Maria and Michelangelo Pistoletto brought the factory buildings housing Cittadellarte in 1992. It marked their return to the village where Michelangelo had been born before moving as a child to Turin with his parents. He was no stranger to the arts, his father was a classical artist and painting restorer.
When I return to Biella in 2011 I am escorted on a tour by Lucca a young man from Biella who truly loves what the Pistolettos are attempting to do with the foundation. If I were going to be slang ridden I would say he has drunk the sects kool-aid. He shows me the shop telling me earnestly that everything is sourced from ethical sources and as much from Biella as possible. These include the dresses made from one of the Pistoletto’s twin daughters made from recycled clothes. I find later it is truly a family affair when I am told that one of the daughter’s husbands is the director of the foundation.
Lucca takes me onto the roof of the foundation to show me how swollen and almost torrential the river is after the recent heavy storms. When the Pistolettos brought the factory, many factories in the area had fallen into disrepair, he tells me that now there is a move on to repair them to keep up with the foundation, something really positive for the area.
Here we have a view of the beautiful small town of the Germanic looking city with its pastel colored buildings and graceful spires. The factory itself is incredibly beautiful. Upstairs the roof ceiling has hammer beams and trusses around the edge that make it appear more like a church than a factory for making woolen fabric – its initial use. Maria Pistoletto tells me later that the open space was for drying the cloth as it was windy in the summer when the sun was at its strongest. There would be hundreds of fabric pieces hanging here she says.
One floor down is the gallery to Pistoletto’s work, including some of the ‘minus pieces’, Pistoletto’s arguably most important pieces including the cube of infinity that has been permanently installed in a hospital for oncology in France as well as some of the more powerful mirrored piece, the self portrait made of atomized stars and the barred cage like images as well as some of the structures made for the group works.
I had come here years before when I had been in Turin for Artissima and had sat through a recreation of an early work by Pistoletto from the 60s where people with strange head dresses made of geometric shapes had met and conversed in quasi ponderous texts about utopia. Coming to Biella and Cittadellarte one gets to see the Utopian theory in practice.
Understanding Pistoletto one needs to really come here, to see how his practice has come full circle in some ways with the breaking of the mirrors, a performance that has been made several times now, most memorably for me in Venice.
It is a strange week to be here as well. As events around the world seem to be ramping up. First in the middle-east and Libya moving into Japan with the earthquake and natural disaster. Suddenly the world seems a more fragile place – a place where new solutions will have to be found.
Pistoletto is clear that culture is the answer. It is only through culture not through government that science and the arts can find new solutions. Hence his symbolic tables that he installed in Philadelphia in the shape of the Carribean or the Mediteranean. Here people will sit on different chairs and through sharing of ideas will come up with new solutions to add to the ones we all ready have.
It seems here, as if anything is possible – the buildings repaired and functioning with young and enthusiastic artists coming from around the world, the café turning out yummy food and the river in full torrent. I sit through an extraordinary film by Egyptian Artist Waly Shawty that will be in the next Documenta. All the sets, costumes were made here in the foundation while the puppets came from a collection in nearby Turin. It is spell binding, the puppets appearing life sized and more potent in their roles of crusaders than any actors could have been. Through the artifice the artist rams home the truth that no war, even religious wars are good.
I sit at a table across from a flu ridden Pistoletto prophetically facing a mirror work with a noose in the middle of it. If we don’t do something soon as a world, much more sinister things will happen to us. Ignore these signs at your peril.
