Lina Bertucci
In occasion of the opening of the Centre for Contemporary Art in Via Modane 16 in Turin in 2001, the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo invited Lina Bertucci, a New York-based photographer of Italian origin, to undertake a project dedicated to the San Paolo quarter, so as to set up a new relationship between the life of the Centre and the district right from the start.
«The idea is to open the new exhibition space to the residents of the area, so that they feel it belongs to them», explains Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, president of the Fondazione. «When we will open the doors of the Centre in a special preview next spring, the first people we will allow in will be those who live or work in the area, photographed by Lina Bertucci in the past few months».
The idea is not just to set up a new dialogue with the quarter, but also to highlight further one of the main objectives of the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo: to render the various expressions of contemporary art accessible to an ever-larger public via a veritable programme of popularisation of current artistic trends. As of September, it is the Centre’s neighbours who will be the sought-after public of exhibitions, performances, collections of videos and films, congresses, seminars and teaching workshops.
Lina Bertucci’s exhibition constitutes a sort of “welcome” to the citizens who have been given the chance to visit the new structure free of charge and “make their own” a project that offers the city important new opportunities for international exposure.
Lina Bertucci says: «The thing that interested me at the outset was the ‘working-class’ history of the quarter. I like stories linked to the movement of people from south to north and the places that change through time.
At the start, I looked for places that hadn’t changed over the years… Little factories where you still see people at work; a technical institute where boys learn to work… We started from this point before spreading our work to seek the families in the area. It was like cataloguing the types of resident before going back in time to their origins…
I came to know of a reality that was different to what I had imagined. Life really has got better. And the quarter is strongly united. People live well here and you can feel it.»
