Bulletin #9

“Art needs to recover its humanity.”

A conversation with Enea Righi “Among the invisible joins”

AMONG THE INVISIBLE JOINS Works from the Enea Righi Collection. Berlinde De Bruyckere, Aanèèn-genaaid, 1999, exhibition view Museion 2024. Photo: Luca Guadagnini

The Enea Righi Collection is one of the most visionary and important international contemporary private art collections in Italy. Thanks to a trusting relationship constructed over time, more than 150 works from this important collection, on permanent loan to Museion, are now on public display in the exhibition “AMONG THE INVISIBLE JOINS Works from the Enea Righi Collection”. To mark the occasion, we spoke to Enea Righi about what it means to entrust your collection to a museum, how different artworks can interact and be invisibly linked and, above all, how art continues to excite and unsettle, while talking to us about the conflicts of our time.

What drives your faith in this museum that is so strong you feel you can trust, and entrust your collection to it, rather than keeping it at home?

I think it is an act of mutual faith. From health care to art, I have a public-centered vision. I believe it should be a state-run public system that promotes art in a country. I don’t have a lot of faith in private foundations, apart from certain truly excellent institutions, like Prada or Hangar Bicocca, which are genuine museums. The art and museum system is very weak, because its activity financing is continually decimated. But, as I said before, I believe in it, and I am absolutely convinced that this is the right direction to move in. So, for as long as I can, I will always help museums.

AMONG THE INVISIBLE JOINS Works from the Enea Righi Collection. Massimo Bartolini, La Strada di Sotto, 2011, exhibition view Museion 2024. Photo: Luca Guadagnini

And Museion, in particular.

My relationship with Museion began about 15 years ago. The first exhibition was staged in 2010, and around that time I was thinking about a long-term loan. It was the director at the time, Letizia Ragaglia, who first asked me about it as she wanted to strengthen the structure of the museum collection, reinforce its relations with foreign museums and support its exhibition activities through the loan of artworks. Over time, new works were added, and our relationship was further consolidated. The current Director, Bart van der Heide, and I have very similar views, and we share the same general vision of art.

You have said that collecting is a real, personal, almost physical, need… is this still the case?

It has got worse. There has always been a physical relationship, and even if it seems paradoxical, as you get older these emotions and feelings increase. Let me give you an example. I am very skeptical about the way the art world is moving as it looks to be heading calmly towards disaster. I think it has lost much of its soul and for a while I kept away from the market. There was an excess of painting, and after the NFT wave, there was the African wave…

But…

The situation changed completely thanks to two works. One was by the artist Gabrielle Goliath that I saw displayed at Raffaella Cortese’s gallery. It consists of ten huge videos in which ten women sing an elegy on a loop. In this song, which is perhaps some kind of funeral rite - and therefore incredibly sad - they describe the violence they have suffered. I was stunned. The second I saw last summer during a holiday in Sicily when we visited the Laveronica gallery in Modica. There, I saw a work by the Lebanese artist, Rabih Mroué, that focuses on flight and an idea of what has happened over the years since the war between Japan and the United States. It talks about a form of violence, perpetrated by an invader. An act of war that involves dropping leaflets on a population that is about to be bombed, warning them of the imminent attack and telling them to ‘Leave now’. The Americans did this in Nagasaki and Iraq, the Russians in Syria, the Israelis in Gaza and Lebanon. They are now doing it by SMS. I put myself in the shoes of those poor people and tried to imagine what it would be like if these leaflets landed in Bolzano, saying we will be bombing you in two hours’ time. It is an absolute and terrible form of violence, I think. And it really upset me. That is the beautiful thing about art.

