Creation and rebirth after the flood. At Palazzo d'Accursio, Faenza art reshaped by water.

It opened on December 15, 2023 at Palazzo d’Accursio in Bologna and will remain open until February 4, 2024, the exhibition IMMANENT. The Art of Faenza Reshaped by Water, curated by Matteo Zauli and Eva Degl’Innocenti, promoted by the Municipality of Bologna, Settore Musei Civici Bologna | Musei Civici d’Arte Antica, the Municipality of Faenza, Settore Cultura, Turismo, Sport e Politiche Internazionali dell’Unione Romagna Faentina in collaboration with Scuola Comunale di Musica “Giuseppe Sarti” di Faenza and Scuola di Disegno, Arti e Mestieri “Tommaso Minardi” di Faenza. An installation intended to be an object snapshot of an event that, more than six months later, is struggling to let itself be considered a memory, still deeply conditioning the present of that territory. On the night of May 16, 2023, the overflow of the Lamone River swept over and covered a large part of the city of Faenza with mud, overwhelming the existence of places, things and people. Many cultural institutions were severely affected, including the Manfrediana Municipal Library, private museums, municipal music and drawing schools. And the City of Bologna wanted to give special attention to the flood theme. “We wanted to compose, even within the schedule of cultural initiatives at the end of the year, a gesture of responsibility of how, even through culture, we can make both memory and sharing and community,” said Bologna Mayor Matteo Lepore and Culture Delegate Elena Di Gioia. “To the irreplaceable and painful loss of people with their lives and affections, the flood also overwhelmed private, public places of life, work and even culture. Here, our invitation to the city of Faenza, through its important museums and cultural places, composes a journey of wounded works that contain the instantaneous trace of what happened and simultaneously contain a push for rebirth.”

A piano, a crate for transporting artworks, two ceramic sculptures, six photographs, twelve terracotta vases and several dozen art catalogs are the strongly evocative presences placed in the Urban Room of the Municipal Art Collections. The exhibits bear witness to creation and rebirth after the flood: from destruction to rebirth, through the power of culture, art and creativity. A memory that bears witness not only to a calamity, a dramatic event, but also to an extraordinary positive energy, that of the solidarity that has since then beneficially invaded the affected territories, and that outlines a sign of hope and rebirth on the future horizon. “The flood emergency,” commented the mayor of Faenza, Massimo Isola, “if on the one hand it has deeply marked our territories, at the same time it has opened for Faenza many bridges and collaborations with many public and private subjects of the third sector. Each subject has found in Faenza some original distinctive elements but also commonality with respect to its own identity. With Bologna we opened a discussion and in a very short time we realized that on the theme of the city of art there could be an important space for collaboration. Faenza and Bologna both have a very lively museum network, a very important number of artists and designers. In this direction we thought of proposing this project that enhances our mutual identities reading the flood event from another perspective, with an artistic and creative look. The exhibition should be seen not as a concluding event of a path but as the beginning of a confrontation and opening of a phase in which two cities on the Via Emilia, with different dimensions but with a deep common creative matrix, can collaborate. We are very grateful and honored to have been able to collaborate with the City of Bologna in its realization.”

The piano

Donated a few years ago to the “Giuseppe Sarti” School of Music in Faenza, this Heitzmann & Sohn brand piano produced in the late 19th century belonged to Don Vincenzo Cimatti, a Salesian missionary in Japan and musician and author of 950 musical compositions, who was born in Faenza in 1879 and died in Tokyo in 1965. After World War II, the instrument was purchased by Muky, an artist and poetess who was a leading figure in the cultural life of the Romagna city, who then donated it to the City of Faenza, as an endowment for the Sarti Municipal School of Music.

After the flood of May 2023, the instrument is musically unserviceable, but it remains a unique testimony to the disaster and has come back to life in its transformation into the installation of this exhibition.

Terracotta Vases

These sixteen vases, resurfaced from the mud and found in the corridors common to the Faenza municipal schools of Music “Giuseppe Sarti” and Drawing, Arts and Crafts “Tommaso Minardi,” constitute a true historical memory of the school of drawing, the work of the great Faenza Torniante Gino Geminiani, a historic teacher of the school founded in 1796 on the intuition and impulse of Felice Giani.

Carlo Zauli / Zolla

Within the exhibition itinerary of the Carlo Zauli Museum, in the historic clay cellar there was space for this sculpture belonging to the Zolla typology, a great example of the sculptures that the Faenza artist Carlo Zauli (1926-2002) created between the mid-1970s and early 1980s with a black German stoneware, symbolically dedicated to the plowed field, a perfect synthesis of harmony between man and nature.

