FONDAZIONE NICOLA TRUSSARDI presents RAGNAR KJARTANSSON - The Sky in a Room

Curated by Massimiliano Gioni 

Church of San Carlo al Lazzaretto

Largo Fra’ Paolo Bellintani, 1 – Milan, Italy 

September 22 – October 25, 2020

Every day from 2pm to 8pm

Free admission, reservations required at this link

https://www.eventbrite.it/e/biglietti-the-sky-in-a-room-121037282771 

In fall 2020, the #fondazionenicolatrussardi presents The Sky in a Room by the Icelandic artist #ragnarkjartansson (Reykjavík, 1976). The project, staged for the church of San Carlo al Lazzaretto in Milan, was conceived in the wake of the difficult lockdown affecting the public and private lives of millions of Italians—especially the citizens of Lombardy. With a strong symbolic value and taking place in the eighteenth year of the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi’s nomadic activities, the project, initiated by the President #beatricetrussardi and the Artistic Director #massimilianogioni, opens up a dialogue with both the distant and recent past of the city of Milan. 

From September 22 to October 25, 2020, accompanied by the church organ of San Carlo al Lazzaretto (also known as San Carlino), professional singers take turns to perform an ethereal arrangement of Il cielo in una stanza, the famous song by Gino Paoli, originally released in 1960. The piece will be repeated, uninterruptedly, for six hours a day, every day, like a never-ending lullaby. 

“Il cielo in una stanza is the only song I know that deals with the fundamental nature of visual art, which is its ability to transform space,” the artist explains. “So, in a way, it is purely conceptual. But I also love how it describes the power of the imagination, put on fire by love, to transform the world around us. It is a poem about how love and music can make a small confined space explode, letting in the sky and the trees... Love can read the writing in the remotest star, as Oscar Wilde said.” 

Kjartansson’s works—which alternate between video, performance, music, and painting— are characterized by a profound sense of melancholy. Often inspired by the twentieth-century traditions of Nordic theater and literature, they include references that may be traced back to the work of Tove Janson, Halldór Laxness, Edvard Munch, and August Strindberg, among others. 

Having grown up in an erudite artistic and musical context—his parents were successful theater actors; his godmother, a professional folk singer—while still an adolescent, Kjartansson undertook a career as a musician with various groups such as Kanada, Kósý, and Trabant, playing both in Iceland and internationally. Since 2007, he has been entirely dedicated to the visual arts, but his relationship with music and theater—as expressive tools and sentimental universes—remains central to many of his works. In particular, the repetition of sounds and gestures is a fundamental element in his compositions and choreographies, which have often been described as forms of meditation and reflection in which ritornellos, musical phrases, and arias are transformed into touching litanies and hypnotic mantras. 

After months spent sealed off in our homes, either alongside our nearest and dearest or far from families and loved ones—perhaps realizing our own loneliness, stuck with those that mistreat us, or grieving those lost to the pandemic—Kjartansson’s performance may be read as a poetic, contemporary memorial. The work is an unusual monument and a civil oratorio in memory of the painful months spent imagining the sky in a room and dreaming of new ways to be together and fight solitude and isolation. 

In this presentation, The Sky in a Room (a performance initially commissioned by Artes Mundi and the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff, with the support of the Derek Williams Trust and ArtFund) is staged in the church of San Carlo al Lazzaretto—the history of which is closely connected with previous epidemics, from the plague of 1576 to that of 1630. The church was made famous in the novel The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni, who cites the Lazzaretto (the hospital and banishment area for plague victims) on various occasions and sets one of the most famous chapters of the story there. 

Initially conceived as a field altar in the heart of the Lazzaretto, built by the architect Lazzaro Palazzi, the church was designed by Pellegrino Tibaldi on the orders of Cardinal Carlo Borromeo in 1576. Originally open on all sides so as to allow the sick to attend services while remaining outside, the church was then transformed by the architect Giuseppe Piermarini around the turn of the nineteenth century. After surviving the transformations carried out over almost five centuries, San Carlino is a place that narrates the history of Milan through its deep layers of memories. 

