A new project promoted by theUniversity of Turin reactivates the archive of Chiara Fumai, an artist who died prematurely in 2017. The documentary fund, kept since 2018 at the CRRI - Castello di Rivoli Research Center, becomes the starting point of a participatory path dedicated to artistic memory.
The project, entitled OCCULTA - Observatory for the Collective Care of Techno-Archival Languages, was created with the aim of enhancing artist archives and building shared forms of cultural memory. The initiative revolves around the Chiara Fumai Fund, preserved in the research center of the Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art, which participates in the project as an institutional partner.
Born in Rome in 1978 and died prematurely in Bari in 2017, Chiara Fumai developed a performance practice strongly characterized by an interest in marginal, rebellious or forgotten female figures. Her research intertwined themes related to feminism, the spiritual dimension and occult imagery, used as critical tools to question dominant narratives.
The OCCULTA project addresses the archive not as a place of preservation, but as an active space for the construction of memory. Through workshops and public moments, the initiative aims to generate new readings of the materials preserved in the Fumai Fund and to experiment with ways of collectively curating the archival heritage.
The program kicks off in May with theCo-curating Atelier, a series of workshops aimed at participants selected through an open call. During these meetings, participants will work directly on archival documents both at CRRI and in the Turin cultural space Mucho Mas! The group will be involved in devising possible ways of displaying and presenting the materials, developing exhibition hypotheses that will flow into a restitution open to the public in the spaces of the Rivoli Castle.
A second phase of the project is the Affective Archives workshops. Participants will be invited to reflect on their own relationship with personal memory, building their own personal archives with objects, documents and biographical traces. These materials will be shared and discussed collectively, transforming the archive into a symbolic tool for storytelling and reappropriation of individual memories.
The journey will conclude in the fall of 2026 with a public event hosted at the Castello di Rivoli on the occasion of the Giornata del Contemporaneo, an initiative promoted by AMACI - Associazione dei Musei d’Arte Contemporanea Italiani. The final event will consist of a series of lectures in the touch and speech format, curated by the project’s scientific committee and designed as a tribute to the performative dimension that characterized Chiara Fumai’s work.
The initiative stems from a collaboration between the University of Turin and the Research Center of the Castello di Rivoli and is conceived and coordinated by Cristina Voto, a lecturer and researcher at the Department of Humanistic Studies of the University of Turin. The project involves scholars and scholars from different disciplinary fields - including comparative literature, Italian studies, media and performing arts - and involves the participation of the Department of Philosophy and Educational Sciences, the Department of History and the cultural association Mucho Mas!
"OCCULTA," explains Cristina Voto, “stems from the desire to bring into dialogue university research, heritage enhancement practices and forms of collective curation around the Chiara Fumai Fund, which is kept by the CRRI - Castello di Rivoli Research Center. Funded by the Department of Humanities of the University of Turin as a Third Mission project, OCCULTA opens an accessible and shared work space, designed for those who wish to participate even without specific skills in art, archiving or curating. Through moments of meeting, discussion and hands-on activities, the project invites questions about what it means today to ’make archives’: what traces we choose to preserve, how we read them, how we relate them, how they become shared narratives. By activating archives in the relationship between personal memories and artistic practices, OCCULTA promotes participatory processes and a collective reflection on personal and artist heritages. The archive is thus understood as a living space, where traces do not remain specialized material, but become tools for reading, relating and shared imagination, capable of generating connections, alliances and new forms of cultural participation.”
"OCCULTA represents an important institutional synergy between Rivoli Castle and the University of Turin. The shared intention to look at archival heritage as an area in which the high value of scientific and academic research is updated through a more participatory and inclusive mode flows into the project. In this context, Chiara Fumai’s practice can best be kept alive for future generations of artists and scholars," says Marcella Beccaria, head of the CRRI
Send an email to progetto.occulta@proton.me with your first name, last name, age and a motivational text (max 1000 words): why are you interested in participating and what would you like to share in the journey?
No artistic, curatorial or archival skills necessary
Deadline: April 6, 2026
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| An open call in Turin to explore and reactivate Chiara Fumai's archive |
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