Press conference to introduce the new Director of Castello di Rivoli

New Castello di Rivoli Director Francesco Manacorda, who took office at the beginning of the year, met with the press today, Tuesday, January 30, 2024, to present his vision for the museum and the 2024 Exhibition Programme.

Francesca Lavazza, President of the Museum, in welcoming the new Director, comments:

“With the appointment of the new Director, Francesco Manacorda, Castello di Rivoli reaffirms its identity and perspective within the international art scene. Over the past forty years, the museum has cultivated a dynamic culture, solidifying its prominent position in the field of contemporary art and its languages. This institution has been instrumental in exploring the complexities of our time, tracing creative movements that originated and radiated from this very space. Castello di Rivoli serves as a benchmark for an ever-expanding audience, thanks to its openness to new projects and initiatives. I am confident that Francesco Manacorda will carry forward these activities with enthusiasm, foresight, and expertise. Since its establishment in 1984, the museum has consistently anticipated trends and engaged in experimentation, which helped to understand and interpret an ever-evolving world. I extend my best wishes to the new Director and the entire Castello di Rivoli team for the realisation of this ambitious and innovative programme.”

Manacorda’s statement below summarises the values and principles that animate his vision for Castello di Rivoli and the guidelines underlying his five-year mandate.

The main mission of a contemporary art museum is to embed art in civic society, making it visible, relevant and meaningful. In this process, the museum must foster a growing community of people who understand, interpret, and participate in artistic innovations. Central to this civic role is the way in which the museum validates, giving strength and value to contemporary art, and in its duty to enable the public to intellectually and emotionally experience such validation.

The museum has clear duties to the public, the artists, and the culture of which it is an instrument. To the public, the museum must be a platform where it empowers, through art and culture, its visitors to decode the world around them. In relation to artists, it must amplify their voices and enable them to represent the issues that are most pressing to them. In relation to culture, the museum has the task of bringing diverse cultures into dialogue and continuing to enrich the artistic heritage of its community.

The five principles and key points aimed at completing the mission described above are:

1. The value of art

Castello di Rivoli is a museum built around Arte Povera and as such has the duty to tell the stories of art using this movement as a crucial point, tracing its legacies and the developments in artistic discourse that this movement facilitated. Nevertheless, the museum also has a duty to insert Italian art into the international discourse and vice versa, promoting dialogue, exchange and encounters while maintaining a very important gender balance and incorporating non-Western perspectives to engage with the cultural evolutions taking place today. In order to make contemporary art more accessible to the general public, topics of general interest that relate to art, such as ecology and the non-human, the scope of spirituality and the impacts of digital technologies will be foregrounded.

One of the strengths of Castello di Rivoli is the contrast between its historic building and contemporary content that establishes the unique condition of ‘future in the past’. This is a cross-cultural and trans-historical positioning that is perhaps the most urgent for the museum today. Conversely, an important strength of all contemporary art institutions corresponds to the future dimension implied in their activity: contemporary artists anticipate the future, and the museum, following them, must become a place where the future is imagined and brought to light. It is therefore necessary to work on a diversified exhibition and educational programme suitable for the 21st century. The museum must help its audiences navigate the future: the greatest value of the art experience is when art takes us by the hand into unknown and unexpected territories, situations, and perceptions.

2. The social vocation of the Museum

Only half of the museum is defined by its cultural activities; the other half of its identity is its public. Castello di Rivoli’s need to build relevance for a wider public does not only go – while embracing it – in the direction of visitor numbers, but also aspires to take charge of putting the museum into the heart of the population. The public is morally the owner of the Castello and its heritage, with the collection first and foremost. Therefore, if a goal is the gradual increase in visitors, this must include a shift in any public perception of the museum as an elitist, difficult to comprehend and distant place.

In order to enhance Castello di Rivoli’s role as part of a shared and beloved heritage and a habitual and recurring destination, it is necessary to make it a social space for diverse audiences. To this end, a meeting place must also be found between different fields through the creation of a “pole of the contemporary” around the museum so as to connect different territories and disciplines, all projected into the present and future beyond the discipline of visual arts.

3. Its international task

Connecting cultures across space and time does not end in an academic task, but encompasses a genuine activity of cultural diplomacy and social weaving. The museum is akin to a public intellectual, aspiring to instigate relevant debates and reflections on our time. It does so by sharing easily usable tools for thinking that enable it to promote exchange and growth for the community and its cultural production. As a space of confrontation, clash and encounter, the museum becomes a place to test the multiplicity of the real and incorporate different and sometimes even conflicting approaches, epistemologies and traditions. In this sense, it is urgent for the museum to continue to open the artistic canon to non-Western epistemological and artistic systems.

4. The educational imperative

Educational practice, understood in the dual etymological sense on the one hand of ‘drawing out’ and on the other of leading into new territories, remains a cardinal point of every art institution. The museum is a machine for training the mind and the heart. And not only for children: it must offer everyone new tools for thinking and feeling. Contemporary art has the advantage of being able to be ‘used’ as a basis for training in unpredictability and curiosity through the openness of the work and its multiple meanings. Immersing oneself in its coils allows us, on the one hand, to develop critical thinking, to go in search of questions rather than answers, and, on the other hand, to train in filtering the relevance of any information or cultural product. Such a pedagogical perspective, so necessary in the current digital age, animates not only the museum’s Education Department, but its entire operation, to accompany visitors from known to unknown territories.

5. The centrality of public heritage

The collection is the sine qua non of every museum, the part without which the institutional edifice collapses. It is what is bequeathed to future generations as cultural memory and intellectual capital. Based on this principle, it is necessary to restore strength, visibility and relevance to the galleries devoted to the collections, making visible and experienceable to the viewer the art historical work that the museum is always undertaking. The construction of public heritage must become a public act understandable to visitors and open to their enjoyment and participation.

Finally, a brief question of method: if the field of art can be likened to the ecosystem model characterised by the interdependence of its actors, it is essential that the museum’s main tools and modi operandi involve radical collaboration and permanent renewal. These are the two ways to avoid the risk of loss of relevance, resilience and effectiveness in today’s world.

Notes to editors:

Francesco Manacorda was appointed Director of Castello di Rivoli on September 26, 2023, at the end of a public selection process by a Judging Committee chaired by Francesca Lavazza, President of Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, and composed of Richard Armstrong, who was Director of The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation from 2008 until July 2023; Andrea Ruben Levi, collector, Friend Benefactor of Castello di Rivoli, member of the Board of Trustees of the New Museum in New York; Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, collector, President of the foundation of the same name, President of Fondazione per l’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea CRT; Sir Nicholas Serota, President of Arts Council England, former Director of Tate.

Francesco Manacorda has been Artistic Director of V-A-C Foundation (2017–22); Artistic Director of Tate Liverpool (2012–17), Director of Artissima (2010-12) and Curator at Barbican Art Gallery (2007-09). From 2006 to 2011 he was Visiting Lecturer in the Curating Contemporary Art department at the Royal College of Art, London. He has co-curated the 2016 Liverpool Biennial and in 2018 the 11th Taipei Biennial.