In Italy, in the Piedmont region, the public art project Radis involved four places of historical and artistic value in the province of Cuneo. The first edition was entrusted to Italian artist Giulia Cenci and curator Marta Papini who created a site-specific installation for a naturalistic park that guards ancient legends and memories of historical events.
There has long been an international debate around the concept of public art and its actual impact on communities: according to many scholars and professionals in the sector, the placement of a work in a public space is not enough to identify it as “public”. Without an active involvement of local communities and a careful study of the territory, its history and the relationships between the place and the people who inhabit it, open-air sculptures, installations, and street art works risk being reduced to mere decorations. In Italy, an example is represented by the Piedmont region and its hard-working network of foundations and non-profit organizations that in recent years have placed art at the center of their multi-year programs. One of these, the project A Cielo aperto (Italian for ‘open-air’), created and promoted by the Fondazione CRC in collaboration with Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, involved four places of historical and artistic value in the province of Cuneo, with highlights including the works of well-known artists such as Olafur Eliasson and Otobong Nkanga. In 2024, the Fondazione per l’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea CRT launched Radis (roots in the local dialect), a four-year project aimed at artistically enriching the Piedmont region with the involvement of local communities, institutions, and associations.
THE FIRST EDITION OF RADIS IN THE PIEDMONTESE TERRITORY
The first edition ended with the inauguration of Le Masche, the site-specific installation by Giulia Cenci curated by Marta Papini in which the artist’s raw and strident language intertwines with local folk tales and bitter pieces of Italian history. The work is located in the Chiot Rosa, a clearing that opens onto the surrounding valleys at 1200m not far from the small village of Rittana (Cuneo) – with a few hundred inhabitants, about forty hamlets, many of which are uninhabited, and thousands of trees that form a natural frame. During the Second World War, Chiot Rosa was the scene of the partisan resistance, marked by bloody battles, but also imbued with ideals of equality and freedom. In light of the precious testimonies collected during the months preceding the production stages, Cenci designed her sculptures as places of welcome, but also as cages: “I wanted this place to become a humus of stories and tales from which imaginary flowers made of stories of animals and humans could bloom. At the base I imagined some sorts of leaves that would give both an idea of refuge and a cage. This was in fact a place of shelter, a real school for partisans, but also a place where violent battles took place, a past that certainly cannot be forgotten”.
THE MONUMENTAL SCULPTURES OF RADIS
The large-size sculptures are the result of a long research work. Their structures stem from casts of the birches of the Chiot Rosa modeled and mixed in 3D with other plant species, such as the iris, whose stem bends under the weight of its fruit, to then replant and propagate in the surrounding soil. This movement leads to the death of the first plant, but at the same time it makes possible the birth and proliferation of many other specimens. For Le Masche Cenci drew from her personal codes and recurring subjects known to the general public thanks to remarkable works such as Secondary Forest (2024), curated by Cecilia Alemani for the High Line in New York, or Dead Dance (2021-22), presented on the occasion of the Venice Biennale Il Latte dei Sogni. Yet this project differs from all the previous ones as it required a major effort from the artist: “It’s the first time I’ve worked on something so definitive, I always felt like a labile being… It was exciting and hardly specific, I tried to use this place as a starting point to understand how the stories, the facts but also its appearance could inspire the work. The result is intended to be a sort of light metamorphosis that can coexist with the landscape. If I usually mix and match many different waste materials, here the real mix was between my work and the place“. From this mixture have flourished hybrid beings between the human, animal and vegetal worlds that recall both fossils from a distant era in time and ruins from a post-apocalyptic world.
GIULIA CENCI’S LE MASCHE
The title of the installation refers to ancient legends of peasant culture handed down from generation to generation and which have come down to us in the testimonies collected by the writer Nuto Revelli in Il mondo dei vinti (1977). The masche (witches in the local dialect) embodied the most hidden fears of the human soul where superstition and religion merge, clouding human rationality and goodness. In the Piedmontese peasant tradition – but in reality, throughout the whole Christian world – the masche were women who lived on the margins of society, persecuted and humiliated, if not even beaten and killed to ward off evil from the communities to which they belonged. Right now, the Dutch foundation National Witches Monument is collecting signatures to create a monument to commemorate the innocent victims of the senseless witch hunt that from the 15th century to the 17th century burned hundreds of fragile and sick women, or simply women who used to live outside of conventional canons. Cenci’s work succeeds in this intent, conveying in her sculptures not only the anguish and weight of a bloody past, but also the seeds of a future that will hopefully be more just for everyone.
THE PUBLIC PROGRAM AND THE EXHIBITION L’OPERA AL NERO
The inauguration of Le Masche was preceded by a broad public program and the second chapter of the exhibition L’opera al nero, open until November 10 at the Civic and Cultural Center of Rittana. Inspired by the homonymous literary work by Marguerite Yourcenar and curated by Marta Papini and Leonardo Pietropaolo, the exhibition brings together works from the Fondazione per l’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea CRT and the Fondazione CRC to trigger an intimate reflection on the individual experience of the body. Born with the aim of culturally enriching the territories involved by combining local traditions and historical memories with contemporary languages and visions, Radis stands out among the numerous national public art programs thanks to the successful synergy between public institutions and the private sector.
LINK
- Ninety Percent of Everything: Interview with the curator Maria Pina Usai - October 2, 2026
- Christina Nakou: the fragility of matter as a metaphor for the human condition - July 3, 2026
- The Island: Hito Steyerl at Osservatorio Fondazione Prada in Milan - December 19, 2025
