gioia (ed.) Massimo Bartolini. Cau-
du e Fridu. Catalogue of the solo exhibi-
tion (Palermo, Oneto Palace of Sperlinga).
Palermo: Fondazione Volume!, 2018.
Zerynthia (ed.) No Man’s Library / La
Biblioteca di Tutti. Catalogue of the
exhibition (Sassari, Ex Biblioteca Univer-
sitaria). Sassari: Di Paolo Edizioni, 2018.
468
2019
Grotoni e Malocchi. Massimo Bartolini
Maurizio Maggiani. Published on the
occasion of the solo exhibition (Faenza,
Carlo Zauli Museum). Faenza: Edizioni
MCZ, 2019. Text by Maurizio Maggiani.
Second Yinchuan Biennale. Starting from
the Desert. Ecologies on the Edge. Cata-
logue of the exhibition (Yinchuan, MOCA
Museum of Contemporary Art Yinchuan)
curated by Marco Scotini. Milan: Mousse
Publishing, 2019.
2020
Apinan Poshyananda (ed.) Bangkok Art
Biennale 2020. Escape Routes. Catalogue of
the exhibition (Bangkok, various locations).
Bangkok: Bangkok Art Biennale, 2020.
Marco Scotti and Francesca Zanella (eds.)
Massimo Bartolini. On Identikit, catalogue
of the personal exhibition (Parma, CSAC
Studies Center and Communication
Archive University of Parma) curated by
Marco Scotti. Parma: All Around Art,
2020. Texts by Paolo Barbaro, Massimo
Bartolini, Carlo Feltrinelli, Luigi Ghirri,
Marco Scotti, and Francesca Zanella.
2021
Le tre versioni di Due di Massimo Bartolini,
published on the occasion of the installa-
tion of Two (Mercer's Version) at I Tattoli
(Cerbaia, Florence), Lorenzo and Veronica
Bini Smaghi, 2021. Texts by Carlo Falciani
and Maurizio Maggiani.
2022
Danilo Eccher (ed.) CRAZY. La follia
nell’arte contemporanea. Catalogue of the
exhibition (Rome, DART Chiostro del
Bramante). Milan: Skira, 2022.
PERIODICALS AND NEWSPAPERS
1994
Alison Sarah Jacques. “Massimo Barto-
lini.” Art + Text no. 47 (January 1994): 93.
Grazia Toderi. “Massimo Bartolini. Care
Of, Cusano Milanino.” Flash Art no. 189
(December 1994–January 1995).
Giorgio Verzotti. “Domestic Violence. Gió
Marconi. Milan.” Flash Art International
no. 178 (October 1994): 56.
Angela Vettese. “Domestic Violence. Gió
Marconi Residence. Milan.” Frieze no. 18
(September 1994).
1995
Saretto Cincinelli. “Ouverture. Massimo
Bartolini.” Flash Art no. 193 (Summer
1995): 51.
Ariella Giulivi. “Massimo Bartolini.
Studio Marconi, Milano.” Tema Celeste no.
53–54 (Autumn 1995): 65.
Helena Kontova. “Uno, cento, mille
Aperto.” Flash Art no. 192 (June-July 1995):
61–63.
Giuliano Serafini. “Massimo Bartolini.
Galleria Gentili. Firenze.” Terzo Occhio 1,
no. 74 (March 1995): 60.
Ken Shulman, “Massimo Bartolini.
Gentili. Florence.” ARTnews (May 1995).
Giorgio Verzotti. “Massimo Bartolini.
Care Of. Milan.” Artforum International
no. 5 (January 1995): 94.
1997
Laura Cherubini. “Massimo Bartolini,
Martin Creed. British School. Roma.”
Flash Art no. 205 (Summer 1997): 112.
Marco Meneguzzo. “Massimo Bartolini.
Galleria Massimo De Carlo. Milan.”
Artforum International no. 2 (October
1997): 107.
Augusto Pieroni. “Intervista a Massimo
Bartolini.” Artel no. 63 (May 1997).
Ludovico Pratesi, “Un match d’arte e
cultura all’Accademia Britannica.” La
Repubblica (April 22, 1997).
