QIC - Windows on Calvino

A project by Fabio Bix and Monica Carrera to celebrate the centenary of the birth of Italo Calvino

2023

Site-specific installation, photographic prints with ecological inks on 20 mm Reboard, Queriniana Library, Brescia

The photographic intervention - integrated in the shelves of the eighteenth-century halls of the Queriniana Library and inspired by "The Baron in the Trees" by I. Calvino - wants to open vegetal windows among the walls of books, fragments that trace the visual horizon of the Baron in the Trees, a sampling of Cosimo's wild gazes in all their variety. The work originates from Calvino's overcoming of the words of St. Bernard: “You will find more in the woods than in books. The trees will teach you things that no teacher will tell you." Calvino indeed, with Cosimo, gives us a character whose wisdom is the perfect synthesis between the forest and books, overcoming the nature-culture dichotomy of which Saint Bernard is still a prisoner, and perhaps partly us too. 

If the internal rooms are dedicated to "The Baron in the Trees", on the external library walls there is an installation by Fabio Bix, inspired by “Difficult Loves”, a short story collection by the same author (www.fabiobix.it/opere/qic-finestre-su-calvino).

The entire project, developed by the two artists in the year in which Brescia is the capital of culture together with Bergamo, intends to celebrate the centenary of the birth of Italo Calvino, one of the greatest authors of Italian literature. The project ended with a reading marathon dedicated to him, in which all those who wished had the opportunity to share selected pieces from his immense production.