From April 1 to July 5, 2026, the unprecedented project Beyond the Clouds. Beyond the Clouds transforms XNL Piacenza - Centro d’arte contemporanea, teatro e musica della Fondazione di Piacenza e Vigevano into a plural narrative space that involves and relates all its environments, weaving different contemporary artistic languages around the evocative theme of the sky and its transformations. An art exhibition, a theater show and a sound itinerary dialogue with each other to build a common imaginary, interpreted through different perspectives.
Inspired by the Trilogy of the Plains by U.S. writer Kent Haruf, who died in 2014, Beyond the Clouds is proposed as a journey between contemporary art, film narratives, sound environments and poetic voices. The journey aims to evoke the plain as told by literature and cinema: a shared sensory space in which silences and sounds, solitude and community, light and fog coexist on the same horizon.
Curated by Chiara Gatti, Paola Pedrazzini and Gianmarco Romiti, with the participation of the Storyville collective, the exhibition investigates the theme of clouds in their visual and symbolic dimension, crossing different fields such as art, literature, cinema and poetry. The project brings together the works of eighteen contemporary artists, including Olivo Barbieri, Leandro Erlich, Laura Grisi, Jeppe Hein, Dominic Kiessling, Laetitia Ky, Piero Manzoni, David Medalla, Filippo Minelli, Marie-Luce Nadal, Mauro Pace, Gabriele Picco, Marco Ricci, Martin Romeo, Denis Santachiara, Mario Schifano, Fausta Squatriti, Alfred Stieglitz and Storyville, in ideal dialogue with great figures of theart of the ancient and modern, taken as iconographic references of a timeless visual tradition.
The exhibition brings together paintings, sculptures, site-specific installations and film sequences that have entered the collective imagination, taken from films by Federico Fellini, Ermanno Olmi, Akira Kurosawa, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Theo Angelopoulos. A unique sensory landscape thus takes shape among XNL’s spacious rooms and Art Nouveau staircases, which also involves XNL Teatro and XNL Musica in the construction of an immersive experience.
“In dark days when the daily clouds are the fumes of war, the exhibition declares from its title that, beyond the clouds, horizons open up that transcend the dramas of the present,” says curator Chiara Gatti. “There remains, however, an awareness that art has the task and responsibility to tell the story of reality. Thus, by appealing to the eternal iconography of the sky, extremely rich in meanings and symbologies, the path crosses liminal places, spaces of transformation, where the image of the cloud, in its sensory declinations, becomes utopia, but also an invitation to lift the gaze - not as an escape or evasion - but as another and possible perspective, admirably expressed in the work Free by Laetitia Ky, with its wings of freedom open to the horizon.”
Throughout the centuries, clouds have continued to fascinate artists and writers, stimulating new expressive experiments without losing their strong symbolic value. They can be interpreted as allegories of moods and inner tensions, but also as representations of concepts ranging from the divine to power, from the afterlife to melancholy. Metaphors of man’s mental projections, in which earthly themes are transformed into universal dimensions, such as travel, desire, and the unknown, they become a space for contemplation of the cosmos and the spirit, a boundary between what is visible and what remains invisible.
Theinstallation, designed by Massimo Ferrari, Claudia Tinazzi and Annalucia D’Erchia of the Department of Architecture, Construction Engineering and the Built Environment of the Politecnico di Milano, is on two levels organized in two distinct sections. On the ground floor, a fluid and immersive environment hosts site-specific installations complemented by asound experience created by XNL Musica together with the Department of New Languages of the Conservatory of Piacenza. A multichannel sound system accompanies the audience in an ascending and descending movement, evoking natural phenomena, cosmic vibrations and invisible dimensions. In this way, the visitor is invited to go beyond the physical limits of the exhibition space, embarking on a perceptual journey to what lies beyond thought, beyond the clouds. The sound path, curated by Gianmarco Romiti, presents an experimental installation by composer S. Ali Hosseini, designed to transform space into an immersive three-dimensional environment. Through the use of spatial acoustic technologies and interactive devices, sound is distributed in space as a physical and narrative presence. The work is configured as a dynamic sound organism, in which the listener becomes an active part of an ever-changing auditory landscape, evoking the lightness and mutability of clouds.