1998
Luca Cerizza. “Massimo Bartolini.
Consumare l’attesa.” Flash Art no. 212
(October-November 1998): 102–103.
Laura Cherubini. “Massimo Bartolini.
Nella testa, nel giardino.” Ars Mediterra-
nea no. 3 (1998): 6–15.
Laura Cherubini. “Nel giardino.” Periodico
del Palazzo delle Papesse no. 0. Centro Arte
Contemporanea, Siena (Autumn 1998).
Michele Dantini. “11 interni di (giovane)
arte italiana.” Ipso Facto no. 3 (Janu-
ary-April 1998): 65–86.
Cloe Piccoli. “Sconfinamenti tra arte e
architettura.” Abitare no. 377 (October
1998): 160–161.
1999
Massimo Bartolini. “Mare quasi calmo,
cielo poco nuvoloso.” Cross no. 1 (1999):
8–15.
Giorgio Verzotti. “Massimo Bartolini.”
Artforum International (January 1999):
110–111.
2000
Massimo Bartolini, “Realtà.” Arte e Critica
no. 21 (January-March 2000): 12.
Luca Beatrice. “Massimo Bartolini.
Massimo De Carlo.” Flash Art no. 221
(April-May 2000): 114.
Mariuccia Casadio. “Intarsi.” Casa Vogue
no. 4 (June 2000): 136–153.
Germano Celant. “Shock-Art Generation.”
L’Espresso (October 12, 2000): 147–150.
Laura Cherubini. “Bartolini, l’immagina-
zione a tutto campo.” Il Giornale (Febru-
ary 7, 2000): 24.
Mario Codognato. “In mezzo ai pini, filari
di puri concetti.” Il Sole 24 Ore (June 25,
2000).
Claudia Colasanti. “La Ville, le Jardin, la
Mémoire. Villa Medici, Roma.” Flash Art
no. 224 (October-November 2000): 120.
Alessandra Mammì. “Ecco a voi Les Folies
Jardin.” L’Espresso (June 29, 2000):
220–224.
Cloe Piccoli. “Ragazzi da museo.” D la
Repubblica delle Donne no. 229 (December
5, 2000): 117–122.
Edoardo Sassi. “Villa Medici, magie
colorate in giardino.” Corriere della Sera
(June 27, 2000): 53.
Paolo Vagheggi. “Se l’arte è una sfida tra
antico e moderno.” La Repubblica (July 10,
2000).
Lea Vergine. “L’evento nascosto dietro un
mobile.” Corriere della Sera (May 1, 2000): 27.
2002
Maria Cristina Bastante. “Massimo
Bartolini. Roma, Magazzino d’Arte
Moderna.” Exibart (online) (March 26, 2002).
Stefano Chiodi. “Massimo Bartolini.
Magazzino d’Arte Moderna. Roma.” Tema
Celeste no. 91 (May-June 2002): 107.
Tamsin Dillon. “Manifesta 4.” Art Monthly
no. 258 (July-August 2002): 46–49.
Milovan Farronato. “Massimo Bartolini.”
Tema Celeste no. 92 (July-August 2002):
70–73.
Alberto Mugnaini. “Massimo Bartolini.
Base, Firenze.” Flash Art no. 232 (Febru-
ary-March 2002): 133–134.
Vanessa Joan Müller. “Fokus auf Massimo
Bartolini.” Frankfurter Rundschau (July 20,
2002): 9.
Ludovico Pratesi. “La stanza in tempesta
nel tamburo di Bartolini.” La Repubblica
Roma (March 8, 2002): X.
Giorgio Verzotti. “Massimo Bartolini.
Magazzino d’Arte Moderna/Frith Street
Gallery. Rome/London.” Artforum Interna-
tional no. 2 (October 2002): 161.
2003
Saretto Cincinelli. “L’invenzione di un
confine.” Flash Art no. 239 (April-May
2003): 100–101.
Guido Curto. “Al Belvedere gli Orizzonti
di Abo.” La Stampa (August 30, 2003): 9.
