Room 17
Invited by Gabriele Basilico

Città inattesa is a journey through a city reconstructed from forgotten pieces of Milan. A dormant city, huddled between skyscrapers and large-scale works. It is assembled from sometimes anachronistic places, which seem to have outlived their mission. But also with buildings that would still be able to live and serve its citizens. It is a puzzle of public spaces that virtually recompose the primary needs of social living in the modern world.
Neglect, failures, economic reasons, political reasons, projects aborted before they were even completed. There are many causes that have made these buildings invisible and often a refuge for the “invisibles”.
These are not the suburbs of a city in retreat, but places scattered throughout the urban fabric of a metropolis challenging the sky with new towers. An absent Milan, too distracted by cementing every void to listen to the silences of buildings waiting for ideas and courage. Places that do not ask to remain the same, but are ready to transform themselves, adapting to new functions.
They are facing a silent struggle. Against the deterioration that is slowly crumbling their foundations, and nature which, quietly, takes back the spaces that have been taken from it.

Giovanni Hänninen was born in Helsinki in 1976. He lives and works in Milan.

Room 16
Invited by Gianriccardo Piccoli

Kei Mitsuuchi was a key figure in the last years of Giovanni Testori’s critical career. The writer had seen his drawings exhibited in a Parisian gallery and immediately encouraged him to embark on increasingly challenging projects, creating a large cycle on the Passion of Christ. This culminated in the exhibition organised in 1985 at the church of San Carlo al Corso in Milan (today three of these large canvases are kept in the parish of San Carlo in Novate Milanese). Kei Mitsuuchi, born in Kochi, Japan, in 1948, works on the themes of the Passion, making his own image the model for all the protagonists of the scenes: a radical, powerful involvement that eliminates all distance between the artist and the story of the episode.
“What drives an artist to make himself the only possible figure for all the images and personae he intends to paint? – Testori asked himself in the introduction to the catalogue of the exhibition – It may be that, if not the impossible answer, some glimmer that illuminates the question, perhaps to further enlighten it, is going to give it precisely the Mitsuchian obsession to be him, and him alone, all the figures and all the personae of his Christic tragedy; given that no one, or almost no one, wanted him and wants him as a “companion”; certainly not the societas of the intellects, which is the most improbable and cruel. How can the immensity of solitude be populated by a damned man who lives in her and only in her? If, then, that damned man (as Kei painfully and explicitly affirms) has, as the first spring to signify his existence, the “need to expiate”, what will happen? Who is he going to pillory if not himself, even if he has to paint a prince or a king?”.

Kei Mitsuuchi was born in 1948 in Kochi, Japan. He moved to Paris in 1969. He has been missing for years and has not been heard from since.

Room 15
Invited by Bertozzi & Casoni

For almost four years now, I have been living in Switzerland in the Lower Engadine, in the canton of Graubünden. The place is enchanting, perhaps a little isolated, but often inspiring, in fact it is here that I discovered the world of the “Strahlers” (since the 16th century in German-speaking Switzerland, crystal seekers have been nicknamed Strahlers – or rather light seekers).

What at first glance might appear to be “simply” abstract paintings are actually the result of stratifications, accumulations, thoughts coming, perhaps, from other worlds. Like an ancient medieval palimpsest, from which one can still glimpse what was written in the past and then scraped off to be reused. In this particular group of works, Rocca’s crystal plays a dominant role and becomes a symbolic element, together with the need to want to stop a precise moment in life and turn it into a work of art. Pure and simple handwriting cannot ignore the need to link the act of writing to something that one wants at all costs to remember or pass on – as in Tentativo di volo by Gino De Dominicis, in 1970: “Perhaps because I have never been able to swim, I have decided to learn to fly. In fact, I have been repeating this exercise for three years. I will probably never be able to fly. But if I make my children repeat this exercise, and my children’s children repeat it, and they repeat it to their children, maybe one day a descendant of mine will suddenly find himself able to fly” – emerges from beneath the grid of signs, using the painting that is contaminated by it, partly by organising the space, partly by letting the painting organise itself.

