This article is published in number 23 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until June 8, 2021
Factories that become foundations. Imposing buildings that over time are emptied of their functions to find others, such as gigantic carapaces that are colonized by new forms of life and bacteria, to support a changing city, history that asks for more: it happened in London, in Berlin, Lisbon, so much so that it creates a genre of its own. In recent years we have danced and visited art exhibitions in many of those former sugar factories and in many of those old paper mills around Europe that at times we have the suspicion that in these places something has never been worked and produced. for real, and that they were born precisely to host installations and make people float inside them.
People who float in space in search of traces and a now dematerialized “weight” of history. But there are places where this sense of estrangement is not so acute, and instead a special continuity is created between the various possible ways of living the same environment. There are places where people worked which then became homes for artists and then turned into places to visit, and they tried not to lose these founding elements: the work, the artist’s space, the sense of the public.
In Rome such a place is the Pastificio Cerere Foundation in the still student district of San Lorenzo: this being a student gives him an “artisanal” dimension that goes well with the existence of a contemporary art center in the middle; there is a certain industriousness, an idea of ​​a laboratory that is reflected in the space of the Foundation.
Born as a pasta factory in 1905, in the seventies Spazio Cerere started hosting a group of artists giving the possibility that every artist asks for in the course of a lifetime: a place to have good light, unlimited ceilings and above all the freedom to stay. , to “mess around”. The amalgam has succeeded well, because this idea of ​​offering opportunities to young artists in search of a dimension still continues today also through scholarships, but above all it is based on the idea that the exhibitions are flanked by a series of workshops and studios . A magnificent mess, in fact.
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