Bologna's Vecchioni brought together in an exhibition for the first time

For the first time, artists’ Vecchioni go on display: Palazzo d’Accursio in Bologna, in the Sala della Manica Lunga, is hosting the exhibition Vecchi Vecchioni until January 9, 2022. Capodanni d’artista on display to celebrate Bologna’s signature New Year’s Eve.

For nearly a century, the passage from the old to the new year has been marked in the capital of Emilia Romagna by the burning of the Vecchione, a gigantic sculpture that, at the stroke of midnight, is burned in Piazza Maggiore, symbolizing the farewell to the year that has just passed. Since the 1990s, the design of the Vecchione has been entrusted by the City Council to artists with ties to the city. The poetics of the artists have enriched the burning of different messages each year, with thoughts related to the human condition and current events, proposing reflections and symbologies: from racism to environmental issues, from the economic crisis to the risks of individualism, to the fears of our days.

The exhibition aims to restore nearly 30 years of history through vintage posters and prototypes made by the artists themselves as miniatures of the large puppets that were burned in the square.

The exhibition opens with the five Vecchioni on a human scale made in the 1990s by Gabriele Lamberti, Pirro Cuniberti, Emilio Tadini, Tullio Pericoli, and Emanuele Luzzati, until now kept in municipal warehouses. It continues with scaled-down models of the Vecchioni of the 2000s: Cuoghi Corsello’s Mago Nero (2005), from which snakes symbolizing funereal thoughts emerge; the “Vecchia” by illustrator and cartoonist Francesca Ghermandi (2007); thework by street artist Ericailcane (2008), an anthropomorphic figure with the heads of his well-known fantasy animals, Marco Dugo’s Frog (2010), Paper Resistance’s Diver who pushes into the abysses of the economic and moral crisis (2011), PetriPaselli’s Mechanical Monkey (2012), which the artists made from scratch just for the exhibition. And again, the watering can hole by the duo TO/LET, a reflection on environmental issues (2013), Andreco’s four-eyed monster (2015), Cristian Chironi’s Donkeys Tower, an imaginative reinterpretation of one of the city’s symbols (2015), and Andrea Bruno’s Hussar, a call to abandon the fear of the stranger (2016). The exhibition is completed by Cantieri Meticci’s participatory Vecchione, made together with a thousand old and new citizens in 2019, the last burning in Piazza Maggiore, and the projection of the digital Vecchione by Chiara Rapaccini, aka RAP, who in 2020 made a poetic animated short film to the notes of Lucio Dalla’s Futura, which she ’virtually burned’ on the municipality’s digital channels at midnight on December 31, 2020.

Finally, the model of the Old Man Old as a Tower, a project of the art collective Parasite 2.0, winner of this year’s call for entries, which, due to the pandemic, will not burn in the square.

The exhibition is open daily from 9:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m., including holidays, and is free to enter.

Bologna's Vecchioni brought together in an exhibition for the first time

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