Tania Pistone was born in 1969 in Catania. She lives and works in Sent (Switzerland).

Room 14
Invited by Alessandro Mendini

A few months after his death, Casa Testori pays tribute to Angelo Mangiarotti, a great architect and designer, one of the protagonists of the Milan School. It is a tribute intended to underline his design characteristics: a strong visionary drive combined with an almost artisanal knowledge of materials. Compared to the other exponents of the Milan School, Mangiarotti had a vocation for imagining and designing large infrastructures, as in fact was achieved with the stations of the Milan railway link. Many other ideas, however, have remained on paper, and he has left them to us, recounting them in dozens of studies and drawings that fully convey the fascination of his inventions. The Catania Stadium, which a group of builders commissioned him to build in view of the 1990 World Cup, is one of these inventions.
Mangiarotti, who is capable of drawing almost utopian forms from very everyday references, starts out from the shape of a creel, a cylindrical or spherical cage-shaped fishing tackle, to conceive the Stadium. In fact, the stadium seems to glide over the sheets of paper just like a spaceship. It is a single, compact volume, made up of a reticular structure of steel tubes with light, opaque and glazed infills. When the Beijing Olympic Stadium was inaugurated in 2008, designed by Herzog-De Meuron on a concept by Ai Weiwei (the famous “swallow’s nest”), many people called Mangiarotti to congratulate him because his futuristic idea of twenty years earlier had become reality.For the realisation of this room, the collaboration of Anna Mangiarotti and Kinue Horikawa was essential.

Angelo Mangiarotti was born in Milan in 1921. He died in Milan in 2012.

Room 13
Invited by Matteo Negri

Before being a ‘disposition’ or a ‘feeling’ that one feels towards others, affectus is a man who is intimately affected by what is external to him, he is questioned, called into question, because he is affected by that external object, which forces him to take a position and no longer be what he was before.
For a few years now, I have been working on small notebooks that I make myself, all in the same format, on which I draw my sketches with a black Bic pen.The subjects? The people, especially young ones, with whom I work, the people I meet in public places where I happen to be, known, unknown or dear to me. In particular, I often go into many churches, from the one below my house to the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, and there I draw the central point of the temple: I sit on one of the benches in the middle and look at the object in front of me, be it the altarpiece or the crucifix, or even, why not, one of my superheroes.

Marco Cirnigliaro was born in 1959 in Milano, where he lives and works.

Room 12
Invited by Marco Signorini

Humani nihil a me alienum puto.
A dozen discreet images can speak more than a long time. There is Amanda Knox, Bill Zeller, Aaron Lee Ralston, but no social denunciation or desire to morbidly intrigue the viewer.
It would seem that the sad gaze of Madre e sposa positions itself – suffering with/for – on the tragic and contradictory events of certain faces of the news, which only under this pressure reveal an unprecedented closeness to themselves. A gaze that would almost seem to understand the suffering of the smiling boy who has written to the world that he is too lonely to go on living, who cringes before the pain of our time, but at the same time has the courage to support it. But it would be an unwatchable end, without something else in his eyes.
Falls and relapses (such as that of the base jumper who, after being under a boulder for 127 hours and losing an arm, did not give up his practice); but the very freedom of looking at another’s lapidary denial of self, expressed in All’autore, makes us realise that causality does not exist, because if one can “die” from a crooked look, one can also be lucky enough to see someone who, although no longer there, today generates in the lives of those attached to him.

Annachiara Lodi was born in 1986 in Milano, where she lives and works.

