On the occasion of the 20th Giornata del Contemporaneo, Palazzo Bentivoglio invites the public to the special opening of a series of rooms dedicated to site-specific works, all recently commissioned.

The tour begins at the entrance at Via del Borgo di San Pietro 1, where, following the twenty-five meters of La zampa di Pea Brain (2004), a neon work by the Bolognese duo Cuoghi Corsello (Mantua, 1965; Bologna, 1964), visitors can access the 16th-century underground spaces, transformed by Studio Iascone & Partners into a venue for temporary exhibitions, opened in 2019.

The visit, guided by Palazzo Bentivoglio’s team of cultural mediators, will lead to the discovery of Ipogea (2020-2021), a large environmental work by Chiara Camoni (Piacenza, 1974), conceived from a heap of stone materials coming from to the palace’s construction process. Arranging the stones to form successive rooms, that house ceramics and printed canvases made with soil, sand, and plants collected in the Bentivoglio garden, Camoni has shaped a space inhabited by natural, organic, and feminine presences. In the room connecting the different moments of Ipogea, Memorie
del sottosuolo (2021) by Francesco Carone (Siena, 1975) replaces one of the bricks of the central pillar with Dostoevsky's volume: the book ideally helps support the vault and evokes the presence of the library housed on the piano nobile.

The tour continues toward the palace’s monumental courtyard, where in the diptych of projections Così per dire (tornare partire) (2023) by Riccardo Benassi (Cremona, 1982) the continuous pulse of the words “return” and “depart” is interrupted by the rapid flow of two poetic stanzas, creating a subliminal and disorienting effect.

The visit can then freely continue to the piano nobile, where the rooms of the Library, housing the book collection of art historian Eugenio Busmanti, will be opened to the public for the first time. The library is accessed through an entrance hall where the large Baroque stucco frames, long empty, inspired the commission of a series of monochromatic works reminiscent of the Panza donation to the Reggia di Sassuolo: the five episodes of Geografia Temporale. Rondello (2021) by Sophie Ko (Tbilisi, 1981) represent different moments of the sky, from dawn to dusk, using pure pigment powders enclosed under glass. On the walls, a pictorial intervention (2024) by Nicola Melinelli (Perugia, 1988) and a wall sconce (2020) by Elmgreen & Dragset (Copenhagen, 1961; Trondheim, 1969) are also present.

In the next room, the space is reconfigured by Andreas Angelidakis (Athens, 1968) with the modular solid system POST-RUIN Bentivoglio (2020), which ironically subverts the idea of monumental ruins, offering a soft seating theater for the consultation of books.