Melissa Lo and Valentina Sansone. “Sculp-
ture Forever. Contemporary sculpture
(Part II).” Flash Art International no. 231
(July-September 2003): 100.
“Massimo Bartolini” in “Speciale Tosca-
na.”Flash Art no. 239 (April-May 2003): 99.
Rocco Moliterni. “Giubbotti e scarpe fatti
d’arte.” La Stampa, (April 15, 2003): 27.
Alberto Mugnaini. “Oltre il paesaggio.”
Flash Art no. 239 (April-May 2003): 101–102.
469
 2004
Giuliana Altea. “Catastrofi minime.” Flash
Art no. 244 (February-March 2004): 151.
“Biennale di San Paolo.” Glamour no. 146
(April 2004): 402.
Rachele Ferrario. “C’è anche un albero
piantato in piscina.” Corriere della Sera
(November 27, 2004): 37.
Teresa Macrì. “Quando l’arte passa via
sound.” il manifesto (March 24, 2004): 16.
Alessandra Mammì. “L’avanguardia in
radice quadrata.” L’Espresso (April 1,
2004): 132.
Norma Mangione. “Massimo Bartolini:
dall’asilo alla santità.” Uovo no. 7 (2004):
68–75.
Costanza Paissan. “Massimo Bartolini /
Nedko Solakov. Roma, Magazzino d’Arte
Moderna.” Exibart (online) (October 29,
2004).
Cloe Piccoli. “Intervista a Massimo
Bartolini.” Carnet Arte 2, no. 4 (Septem-
ber-October 2004): 84–91.
Paolo Russo. “Le nuvole della creazione
sul paesaggio incantato.” La Repubblica
(September 19, 2004).
Licia Spagnesi. “Massimo Bartolini. Nel
deserto dei miracoli.” Arte (April 2004):
92–96.
Licia Spagnesi. “Si prega di toccare.” Arte
(November 2004): 179–182.
Adachiara Zevi. “Massimo Bartolini
contro lo spazio-scatola.” L’a. L’architettura,
cronache e storia no. 583 (May 2004):
422–424.
2005
Lorenzo Bruni. “Risposta al paesaggio e
proposta di territorio.” Arte e Critica no. 41
(January-March 2005): 35–39.
Laura Cherubini. “Installazioni, specchi e
cortocircuiti per ‘illuminarsi d’immenso’” Il
Giornale (August 8, 2005).
Saretto Cincinelli. “Arte all’Arte: IX
edizione.” Flash Art no. 250 (February-March
2005): 119.
Cathryn Drake. “Arte all’Arte 9. Associazi-
one Arte Continua. San Gimignano.”
Artforum International no. 9 (May 2005): 256.
Hunter Drohojowska-Philp. “The Art Trip.”
Artnet (online) (October 2005).
Beppe Finessi. “Una galleria, un artista:
Massimo De Carlo Massimo Bartolini.”
Abitare no. 446 (January-February 2005): 116.
Olga Gambari. “I sensi di Bartolini, l’arte
da annusare.” La Repubblica (March 2,
2005).
Marco Enrico Giacomelli. “Massimo
Bartolini, Torino, Gam.” Exibart (online)
(February 22, 2005).
Angiola Maria Gili. “Le perle di Massimo
Bartolini.” Torinosette – La Stampa
(February 4, 2005): 70.
Michael Kimmelman. “Art for the
tuned-in, blissed-out psychedelia lovers.”
International Herald Tribune (November
9, 2005): 22.
Matilde Martinetti. “Massimo Bartolini.”
Juliet art magazine no. 123 (June 2005):
46–47.
“Massimo Bartolini.” Juliet art magazine no.
122 (April 2005): 49.
“Massimo Bartolini.” Tema Celeste Interna-
tional no. 108 (March-April 2005): 107.
Lisa Parola. “Bartolini, disegnando sotto la
pioggia.” La Stampa (February 12, 2005): 9.
Francesca Pasini. “Massimo Bartolini.
Galleria Massimo De Carlo. Milan.”
Artforum International no. 9 (May 2005):
256.
Ludovico Pratesi. “L’artista che con la
tecnologia modifica il paesaggio.” La
Repubblica - Affari & Finanza (February
21, 2005): 18.