Room 11
Invited by Andrea Bianconi

I like to think of the stairs that connect the two floors of Casa Testori (where my paintings were located) as a metaphor for the two levels at the basis of my painting process: obstinacy and investigation.
Painting is continuous material stratification (obstinacy) that thickens day after day on the canvas, revealing (like an investigation) expressions, concepts and sensations of shapes and colours. Paraphrasing Francis Bacon: “you have to try to pack a lot of things into every single brushstroke”.
Among the works exhibited at Giorni Felici was a paradoxical work: the portrait of my friend Kresnik, a little guy I love very much, portrayed as a five-metre giant. A necessary tribute to a dear person with whom I shared the years of study in Venice.
Pleasure, together with excitement and the eager pursuit of success and popularity are the focus of my latest works.
The intention was to bring to the surface the vacuous shrillness of everyday reality. The most unreasonable contemporary desires have replaced the natural ones. We live our time as a ‘theatre of the absurd’: we feel like protagonists and at the same time strangers in the collective drama of modern society. I am talking about politics and power – the economic one of course, but also the media power of images, representations now devoted exclusively to mass commodification. I try to move like a tightrope walker on that thin line suspended in the void that divides fiction and reality. I want to load the canvases and faces of my characters with matter and poison, in an attempt to make my ideals solid and dangerous.

Aleksander Velišček was born in 1982 in Šempeter Pri Gorici, (Slovenia). He lives and works between Nova Gorica and Venice.

Garden
Invited by Massimo Uberti

The work and the materials I use have always had industrial characteristics: transport vehicles, storing tools, PVC canvases, wood, metal, or ready-made objects such as shelving, a windmill, a forklift.
Nevertheless, the works seem fragile, vulnerable. Although he treats these materials with great care and loving attention, the sculptures can also provoke uncomfortable feelings in the viewer. A huge lorry looks as if it is about to collapse on itself, a completely packed luggage rack serves as an unusual display for unsaleable “manic products”, an escalator has lain limply on a beach, instead of climbing over the dunes…
By placing art in public spaces, the artist has the possibility to reach a potentially infinite number of viewers; many people will be watching his work, without the artist having any relationship with this audience. This means that the interaction and depth of approach between the work and each of the people who see it will be different. In my research, these juxtapositions are the starting point; the public spaces and the materials with which I work my tools.

Wouter Klein Velderman was born in Deventer (Holland) in 1979. He lives and works in Amsterdam.

Room 9
Invited by Giancarlo Norese

There are the lights of the stars and the darkness surrounding them. The forest cannot be seen, it is not there.The focus is on the ability to project oneself outside oneself to take in a new point of view. The environment in which the work was carried out is unusual, due to its conformation and the references to its recent past. The vision was to construct a story by considering this non-neutral space as a nomadic image, in which the game of representing reality is shifted to the mental plane, in a dialectic that I liked to think of as grazing, with a slow and subdued approach to meaning. I combined different languages and told of gravity, of falling, of attraction, of breathing, but also of a glance from nature to man and vice versa. I have chosen to use symbolic forms, from the archetype of the circle to the black and white painting representing a screen, ready to receive images from a possible outpost in space, which bounces them back here, to construct a story made up of contradictions and codes to be deciphered. A frame that has no precise direction; the choice of how to present it can vary and does not condition it, it can also be turned upside down without affecting its substance. Its centre is empty but full of space, an absence awaiting the events of the imagination. It is also a space for reflection and recollection, an area where the gaze can rest. There is a need to take aim at capturing and building things, a need for waiting and silence to be precise. Just there on the outer edge of the construction, you have to stand there, statuesque, concentrated, even if unstable. Perhaps the thought alone is already a work.

Luca Scarabelli was born in Tradate (VA) in 1965. He lives and works between Como and Varese.

Room 8
Invited by Gianni Caravaggio

In these visions in which man is the ideal subject in an embrace with the system given to him by Nature, who can incontrovertibly define which of these relationships is kind and which is violent?
During the act of observing and feeling, the question always arises as to our preference, which binds our gaze to one image or another and passes from one relationship between things to another.
The answer remains a mystery, hovering in our perception in a constant sum of experiences, in a solemn movement of mute fascination.

Graziano Folata was born in 1982. He lives and works in Milan.