From June 4 to October 18, 2026, the Sala delle Capriate in Bergamo’s Palazzo della Ragione will host Tabula Plena, a site-specific installation signed by Fosbury Architecture and Claire Fontaine, as part of the Pedagogy of Hope program promoted by GAMeC - Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo. The project is part of a curatorial framework that places education at the center of museum practice, interpreting it as a space of social and cultural transformation. The artistic direction of Pedagogy of Hope is entrusted to Lorenzo Giusti with the curatorship of Sara Fumagalli, Valentina Gervasoni, Irene Guandalini, Sara Tonelli and Rachele Bellini.
The intervention is configured as a permanent workshop inspired by the thought of Paulo Freire, whose approach to education as a practice of emancipation constitutes the main theoretical reference of the operation. In this perspective, knowledge is understood as a critical and shared process, built through the active participation of those involved.
The project develops from the idea that the contemporary museum can take on the function of an open educational space, oriented toward the production of knowledge. Inside the Hall of the Trusses, Fosbury Architecture designed a habitable and accessible platform, conceived as a relational and pedagogical device, capable of welcoming heterogeneous audiences and activating continuous forms of interaction.
The facility houses three free permanent workshops and a central area intended for meeting and collective reading. The entire facility was also developed through a participatory process that involved thirteen classes from schools of different types and grades in Bergamo and its province. The work with male and female students included a series of workshop activities led by GAMeC educators and designed by Fosbury Architecture, during which the participants developed interpretations of the proposed themes by transforming them into visual signs. These elements, defined as glyphs, were later integrated into the exhibition space and applied to the surface of the platform, conceived as a large blackboard.
The intervention thus transforms the historic hall of the Palazzo della Ragione into an environment that combines architectural, educational and participatory dimensions. The set of installed devices proposes an experience that relates historical heritage with contemporary learning practices, fostering new ways of relating space, knowledge and public.
In dialogue with the workshop structure is Claire Fontaine’s site-specific intervention, which addresses the relationship between digital languages, communication technologies and the construction of social perception. The installation consists of five suspended light sculptures that reproduce emoji, elements of the contemporary visual lexicon widely used in digital communication.
The works, placed in the space above the visitors, represent three different visions of the interconnected world through symbols drawn from the imagery of digital platforms: the planet Earth, the smartphone and the gift package. These symbolic objects are removed from their original interactive context and transformed into static physical presences, highlighting the distance between screen-mediated experience and direct construction of social relationships. The intervention also reflects on the dynamics of consumption and the role of desire in contemporary society.
“Wondering what gift we would all need today,” writes Claire Fontaine, “or what we really desire to give or receive, is not a trivial exercise, because it forces us to think about ourselves in relation to the giver or the receiver, and to ask ourselves what we can take away from monetary transactions and turn it into a gesture of free and beneficial love.”
Emoji, originally designed as tools for emotional synthesis in digital contexts, are thus extracted from their communicative flow and made into three-dimensional objects. This translation produces a suspension effect that invites a reconsideration of the familiarity of such images, returning them as elements capable of activating a reflection on contemporary forms of representation. In this sense, the intervention is configured as an unlearning device, aimed at questioning perceptual automatisms and established habits.
Three permanent workshops also find space within the project, developed in collaboration with subjects active in the field of artistic and educational research. The workshop curated by Numero Cromatico proposes an investigation into the processes of algorithmic thought construction through the use of visual and combinatorial devices. The configurations produced by the participants highlight the constructed and non-neutral nature of algorithms.
In contrast, the Busillis workshop, conducted with URPS - Ufficio Resurrezione Parole Smarrite and Sabrina D’Alessandro, focuses on linguistic imagination and subjective interpretation as tools of knowledge. The narratives produced by the audience flow into a constantly updated collective sound archive, accessible in the arena space. The third workshop, Let’s Talk about Education, developed with Adelita Husni Bey, invites a critical reinterpretation of educational language through the analysis of definitions and categories related to the world of schooling. The project aims to highlight the contradictions inherent in systems of knowledge representation, stimulating forms of collective reflection.
The program extends beyond the main installation with a calendar of public meetings. The first event is scheduled for Saturday, June 6, from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., with the dialogic workshop Common Evidences, curated by the Swiss collective microsillons. The meeting, developed as part of the Pedagogy of Hope Public Program, is part of a research path that critically takes up Paulo Freire’s thought and proposes a reflection on the tools needed to rethink the forms of common living. The activity focuses on the analysis of power structures and the possibilities of building alternative educational practices capable of making visible the dynamics of oppression and activating forms of solidarity. The event is free of charge, is held in English with translation into Italian and requires reservations.
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| Bergamo, Palazzo della Ragione becomes educational laboratory of Fosbury and Claire Fontaine |
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