Elisabetta Tolosano. “Massimo Bartolini.
GAM. Torino.” Flash Art no. 251 (April-
May 2005): 141.
2006
Evaristo Manfroni. “I miei luoghi, misura
dell’umana intensità.” Inside Italia no. 22
(June 2006): 6-7.
2007
Freire Barnes. “Massimo Bartolini
interview. The dark arts.” BBC (online)
(August 2, 2007).
Carlo Alberto Bucci. “Cancelli folli e
monete ‘a scomparsa.’” La Repubblica
(January 26, 2007).
Robert Clark. “Preview. Massimo Barto-
lini.” The Guardian (online) (July 21, 2007).
2008
“Artists Dictionary.” Flash Art Internation-
al no. 260 (May-June 2008): 116.
Francesco Bonami. “Karriere Bar &
Restaurant.” Domusweb (online) (April 17,
2008).
Giulia Brivio. “Intervista a Massimo
Bartolini.” Teknemedia (online) (Novem-
ber 5, 2008).
Barbara Casavecchia. “Innocenti evasioni.
Bartolini.” La Repubblica (November 15,
2008): 16.
Rachele Ferrario. “Pioggia di luce per il
MAXXI.” Corriere della Sera (March 4,
2008): 11.
Olivia Fincato, “Bartolini e le vertigini
della mente.” Oggi7 (weekly magazine of
America Oggi) (October 12, 2008): 9.
Angela Maderna. “Massimo Bartolini alla
Galleria Massimo De Carlo.” Arte e Critica
no. 57 (December 2008–February 2009): 106.
Renata Mambelli. “La luce di Bartolini
apre il museo della città.” La Repubblica
(February 8, 2008).
Michele Nero. “Massimo Bartolini.
470
Maxxi. Roma.” Exibart (online) (February
25, 2008).
Cloe Piccoli. “Arte secondo natura.” D la
Repubblica delle Donne no. 584 (February
9, 2008): 83.
Natalia Resmini. “Avant Gardeners.” Elle
(December 2008): 252–256.
Elena Sommariva. “Massimo Bartolini.”
Domus no. 920 (December 2008): 1.
Giorgio Verzotti. “Una stanza tutta per
sé.” Domus no. 916 (July-August 2008):
92–94.
2009
Massimo Bartolini. “Sala F,” in “Between
two worlds. Biennale di Venezia,” Domus
no. 926 (June 2009): 40.
Francesco Bonami. “Che cosa è First.”
First no. 2 (April 2009): 151–165.
“From Cage to Cage. Massimo Bartolini.”
ART iT - Asia (online) (March 19, 2009).
Laura Cherubini. “Massimo Bartolini.
L’immaginazione praticabile.” Flash Art
no. 276 (June-July 2009): 70–73.
Caroline Corbetta. “Massimo Bartolini,”
in “Making Worlds.” L’Uomo Vogue
(May-June 2009).
Anna Detheridge. “Un drink al bar dell’artis-
ta.” Il Sole 24 ore (online) (May 17, 2009).
Paola Noè, “Massimo Bartolini. Galleria
Massimo De Carlo. Milan.” Artforum
International no. 6 (February 2009): 207.
Costanza Paissan. “Artisti fanno mondi.”
Cura.magazine no. 1 (June-July 2009).
Elena Sommariva. “Twister: musei e
artisti in rete.” Domusweb (online)
(October 29, 2009).
2010
Lorenzo Bruni. “Alla maniera d’oggi. Base a
Firenze.” Flash Art no. 282 (April 2010): 78.
Simona Cresci. “Massimo Bartolini.
Magazzino d’Arte Moderna, Roma.” Flash
Art no. 281 (March 2010): 84.
Emilia Giorgi. “Dai depositi agli spazi
espositivi. La collezione di Museion secondo
Arienti e Bartolini.” Arte e Critica no. 65
(December 2010–February 2011): 54–55.
“Massimo Bartolini. Magazzino d’Arte
Moderna, Roma.” Segno no. 228 (January–
March 2010): 53.