In 2017, the church underwent complete restoration envisioned, supported, and curated by Andreina Rocca in memory of her husband Roberto. 

The Sky in a Room by #ragnarkjartansson is part of a series of project carried out since 2013 by the #fondazionenicolatrussardi: temporary shows, incursions, performances, and popup interventions that have brought international artists to Milan such as Ibrahim Mahama, Jeremy Deller, Sarah Lucas, Gelitin, Darren Bader, and Stan VanDerBeek. 

The #fondazionenicolatrussardi is a private, non-profit institution, a nomadic museum designed for both the production and promotion of contemporary art in multiple contexts and through a wide range of channels. It was founded in Milan in 1996. Its activities are made possible thanks to the generosity of the founding members and that of a group of supporters who sponsor its projects. 

Thus, with The Sky in a Room, the path undertaken by the Foundation in 2003 continues to bring contemporary art into the heart of the city of Milan, rediscovering and reappraising forgotten or unusual venues. Other major solo shows include those by Allora & Calzadilla, Paweł Althamer, Maurizio Cattelan, Tacita Dean, Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset, Urs Fischer, Peter Fischli & David Weiss, Paul McCarthy, Paola Pivi, Pipilotti Rist, Anri Sala, and

Tino Sehgal, as well as two major thematic exhibitions: La Grande Madre (2015) and La

Terra Inquieta (2017). 

The #fondazionenicolatrussardi thanks its Circle’s members for their consistent and generous support to its projects.

Thanks to Spada Partners for supporting The Sky in a Room.

The #fondazionenicolatrussardi also thanks Don Marco Artoni and the volunteers of the church of San Carlo al Lazzaretto, Parish of Santa Francesca Romana, Milan; Sophie Fetokakis, Chiara Gelmetti, Martino Lurani Cernuschi; the performers Yukiko Aragaki, Alessandra Bordiga, Fausto Caricato, Serena Erba, Zhou Fang, Francesco Leineri, Kleva Metolli. 

Media partner: Sky #arte HD. 

#TheSkyInARoom

#FondazioneNicolaTrussardi

Ragnar Kjartansson, 

The Sky in a Room, 2018 

Performer, organ and the song Il cielo in una stanza by Gino Paoli (1960) 

Initially commissioned by Artes Mundi and Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales and acquired with the support of the Derek Williams Trust and Art Fund

In Milan, presented and produced by #fondazionenicolatrussardi at Chiesa di San Carlo al Lazzaretto

Courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York and i8 Gallery, Reykjavik

Ragnar Kjartansson 

Born in Reykjavík in 1976, #ragnarkjartansson is one of the best-known contemporary artists of his generation. Over the last ten years, Kjartansson’s work has been celebrated by many of the most important international museums. 

In 2019, he became one of the youngest artists ever to hold a solo show at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. He has displayed his work twice at the Venice Biennale, where he also represented Iceland in its official participation in 2009. His work has also been featured at the Hangar Bicocca in Milan, at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin and the EX3 in Florence, as well as at the New Museum in New York, the Kunstmuseum in Stuttgart, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Barbican in London, and the Carnegie in Pittsburgh. 

Kjartansson has won major awards, among which the Ars Fennica Award in 2019 and the Performa Malcolm McLaren Award in 2011.

Church of San Carlo al Lazzaretto, Milan 

San Carlo al Lazzaretto—initially named the Tempietto di Santa Maria della Sanità or San Carlino—is a small, octagonal church in the Renaissance style built in the sixteenth century and now situated in Milan’s Porta Venezia neighborhood, a few blocks away from the ancient Eastern Gates of the city. 

Its current location—now in the middle of the urban area, surrounded by palazzos built between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—has very little relationship with its original position, at the heart of a fifteenth-century Lazzaretto with a layout akin to that of a rectangular cloister. 

