The documentary materials, reconstruct the experience of the Deposito d’Arte Presente (1967–1969), a crucial place for the development of art in the 1960s in Turin that wrote an important chapter related to the beginnings of Arte Povera research.
Granted by the heirs of Marcello Levi (Turin, 1922–2014), main animator and promoter of the Deposito, the material stored at CRRI includes correspondence, press reviews, accounting documents, and photographs, offering a never-before-seen and concrete perspective on the working dynamics of this revolutionary space. The idea behind the Deposito d’Arte Presente was to provide artists, critics, curators, and collectors with a temporary, self-managed space in which to house, preserve, and display contemporary artworks and to encourage, through direct confrontation, reflection on artistic experiences in their own making. The Deposito d’Arte Presente—which was also an association in the traditional sense, as a venue for production and trade—eventually offered a stage for avant-garde music and theater experiences, such as the first performance, produced by the Teatro Stabile di Torino, of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s opera Orgia, a tragedy in verse consisting of a prologue and six episodes.