{"id":105000,"date":"2019-09-02T10:18:30","date_gmt":"2019-09-02T08:18:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.castellodirivoli.org\/tribe-event\/for-an-imaginist-renewal-of-the-world-the-alba-congress-1956-2019\/"},"modified":"2025-11-25T14:25:15","modified_gmt":"2025-11-25T13:25:15","slug":"for-an-imaginist-renewal-of-the-world-the-alba-congress-1956-2019","status":"publish","type":"tribe_events","link":"https:\/\/www.castellodirivoli.org\/en\/evento\/for-an-imaginist-renewal-of-the-world-the-alba-congress-1956-2019\/","title":{"rendered":"For an Imaginist Renewal of the World. The Alba Congress: 1956-2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cOur Congress is like a huge and unknown chemical reaction\u201d.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Pinot Gallizio, 1956<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

For an Imaginist Renewal of the World. The Alba Congress: 1956-2019 <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

From September 21 to 22, 2019<\/strong><\/p>\n

Alba (CN)<\/p>\n

Drafted by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev and Caterina Molteni<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Castello di Rivoli Museo d\u2019Arte Contemporanea and Fondazione CRC are organizing from 21 to 22 September 2019, For an Imaginist Renewal of the World. The Alba Congress: 1956-2019<\/em>, a poetic reenactment of the First World Congress of Free Artists that took place from 2 to 8 September 1956 in Alba (Pinot Gallizio\u2019s and Elena Verrone\u2019s hometown), which anticipated by a year the foundation of the International Situationist in Cosio di Arroscia, hometown of the artist Piero Simondo.<\/p>\n

With the theme \u201cThe Free Arts and Industrial Activities\u201d, the congress gathered artists and intellectuals from eight different countries, with the participation of representatives of the International Letterism, of the Nuclear Art Movement and the dissolved CoBrA group, under the coordination of the Experimental Laboratory of the International Movement for an \u201cImaginist Bauhaus\u201d (MIBI), founded by Asger Jorn, Pinot Gallizio and Piero Simondo in September 1955.<\/p>\n

The three artists proposed a project of relationship between art and technique in contrast with the functionalist approach of the time. \u201cBased on a subjective artistic research in favor of a democratic and collaborative vision of an art accessible to all<\/em>\u201d, states the director of Castello di Rivoli Museo d\u2019Arte Contemporanea Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, \u201ctheir laboratories were conceived as a space of collective and experimental work, in which artistic sensitivity met the scientific and alchemic knowledge of materials (dust, resins, pigments). The interests extended to popular cultures and urban planning with the aim of realizing the idea of a \u201cfree\u201d artist, capable of operating and developing his own research transversely in different fields of knowledge.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

In the years preceding the Congress, Asger Jorn had recently completed his experience with the CoBrA group (1948-1951) and traveled around Europe in search of a new collective vitality in the artistic production.\u00a0\u00a0Meanwhile, Pinot Gallizio, a central figure in the Alba socio-cultural life as city councilor, former partisan, passionate researcher of popular cultures, nomadism, botany, chemistry and archeology, had come into contact with the young artist and philosophy student Piero Simondo, who moved to Alba in 1952, where he attended his girlfriend and philosophy student Elena Verrone. Gallizio and Simondo met soon after at a conference in Alba by Simondo and Michele Lo Sacco on the theme of German Expressionism.<\/p>\n

In Albisola in 1955, Gallizio and Simondo met Asger Jorn for the first time. The Danish artist had organised in those years the International Ceramics Meeting<\/em>involving part of the Nuclear\u2019s, Lucio Fontana, Karel Appel and Corneille, Emilio Scanavino and Tullio Mazzotti d\u2019Albisola. This exhibition introduces the artists into the debate against functionalism thanks to a new exhibition organised on the occasion of the International Congress of Industrial Design<\/em>of the X Triennale di Milano. In the dispute over the relationship between art and technique, in particular addressed to Max Bill\u2019s functionalist aesthetics, the artists play a central role in ceramics. The use of this material, thanks to the element of unpredictability present in the processes of cooking and taking color, allowed to project standardized and functional design objects from a perspective based on the dynamic experience of matter.<\/p>\n

The First Congress of Free Artists <\/em>started from these assumptions and concluded with the adoption of a common theoretical platform centered on the idea, dear to the Lettrists, of a \u2018unitary urbanism\u2019: the construction of an environment that, thanks to the synthesis of art and technique, was the place of a future lifestyle.<\/p>\n