The Lazzaretto of Milan was a square area roughly four hundred meters long, designed by Lazzaro Palazzi at the end of the fifteenth century just outside the city walls. At the center, a field altar was placed straight onto the ground so that the sick might follow the religious services in the open air from any position. After the Lazzaretto had been used to host the sick during the plague epidemic of 1576, Archbishop (later Cardinal) Carlo Borromeo commissioned a new church from Pellegrino Tibaldi, who erected a building with a central plan and open arches, again to allow the sick to follow the mass from any point around the surrounding porticos. 

In the seventeenth century, during the Great Pestilence of Milan of 1629–31 (which caused more than a million deaths—25 percent of the Italian population and 50 percent of the population of Milan), the Lazzaretto became the epicenter of the health crisis. 

During the Cisalpine Republic, the architect Giuseppe Piermarini—known for his Neoclassical interventions on Palazzo Reale (1770) and for having designed the Teatro alla Scala (1776–78)—was commissioned with transforming the church into a “Temple of the Motherland.” Piermarini demolished the original cupola, while the outside walls had already been closed in, but his work was then interrupted.

During the nineteenth century, the grounds of the Lazzaretto were given over to agricultural use, and the cloister to dwellings for farmhands—up until the purchase of the entire area by the Banca di Credito Italiano, which decided to demolish it and sell it off in lots. The central-plan building was spared, restored, and the cupola was rebuilt, to then be consecrated once more and reopened for worship in 1884, newly named after Saint Carlo Borromeo, who had originally commissioned its construction. 

San Carlo al Lazzaretto recently underwent complete restoration (2015–17) envisioned, supported, and curated by Andreina Rocca in memory of her husband Roberto, with the aim of using it both as a place of worship and a concert venue. A new organ with 1,800 pipes was installed, designed by Martino Lurani Cernuschi, with a romantic-symphonic layout.  

The church was inaugurated once more by the Archbishop of Milan, Mario Delpini, on November 3, 2017. 

The church and the Lazzaretto serve as the backdrop to various scenes from The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni. The place is presented for the first time in chapter eleven, when Renzo reaches Milan after having left the village in the wake of the attempt to kidnap Lucia, directed by Father Cristoforo to the Capuchin monastery at the Eastern Gates. The history of the Lazzaretto is summed up by Manzoni over the course of chapter twenty-eight, during the description of the terrible famine that afflicted the Milanese province during 1628–29. In chapter thirty-one, the first of two that the author dedicates to his historical digression on the plague in Milan in 1630, the Lazzaretto is mentioned as the place where the sick are segregated and isolated from the rest of the population—starting from those who had come into contact with the soldier who had first brought the contagion to the city.  

After the solemn procession of June 11 (chapter thirty-two), which Cardinal Borromeo had opposed in vain and was supposedly meant to halt the spread of the contagion, the plague grew ever stronger, and the population of the Lazzaretto rapidly increased from 2,000 to 12,000 #people, only to reach the terrifying figure of 16,000 plague victims. In chapter thirtyfive, the Lazzaretto becomes a genuine narrative space in the novel, as Renzo, having arrived in Milan shortly before, in search of Lucia and after having learned that the girl is to be found among the patients of the Lazzaretto, manages to reach it in a fortuitous manner following his attempted lynching by the crowd (believing him to be an untore [an infector])—on board the cart of the monatti (the body collectors) from which he jumps near the Capuchin monastery at the Eastern Gates (featured previously in chapter eleven).  

Later on, Renzo meets Father Cristoforo outside one of the huts, not far from the one where Don Rodrigo lies, sickly and drawing his last breath. The Capuchin friar then points out the octagonal chapel to Renzo (chapter thirty-six), described by the author as it appeared at the time, or rather with a cupola standing on thin columns, topping a building open on all sides, so that the altar placed in the center might be visible from all sides. Renzo then bids farewell to Lucia and Father Cristoforo (chapter thirty-seven), leaving the Lazzaretto just as the storm breaks that marks the end of the long period of drought and coincides with the start of the epidemic subsiding. This is, in fact, the last appearance of the structure as a genuine narrative space, except for the later mention of Lucia’s complete recovery, leaving the company of the wealthy merchant woman, shortly after having learned that Father Cristoforo has died of the plague.