“In dialogue with XNL Arte’s visual installations and XNL Teatro’s performances, the sound installation contributes to building a polyphonic and multisensory experience,” says Gianmarco Romiti. “The viewer is thus guided on a journey between light, shadow, images, words and sounds, where the sound element not only accompanies the vision, but itself becomes narrative material, evoking the lightness, power and mutability of clouds and the sky. Through this intervention, XNL Musica consolidates its role as a laboratory of experimentation, exploring new possibilities of interaction between art, technology and sensory perception, and contributing to making the exhibition Beyond the Clouds an immersive, intense and all-encompassing experience, capable of stimulating reflection, emotion and wonder.”
The installation, conceived as a sound device with spatial progression, is articulated in several levels of diffusion: a first system of loudspeakers generates a soundscape with low intensity and wide dispersion, which accompanies the visitor without dominating the environment. Gradually, the sound leads toward the fulcrum of the experience, consisting of an eight-speaker multichannel system arranged in a circle within an essential space, characterized by reduced lighting to encourage prolonged listening. The transition from ambient diffusion to a concentrated immersive field ensures narrative continuity and precise management of sound dynamics.
On the second floor, the journey continues between painting, sculpture and video installations with archival materials reworked by the Storyville collective, which use cinematic and iconographic images to explore the sky and clouds as symbolic places of observation, transformation and imagination.
At the same time, XNL Teatro develops two lines of intervention: on the one hand, narrative insights that accompany the audience along the exhibition route, and on the other hand, the project Delle nuvole o dell’identità, a cycle of three performances curated by Paola Pedrazzini. In these events, contemporary theater offers new perspectives on the themes of identity, memory, dreams and illusion. The program opens on March 21 with Autoritratto, written and performed by Davide Enia, winner of two Ubu 2025 Awards as best actor or performer and for best new Italian text. Beginning in 1980s Palermo and the 1992 massacres, Enia weaves story, body, word and dialect into a personal and collective self-portrait that takes on the tones of a civil tragedy, questioning the relationship between individual and community, private memory and public history. The second event, scheduled for April 16, is Nel blu. Avere tra le braccia tanta felicità, a show by and with Mario Perrotta dedicated to the figure and songs of Domenico Modugno, also awarded the Ubu 2025 Prize for best sound project. Through songs that have entered the national imagination, the show builds a portrait of an artist and a country suspended between reconstruction and desire for happiness, where the dream of “flying” becomes a metaphor for individual and collective emancipation. The cycle concludes on May 6 with King Lear died in Moscow, a choral performance directed by Argentine artist César Brie. The work evokes the history of the Goset, Moscow’s Jewish theater, among the most significant of the 20th century, and through the figures of Michoels and Zuskin, persecuted by the Stalinist regime, reflects on the identity of the artist and the relationship between art and power, creative freedom and repression.
In the confrontation between visual arts and theater, the second floor of XNL is thus transformed into a space for poetic and critical reflection, in which dream and memory become tools to interrogate the present and imagine new possibilities of being.
Around the exhibition, XNL Piacenza also offers a program of free educational activities aimed at schools of all levels, with the goal of bringing students and teachers closer to the themes and works on display through a participatory, critical and inclusive approach. Finally, the Oltre le nuvole project includes an accessible route developed in collaboration with the Union of the Blind and Visually Impaired of Piacenza and with the contribution of its president Filippo Siciliano. The exhibition is conceived as an experience to be traversed with multiple senses: immersive installations will allow visitors to “inhabit” the clouds through sounds and theatrical narratives, while the paintings, photographs and sculptures will be accompanied by audio descriptions that can be activated through QR codes. On the second floor, Marco Ricci’s painting Landscape with Waterfall will be explorable through a tactile reproduction, while a sculpture by Gabriele Picco will also be made in a three-dimensional version to allow exploration with the hands.
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| XNL Piacenza, an unprecedented project on the clouds interweaves contemporary art, theater and music |
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