Lea Mattarella. “Tutti connessi al Castello
di Rivoli.” La Repubblica (August 28, 2010).
Anna Mecugni. “Massimo Bartolini.” Art
in America (April 2010): 134–135.
MM. “Massimo Bartolini.” Inventario
01|Tutto è Progetto (2010): 36.
Ludovico Pratesi. “I mobili sonori di
Bartolini un itinerario di poesia.” La
Repubblica (January 21, 2010).
Alessandro Rabottini. “Civica 1989-2009.”
Frieze no. 128 (January–February 2010):
118–119.
Linda Yablonsky. “Artifacts | Art Unlimit-
ed.” T Magazine - The New York Times
(online) (June 16, 2010).
2011
Matteo Bergamini. “Massimo Bartolini.
Milano, Galleria Massimo De Carlo.”
Exibart (online) (October 3, 2011).
Elena Bordignon. “Massimo Bartolini.
Massimo De Carlo, Milano.” Flash Art no.
297 (November 2011): 105.
Valentina Briguglio. “Attirati alla terra: in
dialogo con Massimo Bartolini.” Arte e
Critica no. 68 (September-October 2011): 95.
Gianluca Collica. “La Sicilia di palazzo
Riso. Il ritorno dell’arte nella vita.” Arte e
Critica no. 68 (September–November
2011): 112–113.
Max Mutarelli. “Tutto giù per terra.”
Artribune (online) (September 22, 2011).
Lisa Pedicino. “Sotto quale cielo? a Palazzo
Riso.” Arte e Critica no. 67 (June–August
2011): 108.
Sergio Troisi. “Paesaggi siciliani, visioni
d’artista.” La Repubblica (June 11, 2011).
Evence Verdier. “Mondovision.” Art Press
no. 382 (October 2011): 08.
2012
Wanda Lattes. “Quel sax sotto l’albero e la
tradizione dell’arte.” Corriere della Sera
(May 1, 2012): 53.
Ludovico Pratesi. “Il futuro? Per immagi-
narlo, dodici artisti si guardano dentro.” il
venerdì di Repubblica (December 28, 2012):
84–96.
Gabi Scardi. “dOCUMENTA (13).”
Domusweb (online) (July 5, 2012).
Giuseppe Serao. “Hum di Bartolini nuova
arte del suono.” La Repubblica (November
24, 2012).
Marco Tagliafierro. “Massimo Bartolini.
Massimo De Carlo. Milan.” Artforum
International (January 2012): 236.
2013
Elena Bordignon. “Massimo Bartolini.
Milano. by Elisabetta Claudio.” L’Uomo
Vogue no. 441 (May 2013).
Manuela Brevi. “Massimo Bartolini.
Nuove mappe per le vie dell’immaginazi-
one.” Arte (August 2013): 84–87.
Cristiana Campanini. “La nuova età del
bronzo.” La Repubblica (February 2, 2013).
Francesco M. Cataluccio and Michela
Dossi. “P come Pioggia.” Inventario
06|Tutto è Progetto, 2013.
Robert Clark. “The week’s art shows in
pictures.” The Guardian (online) (February
1, 2013).
Flaminia Gennari Santori. “Vice Versa.”
Doppiozero (online) (June 12, 2013).
Laura Herman. “Wie het kleine niet eert.”
H Art (September 5, 2013): 17.
2014
Francesca Bonazzoli. “Quando l’arte
supera i limiti. Quelle opere attratte dal
vuoto.” Corriere della Sera (October 24,
2014): 50.
Linda De Sanctis. “Bartolini, ‘Il caos in
terra’ è fatto di foto e disegni.” La
Repubblica (December 18, 2014).
2015
Arianna Baldoni. “Massimo Bartolini,
dinamismo fra passato e presente.” Arte
no. 498 (February 2015): 26.
Elena Bordignon. “I’ll be there forever |
Short interview Perrone – Bartolini.”
ATPdiary (online) (May 7, 2015).
Marilena Di Tursi. “Proportio.” Segno no.
253 (Summer 2015): 39.
Mario Finazzi. “Massimo Bartolini.