The work had been exhibited in 2015 at the Museo Civico Medievale in Bologna in the exhibition Le Zolle, dedicated to Zauli as part of ART CITY Bologna and on the occasion of Arte Fiera. In the exhibition project, the collections of the Museo Civico Medievale, archetypal masterpieces of our artistic and cultural tradition, had entered into dialogue with a representative nucleus of one of the founding themes of the Romagna sculptor’s artistic research: the Earth. Zauli investigated, through his own expressive language and stylistic cipher, the relationship between the individual and the Earth, in its most natural form: the primal and constituent element of the “clod of clay.” The Sod returns to dialogue with the Civic Museums of Bologna: originally a primal, monolithic geometric form, black in color, it now presents itself to our eyes divided into two parts, red in color. It has changed shape and color.

The work, swept away by the mud and the objects it brought with it, fell splitting and covering itself with that reddish sludge due to the leakage from the sacks of tons of iron oxide stored there, thus becoming a symbol strongly charged with meaning and memory. Hard hit by the flood of May 2023, yet not destroyed, but transformed.

Wei Bao / Trail of flow

After winning first prize under 35 at the sixty-second Premio Faenza and being invited to a two-month residency, Wei Bao, a young ceramic talent active in Jingdezhen, China, found himself confronted not only with the local ceramic customs and traditions but also with the dramatic situation of the city devastated by last May’s flood.

This resulted in works in which the artist applies to his own typical aesthetics dominated by circularity-symbolic of the ancestral ceramic work related to turning pots, but also of the concept of time in Chinese culture, marked by cyclically occurring events-elements witnessing the catastrophe, particularly oxides and clays created in the cellars of the Zauli Museum, in which the historical stoneware used was mixed with oxides and mud from the flood.

In addition, the concept of circularity in Chinese cultural tradition becomes a message of hope and rebirth that sees in the repetition of changing events the ability to maintain harmony in society. The mud of destruction has given rise with its alluvial clays to the creation of a new work, Trail of Flow.

Wooden crate

A small wooden crate almost completely covered in mud is witness not only to the flood but also to the passage of an artist-in-residence at the Carlo Zauli Museum. He is David Casini, a Tuscan artist who was invited in 2005 and then stayed in Faenza for three years. An artist who now lives and works in Bologna. The typical “Fragile” inscription still legible seems to allude not only to the nature of the work that once found a home in the small crate but to the condition of objects in the face of the unpredictable unleashing of natural events.

Archive Books of the Carlo Zauli Museum

Among the most important cultural losses due to the flood are certainly books. From public to private libraries, from museums to stores they represent perhaps the most profound loss of memory and cultural heritage. In this case, these books, unrecoverable, were part of the historical archives of the Carlo Zauli Museum, to this day almost totally devoid of some fundamental titles, linked to key episodes in the artistic life of the Romagna artist or the first two decades of his museum activities.

Photographs by Cristina Bagnara

Immediately after the flood, the Carlo Zauli Museum turned into a veritable construction site, in which the entire staff, friends and a great many volunteers took turns in the hard work of saving and preserving archival items. Plaster molds, models, unfinished works, furniture were pulled from the mud, washed, sometimes restored. In those early weeks Cristina Bagnara, a photographer from Cervia who had already produced a valuable reportage on the museum in the past, documented the state of affairs and the first recovery activities from which the vivacity and momentum that characterized those days shines through.

IMMANENT. The Art of Faenza Reshaped by Water is the first project expression of an agreement signed between Settore Musei Civici Bologna and Museo Carlo Zauli for the realization of research, artistic, cultural, educational, and participatory activities that can contribute to the research, valorization, dissemination and innovation of the culture of ceramics and the arts.

Hours: Tuesday and Thursday from 2 to 7 p.m.; Wednesday and Friday from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.; Saturday, Sunday and holidays from 10 a.m. to 6:30 p.m.

Four guided tours led by Matteo Zauli are scheduled during the exhibition period:

Sunday, Dec. 17 and Saturday, Dec. 30, 2023 at 5 p.m.; Sunday, Jan. 14 and Sunday, Jan. 28, 2024 at 11 a.m. No reservation is required for participation; admission with museum ticket.

Photo by Giorgio Bianchi - Municipality of Bologna.

Creation and rebirth after the flood. At Palazzo d'Accursio, Faenza art reshaped by water.

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