Atelier dell'Errore for the 21st Giornata del Contemporaneo, Unknown Pleasures - The Shelter, 2025

Saturday, 4th October 2025

The 26 AMACI museums and approximately 1,000 institutions across Italy will open their doors for the 21st year, offering free entry with exhibitions, events, workshops both in person and online, to welcome and engage a wide audience.

From 4th to 10th October 2025,

thanks to the collaboration with the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture and the Directorate-General for Public and Cultural Diplomacy of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation,

Giornata del Contemporaneo | Italian Contemporary Art will once again extend beyond Italy's borders to strengthen the network of cooperation with institutional entities that promote and support Italian contemporary art abroad.

Saturday, 4th October 2025 marks the 21st edition of Giornata del Contemporaneo, the large annual event promoted by AMACI with the support of the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture, in collaboration with the Directorate-General for Public and Cultural Diplomacy of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation.

For the 21st consecutive year, the 26 AMACI museums, along with over a thousand public and private institutions across Italy, will open their doors to the public for free, with a special programme of exhibitions, events, workshops, and initiatives—both in person and online—designed to bring contemporary art to an ever-widening and more diverse audience.

As in recent editions, this year Giornata del Contemporaneo will transcend national borders, extending internationally until 10th October 2025 with the Giornata del Contemporaneo | Italian Contemporary Art, created in synergy with the diplomatic and consular network of the MAECI – Italian Embassies, Consulates, and Italian Cultural Institutes – to promote and highlight Italian contemporary art worldwide.

The theme of the 2025 edition is education, understood as a broad and plural process that encompasses education, research, the exchange of experiences, and knowledge. This theme is shared by the directors of AMACI museums, continuing from the study day organised by the association in March of this year.

The tradition that has been in place since 2006 continues, entrusting a prominent artist with the task of creating the official image of the event: after Michelangelo Pistoletto (2006), Maurizio Cattelan (2007), Paola Pivi (2008), Luigi Ontani (2009), Stefano Arienti (2010), Giulio Paolini (2011), Francesco Vezzoli (2012), Marzia Migliora (2013), Adrian Paci (2014), Alfredo Pirri (2015), Emilio Isgrò (2016), Liliana Moro (2017), Marcello Maloberti (2018), Eva Marisaldi (2019), various artists (2020), Armin Linke (2021), Giorgio Andreotta Calò (2022), Binta Diaw (2023), and Tomaso Binga (2024), the 2025 edition will feature the Atelier dell’Errore collective (AdE).

Founded in 2015 by Luca Santiago Mora, Atelier dell'Errore is currently a collective of twelve neurodivergent young artists based at the Maramotti Collection in Reggio Emilia. Their artistic practice, born within a workshop in the child neuropsychiatry department in Reggio Emilia, has transformed over the years into an extraordinary experience of creative cooperation and inclusion, now recognised nationally and internationally for the quality and originality of its visual and performative research.

The shared practice of AdE is both a moment of creation and a space for education to life: a context in which social complexities, relational challenges, and isolation often experienced by neurodivergent individuals are addressed, even through art. In recent years, one theme in particular has emerged across the collective's work, generating dialogue and common research: emotional education.

The work created to represent the 2025 edition is Unknown Pleasures – The Shelter (2025), a piece that poetically reinterprets the large Ade Vela Rapido sail, made from 50 emergency blankets, belonging to the boat once owned by Pier Paolo Pasolini, featured in the play Oedipus Rex. During a restoration phase of the sail, two artists from the collective transformed it into a temporary shelter space: an emotional, fragile, and intense architecture, where one can imagine—if only as a game or in a dream—one’s own affective freedom. An intimate, protected space that brings visibility to desires often denied.

As in every edition, the Giornata del Contemporaneo will feature several clusters of activities, all free of charge: a special programme from AMACI museums, initiatives in collaboration with the MAECI’s international network, events from the Luoghi del Contemporaneo promoted by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity, and proposals from the hundreds of voluntary participating organisations across Italy.

The event is supported by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture, in collaboration with the Directorate-General for Public and Cultural Diplomacy of the MAECI, and is under the patronage of the European Commission’s Representation in Italy, UPI - Union of Provinces of Italy, and ICOM Italy.

In 2025, it will also be possible to register and explore the full event offering via the website www.amaci.org, thanks to the established technical collaboration with Artshell.

INFORMATION FOR PARTICIPATING IN THE EVENT

In occasion of the 21st Giornata del Contemporaneo, AMACI invites all organisations and entities active in promoting contemporary art to open the doors of their spaces and/or organise one or more free events across the country on Saturday, 4th October 2025. The event will also be extended internationally from Saturday, 4th to Friday, 10th October 2025.

To include one or more events in the official programme of the event, it is necessary to fill out the appropriate registration form available on the website amaci.org. Once the registration is completed, a confirmation of receipt will be sent.

New this year: To improve the management of registrations, events will only be visible online from 15th September 2025 on the official website’s dedicated section. You can register your initiative until Friday, 3rd October 2025, at 3:00 PM.

For further information or clarification, please write to giornatadelcontemporaneo@amaci.org or contact the phone number +39 035 270272.

ATELIER DELL’ERRORE

Atelier dell'Errore (AdE) is an artistic collective focused on visual arts and performance. The project was established in 2002 as a visual arts workshop by artist Luca Santiago Mora, dedicated to neurodivergent children under the care of local healthcare services in Reggio Emilia and Bergamo. In 2015, after working together in the workshops for 8-10 years, some of the young participants, now of age, requested to pursue professional artistic practice. This urgent desire led to the creation of Atelier dell'Errore, a collective independent from the public healthcare service. Since its founding, the collective has been permanently hosted at the Maramotti Collection in Reggio Emilia.

In 2018, the collective formed a cooperative studio with the young artists and their parents as founding members. The 10 young artists and their artistic director became worker-members of the cooperative, turning Atelier dell'Errore into a social enterprise that self-finances through the sale of their works and professional collaborations.

Luca Santiago Mora often compares AdE’s creative process to the functioning of an "organism", where each member plays a vital and essential role, just as the organs of a body do. Here, the artworks are not only a creative effort but also part of a broader relational process. The operational rules of AdE's artistic process are few and clear: Animals and Errors. Animal creatures are the sole subject of all their works, and throughout the entire artistic process, nothing is ever erased, thus preserving and activating the transformative and metamorphic potential inherent in every so-called "mistake".

AdE tackles very complex projects from an executive point of view, functioning like a contemporary Renaissance workshop, where each of the young artists specialises in a particular phase of the project. The works and performances of Atelier dell'Errore have been exhibited in galleries and institutions internationally. In February 2025, Kaufmann Repetto (New York) will host the first solo exhibition of AdE in the United States. In autumn 2025, the collective will present a retrospective exhibition at GAMeC (Bergamo). Recent exhibitions include: Italics Panorama - Monferrato (2024), Nottilucente, Duomo + Galleria Continua, San Gimignano (2024), Laboratorio degli Angeli, Bologna (2024), Richard Saltoun Gallery, Rome (2024), and others.