Piero Gilardi. Dall’arte alla vita

The exhibition reconstructs a crucial moment in Piero Gilardi's research: when the artist abandoned all object-based production in radical rejection of the artwork as a consumer good, for direct engagement with the social sphere through theatrical animation. The trajectory begins in Turin in the early 1970s with workshops led also within psychiatric institutions: here Gilardi first experimented with a radically different use of art, bringing theatre, masks, and collective play inside total institutions, restoring to patients a body, a voice, a public presence. This method the artist carried forward in the following decades, adapting it to different communities: the workshop — the hospital, the street, the neighbourhood, the square — became his permanent space of work where art placed itself at the service of people, driven by the conviction that it could concretely change lives and take part in the transformation of society. From this practice emerged in Gilardi's theoretical reflection the idea of an aesthetic community as an anticipatory figure of the political community.  From the late 1980s onward, this tension took new form in the large street parades — masks, big heads, grotesque figures — where Piedmontese carnival imagery met the language of anti-nuclear and anti-globalisation protest.