Magazzino Arte Moderna.” Exibart
(online) (January 27, 2015).
Matteo Galbiati. “‘L’altra’ scultura di
Massimo Bartolini inaugura il nuovo
anno del Museo Marino Marini.”
Espoarte (online) (January 11, 2015).
JJ Martin. “A sense of the classic: Acqua
di Parma puts on first contemporary art
show in Milan.” Wallpaper (online), (May
12, 2015).
“Massimo Bartolini.” Domusweb (online)
(January 15, 2015).
Emanuela Nobile Mino. “Massimo
Bartolini. Magazzino d’arte moderna,
Roma.” Flash Art no. 320 (March–April
471
2015): 77.
Paolo Russo. “Massimo Bartolini la natura
e i numeri di un rabdomante.” La
Repubblica (February 22, 2015): 47.
2016
Elena Bordignon. “Intervista con Rita
Selvaggio – The Pagad, MDC, Milan.”
ATPdiary (online) (March 21, 2016).
Ginevra Bria. “Massimo Bartolini:
Landscape Phenomena.” Aesthetica (online)
(May 28, 2016).
Valentina Briguglio. “Paesaggi di Massimo
Bartolini da Massimo De Carlo.” Arte e
Critica no. 85 (Spring–Summer 2016): 115.
Benita Fernando. “Habit-co-Habit, the
third edition of the Pune Biennale kicks off
on January 5.” mid-day (online) (December
25, 2016).
Federico Florian. “Massimo Bartolini.” Art
in America (online), (August 17, 2016).
Maisie Skidmorem, “The Ten Best Things
We Saw at Art Basel.” AnOther (online)
(June 20, 2016).
2017
Simone Ciglia. “Linea Terra.” Flash Art
no. 333 (May–June 2017): 78–83.
Alessandra Mammì. “Nel segno di
Buddha. Massimo Bartolini.” L’Espresso
(December 24, 2017): 87.
Valeria Montebello. “La nuova mostra di
Massimo Bartolini.” L’Officiel (online)
(December 18, 2017).
Marina Paglieri. “Quattro. Alla Fondazi-
one Merz gli originali lavori di Massimo
Bartolini, in perenne equilibrio tra l’arte
e la musica: ‘Four organs’ è capace di
intrecciare suoni, immagini ed effetti di
luce:” La Repubblica (July 6, 2017).
Ida Panicelli. “Massimo Bartolini.
Magazzino, Roma.” Artforum (online)
(December 2017).
Laura Robertson. “Otherworldly Sound
Art that Repels and Attracts.” Hyperaller-
gic (online) (September 14, 2017).
Alberta Romano. “Massimo Bartolini
Fondazione Merz / Torino.” Flash Art
(online) (October 2017).
 2018
Lorenzo Madaro. “Oltre la forma tra
fotografie e sculture di Bartolini.” La
Repubblica (January 22, 2018).
Massimo Mattioli. “La festa è finita, resta
la bellezza. Massimo Bartolini a Palazzo
Oneto per Manifesta Palermo.” Artslife
(online) (June 18, 2018).
Valentina Muzi. “Massimo Bartolini Atlante
Occidentale, Daniele Del Giudice, Einaudi
Tascabili, 1998, pag. 78, Magazzino, Roma.”
Exibart (online) (January 26, 2018).
2019
Silvia Conta. “Massimo Bartolini e
Maurizio Maggiani al Museo Carlo Zauli,
SELECTED DISCOGRAPHY
Aus Schlafes Bruder, 2005-2006
Concept: Massimo Bartolini
Sound Engineer: Pietro Riparbelli
Saxophone: Edoardo Marraffa
Part of the catalogue of the exhibition
Registres i hàbits. Màquina de temp /
imatges d’espai (Barcelona, Fundació
Antoni Tàpies; Santiago di Compostela,
Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea),
Fundació Antoni Tàpies 2006.
UR-GERÄUSCH, 2009
Concept: Massimo Bartolini
From a project by: Pietro Riparbelli and
Sandro Gronchi
RMEDL|SG Edizioni www.radicalmatters.
com/radical.matters.
cd.cdr.catalogue.asp?tp=1&c=135
Faenza.” Exibart (online) (December 20,
2019).
