The artists were invited by the classroom – the art and education centre opened in April 2016 in Milan -, to develop a thought about the care of the image in the context of a specific project, which saw them meet the most prestigious Italian restoration and conservation institutions chosen as production materials. Handle with care, indeed, is the title of the multiple channels video made on this occasion inside the Opificio delle Pietre Dure in Florence and the Centro per la Conservazione e Restauro in Venaria, both unique places, that for the very first time have been unveiled by the look of contemporary art. Here, the artists have been in direct contact with the materialness of the art object, its value and its endurance, with the rituals and gestures of restorers and scientists who face themselves for centuries with the creation, destruction and re-creation of the artwork, going beyond the cultural and time boundaries. These Italian excellences, chosen by the artists as ideal set of a thought about the origin of the image, its destruction and transmission over time, are magnifying glasses for the understanding of the art making process, from the raw material to the finished object. This is a very delicate ecosystem, a balanced and age-old system of coexistence among works and people, chemical and emotional reactions, temperatures and sounds, tradition and innovation, craftsmanship and technology, history and future, brought to light by an equally careful and accurate job done by the artists. The work, indeed, develops as a direct survey on the field, without crew, where each fragment is placed inside a coherent vision and, at the same time, offered to the viewer as a separate frame, as a moving image that opens individually towards a thousand other possible tales. Handle with care comes along with a selection of other works created for this project, working as evidences, materials coming from the artists’ lab, objects and symbols around which the research has grown over the course of more than a working year. A sort of dna work, these works (photographs, small sculptures, installations, videos and objects of different sized) are displayed both in the halls of the Centro Restauro in Venaria, and inside the Sala d’Arme in Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, before being moved within a single body in the central space of the Citroniera at the Venaria Reale, the majestic baroque nave designed by Filippo Juvarra and designed as plastic space. [Paola Nicolin]
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