Italy Grand Tour: art in the window, the history of Codalunga

This article is published in number 23 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until June 8, 2021

Vittorio Veneto. 2005. A period. A context. I was moving to New York and at the same time I had decided that, when I returned to Italy, my headquarters should be where I was born. If you think about it, it is precisely from the boredom that I felt when I was attending middle school and high school that it all started. I had recently taken a studio in the main street in the heart of the historic district, Serravalle, and it was obvious early on that it couldn’t work.

It is a dark place and above all it has a large window on the street: constantly passers-by, mostly elderly, stop to watch from the sidewalk and watch me work and many then knock and enter to ask what I am doing.

I think it’s a good idea to turn it into an exhibition space: a place to invite other artists to present, or rather test, their work. After all, it is already evident to me, although I have recently started my career as an artist, that I want to confront myself with a much wider audience than that of professionals but above all I am interested in a comparison, not to say confrontation, with he is not in the least attracted to what I do. So I start inviting friends to exhibit, play, perform. The first event consists of a sort of environmental installation made of balls of adhesive tape scattered on the floor that stick to the shoes of those who enter and a playlist, musically rather violent and not very pleasant.

When it opens it is full of people which for the most part will never come back. For several years there are between ten and thirty people waiting for the events, as well as obviously the passers-by whom I have already told you about who look inside through the window. At a certain point, therefore, I decide to close the windows with wooden boards thinking that in that way people would have to enter to understand what was happening inside, or they would have to make an effort and try to imagine it. Oh yes, I say the windows because over time I have decided to rent the two shops next to them. I also thought that the windows could be an exhibition space and so I invited several artists to send works that I could apply to the glass as adhesives. Among the various interventions, the Triptych by Enzo Cucchi remains memorable, which some people tried to tear and on which they threw eggs. From 2005 to today Codalunga it has hosted almost two hundred artists from all over the world and remains stubbornly and obstinately tied to the original mission: to offer artists a place to test and make mistakes without any pressure in a context that is not necessarily prepared or interested.