Natalia Distefano. “Sognando l’India tra
Ginsberg e Kali.” Corriere della Sera
(December 11, 2019): 16.
Massimo M. Villa. “La luce è l’odore della
vista.” Luce e design no. 1 (February 2019):
66–70.
2020
Federica Bianconi. “Gli identikit di
Massimo Bartolini sono in mostra a
Parma.” Artribune (online) (March 6, 2020).
Alessandra Quattordio. “Come prima,
meglio di prima. La nuova mostra della
galleria Massimo De Carlo a Milano.”
HUM, 2012
Concept: Massimo Bartolini
Voice: Nicholas Isherwood
Published on the occasion of the exhibi-
tion HUM (Rome, AuditoriumArte,
November 29–December 9, 2012, curated
by Anna Cestelli Guidi)
RMEDL|SG Edizioni www.radicalmatters.
com/radical.matters. cd.cdr.catalogue.
asp?tp=1&c=544
Golden Square, 2016
Concept: Massimo Bartolini
Composizione: Edoardo Marraffa Voci:
Vincenzo Vasi
Violin: Valeria Sturba
Flute: Piero Bittolo
Piano: Nicola Guazzaloca
Cello: Francesco Guerri
Recording and mix: Enzo Cimino,
472
Artribune (online) (September 25, 2020).
Richard Unwin. “A Conversation About
Landscape: Massimo Bartolini.” The Net
Gallery (online) (March 27, 2020).
Antongiulio Vergine. “Through Time:
integrità e trasformazione dell’opera |
Intervista con Francesca Zanella e
Massimo Bartolini.” ATPdiary (online)
(February 15, 2020).
2022
Francesca Pini. “Crazy, una valanga di
colori. Dal neon di Fontana all’artista
pescivendolo.” 7 (online, weekly newspa-
per of the Corriere della Sera) (February
17, 2022).
SoundLab, Bologna
Ragle Gum Production
Petites esquisses d’arbres, 2016
Concept: Massimo Bartolini
Composition: Pietro Riparbelli and
Massimo Bartolini
Field Recording and mixing: Pietro
Riparbelli
RMDL Edizioni
Four Organs, 2017
Concept: Massimo Bartolini
Recording and mixing: Fabio Lombardo
Realized on the occasion of the exhibition
Massimo Bartolini. Four Organs (Turin,
Fondazione Merz, July 3–October 1,
2017).
 PROJECT SUPPORTED BY THE DIRECTORATE-GENERAL
Pamela Masi, Silvia Oltremari
FOR CONTEMPORARY CREATIVITY BY THE ITALIAN MINISTRY
Amministrazione OF CULTURE UNDER THE ITALIAN COUNCIL PROGRAM (2021)
Antonio Bindi
Maintenance Office Coordinator
Jacopo Prete
Maintenance Office
FONDAZIONE PER LE ARTI Raffaele Di Vaia
CONTEMPORANEE IN TOSCANA Installation, Collections and
Photo Archives Coordinator
Lorenzo Bini Smaghi
Chairman CoopCulture
Library, Bookshop Keeper Hagoromo. Massimo Bartolini Book Design
Stefano Collicelli Cagol NERO ©️ 2022, NERO, Centro per l’arte
Director Keras Book edited by contemporanea Luigi Pecci
Free Tours and Educational Activities Luca Cerizza, Cristiana Perrella © texts: the authors
Gherardo Biagioni, Silvia Cangioli, © pictures: authors, unless otherwise
Edoardo Donatini, Jacopo Gori, MUTTNIK Texts indicated
Alessio Marco Ranaldo Graphic Design A.TITOLO / Francesca Comisso e Luisa
Board of Directors Perlo, Massimo Bartolini, Fiona Bradley, Courtesy
Fabrizio Zaccagnini Lara Facco P&C Gavin Bryars, Luca Cerizza, Laura Unless otherwise indicated, the courtesy
Auditor Press Office Cherubini, Carlo Falciani, Chus Martínez, of the works in this book is by Massimo
Jeremy Millar, Cristiana Perrella, Marco Bartolini, Massimo De Carlo Gallery,
CENTRO PER L’ARTE CONTEMPORANEA The Centro Pecci is managed by Scotini, David Toop, Andrea Viliani Frith Street Gallery, Magazzino Gallery.