AMONG THE INVISIBLE JOINS Works from the Collection Enea Righi. Walid Raad, We Decided to Let Them Say “We are Convinced” Twice (It was More Convincing this Way), 2005, exhibition view Museion 2024. Photo: Luca Guadagni

So “politically committed art…”

Look, it is true, this is political art, committed art. But I am not interested in any particular political choice or stance. What interests me is its attitude to the human being, who has to overcome these situations. Art needs to recover its humanity, the humanity of the relationship between human beings and between communities. This is the true function of art, and it is what interests me most. This is more or less the thread that runs through the exhibition at Museion.

The exhibition at Museion also talks about the invisible relationships between different artworks, and between the collector and the works themselves, as they reflect his or her vision of life. What are the strongest, most characteristic features of this vision?

A collection absolutely represents its collector and that is the beauty of art. I get very bored when I see collections that are always the same, as they have been put together by the same old galleries and often by architects or gallery owners, but not by collectors. At the exhibition I looked again, first at Walid Raad’s splendid work We Decided to Let Them Say “We are Convinced” Twice (It was More Convincing this Way), which is as topical as ever in the context of the international conflicts we are currently experiencing. I can make a political judgement about this, but I can’t judge the system. I am not on one side or the other. I believe the bottom line is, as I have already said, that we need to recover our humanity by overcoming ideologies that cause disasters at all levels. And I believe that art can play an extremely important role in this. Like the duet in the exhibition between Anna Boghiguian’s work (Woven Winds. The Making of an Economy-Costly Commodities) and Theaster Gates’ video (Billy Sings Amazing Grace), that is excruciating. It narrates an experience of centuries of colonialism and violence, using voices that are vibrant and, at the same time, incredibly powerful. I remember seeing the Gates video for the first time in Toronto and I couldn’t leave the room. I feel the same emotion today, as every time I enter the exhibition room, I am captivated by those voices.

AMONG THE INVISIBLE JOINS Works from the Enea Righi Collection. Anna Boghiguian, Woven Winds. The Making of an Economy – Costly Commodities, 2016, exhibition view Museion 2024. Photo: Luca Guadagnini

And then there is the “laugh” in the work entitled D’io by Gino De Dominicis on the fourth floor.

De Dominicis is one of the few artists who has worked on immortality. Lorenzo (Paini, ed.) and I discuss this work a lot, because each of us has his own interpretation of that laugh, which can be sarcastic or dramatic. The exhibition starts its journey with ‘disaster’ on the ground floor and moves towards a form of hope that is offered on the fourth floor with the beating heart and lights of Massimo Bartolini’s work (Strada di Sotto). But will this be realized? Will we all seek immortality? He laughs at this. And his laugh is the closure of a system.

AMONG THE INVISIBLE JOINS Works from the Enea Righi Collection. Gino De Dominicis, D’io, 1971, exhibition view Museion 2024. Photo: Luca Guadagnini

In a previous interview you said that ideally you would like to write a New Manifesto for contemporary art in Italy. What do you think is most needed in the current museum and art scene?

The state and its various branches must restore the public funding system. Sadly, or perhaps luckily, the contemporary art system does not attract large numbers of people. To achieve that today, all a museum needs to do is organize an exhibition on an Impressionist or a theme related to the Impressionists, like snow, mountains or something like that. You see exhibitions with one painting by a genuine Impressionist alongside ten mediocre works and this attracts an audience and numbers that contemporary art cannot match. Instead, we need to send a message that says even if we don’t attract large numbers, we may perhaps change people’s consciences. And if you change the consciences of twenty thousand people, you won’t have 100,000 admissions, but you are helping twenty thousand people to think.

Museion Bulletin editorial team: Caterina Longo and Mara Vicino

The exhibition AMONG THE INVISIBLE JOINS Works from the Enea Righi Collection is on display at Museion until 02.03.2025. Opening times Tue-Sun 10am - 6pm, Thu 10am - 10pm (free admission from 6pm)

The exhibition presents a wide range of artworks, architectural projects and artist’s books by renowned international artists. The artworks selected encourage viewers to reflect on the transitional spaces of contemporary existence, where socio-political tensions interweave with artistic expression.

Bulletin 2024

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