The Fondazione Spinola Banna per l’Arte was founded by Gianluca and Orsola Spinola on the Banna estate in Poirino (TO) in 2004, with the aim of contributing to the promotion and diffusion of contemporary art in the visual arts and music sectors. Since then it has been dedicated uninterruptedly to the training of young artists by organising seminars, workshops and conferences on contemporary art and music, in order to promote the theoretical study of current artistic practices and the teaching of the most relevant themes in the philosophical debate related to them.
For the VISUAL ARTS, thanks to the support of the Compagnia di San Paolo, since 2005 the Foundation has created a postgraduate training programme dedicated to young artists under 35 entering the profession, offering meetings, conferences and intensive workshops by means of its residency programme, with reference to the major European training centres. Among the tutor artists, we might recall Mario Airò, Stefano Arienti, Doug Ashford, Massimo Bartolini, Luca Beatrice, Andrea Caretto, Martin Creed, Jason Dodge, Linus Elmes, Emilio Fantin, Milovan Farronato, Lara Favaretto, Peter Friedl, Alberto Garutti, Piero Gilardi, Marta Kuzma, Leigh Ledare, Raimundas Malasauskas, Eva Marisaldi, Elena Mazzi, Maria Morganti, Liliana Moro, The Otolith Group, Adrian Paci, Jorge Peris, Diego Perrone, Alberto Pesavento, Tobias Rehberger, Tim Rollins & Kos, Raffaella Spagna, Rirkit Tiravanija, Diego Tonus, Francesco Vezzoli, Andrea Viliani, Luca Vitone and Benjamin Weil.
Over the 2016–2019 period, the residency programme has taken on a new physiognomy and has been enlarged thanks to the collaboration with GAM-Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea of Turin, which gave the residency project an extra edge thanks to the involvement of a contemporary art museum audience. Ever since the start of its activities, the Foundation has involved almost 200 young artists and has activated a network of institutions with which it has worked in collaboration, including the Centre International d’Accueil et d’Échanges des Récollets and the Dena Foundation for Contemporary Art in Paris; WIELS Centre d’Art Contemporain in Brussels, the Università Iuav and the Fondazione Bevilacqua la Masa in Venice; Via Farini and NABA Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti in Milan, and the Turin Polytechnic. What’s more, from 2010 to 2017, the Foundation was part of the international residency programme RESÒ, which emerged from cooperation between the leading institutions that deal with contemporary art and training in Piedmont, and promoted by the Fondazione per l’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea CRT, also in this context interweaving relationships with institutions driven by the same intentions in Egypt, Israel, Australia, Brazil, Colombia, Ukraine, India and France. In 2015, the Foundation also joined the Comitato promotore per le Fondazioni Italiane d’Arte Contemporanea which, through the projects it developed, maintained constant contact with the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities (MIBAC).
For MUSIC, since 2007 with its Progetto Musica, conceived by Orsola Spinola with the help of Giorgio and Anna Claudia Pestelli, the Foundation has developed a specific branch of training activities, with the aim of encouraging the creation and promotion of new works, enhancing the talent of young composers and giving visibility to their experiences in contemporary music. The project consists of both the commissioning of new compositions and the creation of a unique workshop in which artists and performers, under the guidance of an internationally renowned composer, are brought together – just as was once the case – in the construction of a musical work. The final concert of each project is held at the Foundation’s estate, although over the years it has been replicated in institutional contexts of undisputed importance for the sector such as the Music Biennale in Venice, Milano Musica and IRCAM in Paris. The tutor composers hosted in the past have included: Georges Aperghis, Unsuk Chin, Luis de Pablo, Hugues Dufourt, Ivan Fedele, Luca Francesconi, Toshio Hosokawa, Helmut Lachenmann, Fabio Nieder, Salvatore Sciarrino and Fabio Vacchi. In 2011, the Progetto Musica, as part of the ‘Franco Abbiati’ music critics’ prize awarded by the Associazione Nazionale Critici Musicali, won the Duilio Courir Prize, and in 2013 the Silver Lion of the Venice Music Biennale.
For MUSIC, in 2015 the Foundation also launched the new educational project Compositori in Erba (‘Budding Composers’) which, exploring the world of sound through listening, aims to encourage creativity and musical composition right from primary school, thanks to the innovative teaching method of Maestro Matteo Manzitti. As part of this project, in 2016 the Foundation collaborated with the Teatro Regio of Turin for the staging of Hans Werner Henze’s Pollicino, with the children of the Primary School of Villanova d’Asti who participated in the show.
Finally, we might recall how the Foundation promoted a special commission that, between 2016 and 2018, led to the creation of a multi-modal visual-sound work aimed at the artistic reconversion of an external wall of a building owned by the Metropolitan City of Turin which houses the Primo Liceo Artistico Statale of Turin. The work SEGNI PER LA SPERANZA is an experimental site-specific intervention that draws on various art forms (visual, sound and web) to make up a single and mutually correlated work, thanks to the common intent of the artist Giuseppe Caccavale, the composer Stefano Gervasoni and the computer-music designer Marco Liuni (IRCAM, Paris). For the creation of the work, the Foundation collaborated not only with IRCAM in Paris, but also with prestigious institutions in the area such as the Degree Course in Conservation and Restoration of Cultural Heritage (University of Turin and Fondazione Centro per la Conservazione e il Restauro dei Beni Culturali ‘La Venaria Reale’), the Polytechnic of Turin and the ‘Giuseppe Verdi’ State Conservatory of Music of Turin, involving young students as well as students of these institutions in the implementation of the work, reflecting their key educational goals.
Luisella Molina, Director