LUIGI PECCI the Fondazione per le arti contemporanee For the work Untitled (Wave), in addition
in Toscana, founded by the Region Biography and Bibliography to the galleries mentioned above,
Emanuele Lepri Tuscany, the Municipality of Prato, and Gabriella Valente D’Amelio Gallery.
Secretary the Associazione Centro per l’arte contem-
poranea Luigi Pecci. Managing Editor All rights reserved. No part of this publica-
Stefano Pezzato Camilla Mozzato tion may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
Head of Collections and Archives, system or transmitted in any form or by any
FOUNDED BY
Regional Activities Coordinator Editorial and Iconographic Coordination means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy-
Carolina Feliziani, Vittoria Pavesi ing, recording or otherwise without prior
Elena Magini permission of the publisher.
Curator, Exhibitions and Events Coordinator Translations
Clara Ciccioni, Carolina Feliziani For orders and information distribution@
Camilla Mozzato neroeditions.com neroeditions.com
Curator and Special Projects Project supported by the Italian
Council (10th edition, 2021), program to ISBN 9788880561712
Mario Pagano promote Italian contemporary art in the
Research and Public Program world by the Directorate-General for Printed and bound
Contemporary Creativity of the Italian January 2023
Luca Barni Ministry of Culture
Cinema Curator This exhibition project and the volume
SUPPORTED BY
Questo libro was published were produced in collaboration with
Irene Innocente on the occasion of the exhibition
Educational Dept. Coordinator Hagoromo. Massimo Bartolini
Simona Bilenchi
Educational Dept Centro per l’arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci
September 16, 2022–May 1, 2023
Rita Duina
Audience development Curated by
Luca Cerizza with Elena Magini
PARTNER
Michela Gaito
Fundraising and Development Dept. Every attempt has been made to locate all
photographers of the works reproduced in
Ivan Aiazzi this volume. The publisher apologizes for
Communications Coordinator any unintentional omissions, and remains
Margherita Villani available for referrals, and undertakes, in
Social media and Website such cases, to add references in future
printings.
TECHNICAL SPONSOR
Donatella Sermattei
Lucia Zanardi
Secretariat
Gionata Cati
Telephone Operator

Ornella Masi
Administration
I would like to thank my Family: Franco, Anna, Luca,
Silvia, Nicola, Irene, Edoardo, Verusca Piazzesi, Pietro.
The friends I was lucky enough to meet: Edoardo
Marraffa, Pietro Riparbelli, Riccardo Rossi. Yari Andrea
Mazza, Massimo Drovandi, Samuele Maffucci, Massimo
De Carlo, Gaia Mauri, Ludovica Barbieri, Jane Hamlyn,
James Lingwood, Gavin Bryars, Mauro Nicoletti,
Gabriele Gaspari, Gabriella Valente, Vittorio Corsini,
Cosimo Vinci, Francesca Sorace, Paolo Parisi, Base
Progetti per l’Arte, Luca Trevisani, Robert Schneider,
Maurizio Maggiani... Many others who are not involved
in this book but whom I would still like to silently thank.
Finally, all those who worked on this exhibition and
the book: curators Luca Cerizza, Elena Magini,
Cristiana Perrella, editor Camilla Mozzato, the writers
of the texts: Jeremy Millar, David Toop, Fiona Bradley,
Marco Scotini, Luisa Perlo, Francesca Comisso, Chus
Martinez, Andrea Viliani, Carlo Falciani. Friend and
photographer Attilio Maranzano.
The staff of NERO: Lorenzo Gigotti, Carolina
Feliziani, Francesco de Figueiredo, Elisa Chieruzzi.
Finally, I would like to thank the Cargo Bar Bistrot at
Centro Pecci, the diner near NERO where we used to
go to eat, and Thelonious S. Monk.

MASSIMO BARTOLINI