South Tyrol. The Other Italy. Elizaveta Ebner
life and the lives of your families for the sake of hope for the future. Put yourself in the shoes of these people. What do you know about them?
The reaction of the Museion’s administration was not immediate, but nevertheless the only correct one: they gave the migrants the opportunity to speak about themselves. The project was called “Where do you imagine yourself?” Within its framework, meetings were held, at which the migrants were told about the place in front of which they would spend hours on benches, separated from it, however, by an invisible barrier. The experimental project of the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Bolzano helped these people to take the first steps to adaptation and became an opportunity to learn about their stories and life situations. And that was only the beginning. A few months later, migrants, young people from South Tyrol and other European regions were already working together on an art project at Museion. The barriers had been finally brought down. The migrants got an opportunity to become a part of the community, while the community got a chance to feel closer to the migrants.
This art project, like many others, was created through common efforts in the studio – the building located next to the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art. The house-studio was designed, along with the Museion and two bridges – for pedestrians and cyclists, by the Berlin KSV architects, as part of a single museum complex. The interior space of the building was occupied by the South Tyrolean designer Harry Thaler, whom the press usually calls “a London designer of South Tyrolean origin”. Interestingly, during his studies in the capital of Great Britain, Thaler, before setting up his own firm, worked at the office of Martino Gamper, the designer of the Museion Passage. The house-studio was designed as a temporary housing and a workshop for guest artists and curators invited to the Museion in Bolzano (Bozen).
The museum complex continues with two bridges spanning the Talfer river. Though made from the same materials as the museum itself, they were designed curvilinear in contrast to its strict forms. The bridges connect the historical centre of the city with the “new” Bolzano (Bozen), and you will have to cross them in order to look at the last part of the museum complex, located in the modern Don Bosco district.
There used to be a huge garden where Don Bosco district is now, but in 1940, under the Fascist regime, workers who came from various places in Italy to work in the nearby industrial area of Bolzano (Bozen) began to settle here. This project was part of the plan for the Italianization of South Tyrol – the result of the agreement between Hitler and Mussolini concerning the region. The period from 1943 through 1945 was for Don Bosco the time of Nazi occupation. A transit camp was established here, in which the Jews and the partisans of South Tyrol and other occupied territories were usually held before deportation to concentration camps in Germany. Today, you can follow the history of Don Bosco by looking at the few monuments of the past still found on its territory: remnants of the camp wall, sculptures dedicated to the victims of the inhuman regime, and one of the houses for Italian workers, now turned into a museum (casa semirurale, “a semi-rural house”).
People generally go to museums for knowledge and new impressions, but the administraton of Museion reckoned that the opposite is also possible. That is how a small glass pavilion – the Garutti Cube, or the Little Museion, as people call it – appeared in Don Bosco district. The artist Alberto Garutti studied the population of the district and came to the conclusion that its residents have practically no interest for arts. Garutti wanted to change this state of affairs, to establish a dialogue with the city, to become as close to the potential audience as possible, to step down from the creator’s “pedestal”, and to produce a piece of art that would possibly become a link between his work and the audience. As part of this project, it was decided to decentralize the system responsible for contemporary art in Bolzano (Bozen) by moving one work of art from the Museion collection to the outskirts of the city every three months or by creating “autonomous” exhibitions. The simple glass-and-concrete pavilion installed next to a playground became a mini-representation of the Museum of Modern Art. You cannot enter the transparent cubic sculpture – you can only look at its contents from the outside, but when you approach the pavilion, the lighting is turned on at any time of the day (or night). People passing by the Garutti Cube inevitably find themselves in the role of spectators, and over time it becomes an everyday object for them. The pavilion naturally generates around itself numerous meetings of local residents, of people interested in the exhibited works and in art in general. The architectural solution of the Little Museion was made as simple as possible on purpose – so that the concept of introducing modern art into different parts of the city could be continued in the future.
One would think that the residents of Don Bosco remained only outside observers of the Garutti Cube project, but that is not true. Several exhibitions were set up in the pavilion with their active participation. For one of them, residents of the district were asked to bring some of their personal belongings to the cube; those were used to create an exhibition dedicated to the collective activities of the population of Don Bosco. As part of another project, people were invited to turn the walls of the pavilion into a shared diary, which was then exhibited in Museion.
Isn’t art an amazing thing! It can unite; evoke feelings and emotions in people of any age, any culture, and any nationality. The inhabitants of Don Bosco, before the appearance of the Garutti Cube in their district, probably could not have imagined that their thoughts or objects preserving the memory of their lives would one day become museum exhibits.
It is wonderful how one building can put a whole region on the map of the world. The architect Frank Gehry designed the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, and the life of the Basque Country changed dramatically for the better. The whole world started speaking about that part of Spain.
The Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Bolzano (Bozen) did not bring instant international fame to South Tyrol, so what? The most important thing is that Museion has managed to make a difference for its land and for its residents. You will probably say that not everyone will agree with this statement in South Tyrol itself, and that, according to opinion polls, not all the inhabitants of the region are proud of the museum. Well, there are very few things in life that people would be unanimously positive about, especially when it comes to art.
Chapter Eight.
Peace Already?
“Here at the border of the fatherland set down the banner. From this point on we educated the others with language, law and culture”, reads the inscription on the triumphal arch, the Victory Monument in Bolzano (Bozen). The inscription was supposed to look a little different, but at the last moment it was decided to replace the word “barbarians” in the original version with the less specific word “others”. It was officially reported that the phrase on the monument is an imaginary dialogue between a legionary of the Roman Legio X (15 BC) and an infantryman during the Battle of the Piave River, where the Italians blocked the Austrian army’s advance in 1918. The German-speaking residents of South Tyrol did not believe in the story of this imaginary dialogue; for them, the inscription on the Victory Monument was offensive, as it demonstrated the repressive policy of Italy towards their region. Given the historical context in which the ceremonial unveiling of the monument took place, South Tyroleans had every reason for such thoughts. The irony was that the people who were going to civilize them were representatives of a country in which the level of literacy was at that time lower than in their own very small region.
In South Tyrol, the campaign of oppression against its German-speaking residents was in full swing: the population of the region, in the absence of Italian education diplomas, were put out of their jobs in droves, their land was occupied by Italians, who most often came from the very south of the country, and the architectural image of South Tyrolean cities was forcibly changed. In 1923, Ettore Tolomei, the man who is still called the “grave-digger of South Tyrol”, put forward a draft law for South Tyrol which was called the Gentile Reform and affected all the formerly Austrian lands. It was prohibited to use