GIORNI FELICI
Casa Testori
2009 – 2014
“However, I can assure you that what has always helped me to live, and, moreover, to accept life even in its curse, has always been the return home. One makes these outward moves – which can also be violent, destructive – but then the return home gives the very experience of that exit an inexpressible warmth. Because returning does not mean forgetting, it does not mean shaking off violence and destruction”
Giovanni Testori
REOPEN CASA TESTORI
Anna Bernardini and Giuseppe Frangi
It is amazing to discover how there are places that are full of energy, for reasons of history and destiny. Until a few years ago Casa Testori seemed to be simply a big house, full of memories and with a beautiful past behind it. It was not due to a precise calculation or a project studied at the table that at a certain point, three years ago [2009], we tried to reopen its doors. It was a bit of an instinct induced by the place itself: if so much life had passed between those walls, so much new life could have come back into circulation. The good seed that had settled between these walls had to be generated again. New life, even if it is a different life from the one that once existed. This is how Giorni Felici was born: from the conviction that this is a sort of cradle house, where even in times that tend to be unhappy like the ones we are living, there is an energy that stubbornly continues to push in a positive direction.
The vita nova that has entered these rooms is that of many young artists who have found the right place here to show and display themselves, to say what they wanted to say, as an urgency of life and poetry. They are free rooms, not bound to any scheme, not even to those that have gloriously and joyously populated it in the past. A Kunsthaus, we have defined it with a touch of ambition. A place where art circulates, just as everyday life once did. And where everyone – the visitors – can enter, look, understand, leave the trail of their own sensations. This is what Casa Testori wants to be, a place of new visual experiences that open up to many curious gazes, without preconceptions and full of desire.
So, after the two editions in 2009 and 2010, after the exhibition-performance by Andrea Mastrovito, the most voted artist last year (a genius loci…), we have arrived at the new Giorni Felici [2011]. Thanks to the artists who yesterday and today accepted our invitation with great freedom and creativity. Thanks to those who have supported us, in the most varied forms. And sincere thanks to those who have lived in this house in the past, because they have left us free to “inhabit” it in a different way.
THE EXHIBITION
Giorni Felici (Happy Days) was a series of experimental exhibitions in which artists from different backgrounds interacted in a place that undoubtedly arouses enormous fascination, thanks to the creative power of those who have lived there for many years of their lives. After the great success of its first edition in 2009, the Giorni Felici formula was repeated in 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2014, always hosting around twenty artists in as many rooms of the house.