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Young Curators Residency Programme
Every year since 2007 Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo promotes the Young Curators Residency Programme Torino. The project aims to support emerging curatorial practice while spreading knowledge of the Italian art scene on an international level.
Young Curators Residency Programme 2021 Coordinated by Lucrezia Calabrò Visconti
Palazzo Re Rebaudengo, Guarene, Italy October 2 - November 28, 2021
Badly Buried
Beneath the Palazzo Re Rebaudengo, there lie underground tunnels. Nobody knows where they lead or what they hide, but some say that if you listen carefully at night, you can hear voices and see shadows turning quickly around the corners. Beneath the cover of domestic space, these tunnels might stand for how the fantastic is merely hiding in plain sight.
Badly Buried is a descent—a dive below to what lies beneath. Beyond secret tunnels that serve as our gateway to the subterranean, we begin to discern the underground as a shapeshifter: it is the soil, the subconscious, a mine, a sex dungeon, a cave, or a grave. It is a space where both the material and the imaginary coalesce.
The appeal of the underground has shaped mythology, epic poetry, and popular forms of literature across time. From 24th century BCE Egyptian myth of Osiris’ descent into the underworld to become master of the Afterlife, to Jean Valjean’s fall into the clammy sewers of Paris, that hide the wretched in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables in 1862. In Notes on the Underground (2008), historian Rosalind Williams surveys the subterranean as conceptual terrain, charting a genealogy of tales so ancient and universal that their fundamental structure—the opposition of surface and depth—may well be rooted in the structure of the human brain.
Descending into the underground and its inner worlds is an act of searching, of contending with the unknown, the abject, and the internal; of opening passages and holding space with the monstrous. Journeying downwards, the exhibition asks: What knowledge arises from the act of descending physically, psychologically, and socially? Emerging from the underground, what narratives do we uncover? What can obscurity reveal?
Having crossed thresholds between worlds, knowledge resurfaces in the form of performances, installations, and moving image works investigating notions of labor, secrecy, pleasure, monstrosity, and death. The works bring us from the bowels of a BDSM dungeon to a pixie’s bathroom, from the depths of the subconscious to the earth, and back again.
Jacopo Belloni’s sculptures and installations bring esoteric practices, rituals, and contemporary spiritual practices to the historical space of Palazzo Re Rebaudengo. Ilaria Vinci’s works are speculative in their nature—making use of fantastical realist narrations, she imagines alternative realities, while Alessandro di Pietro’s “TOMB WRITER” turns the palazzo into a tomb, where dead bodies return to the earth—a cyclical way of thinking about time.
While entering the room that holds Irene Coppola’s work might feel like ascending above ground, the scars she surfaces from recent history tell another tale. Using industrial materials, Coppola plants a ghostly orchard, where tropical plants silently testify to the violence of warfare and colonial intervention. Climbing further puts the viewer in front of GianMarco Porru’s “MALEDETTA.” In this three-channel video installation, we witness a hypnosis session where a voice offscreen reveals, in spellbinding detail, how Medea—a magician and master in the art of potions and poisons—turned into a monstrous figure as a result of forces far beyond her control.
Journeying into the underworld also means looking inward, into our own depths. For Badly Buried, Eleonora Luccarini nosedives into the abyss of her multidimensional self to wrestle with her alter ego, Leonard Santé, while Massimo Vaschetto explores BDSM culture wherein, resembling the katabasis motif in literature, sadomasochists descend to underworlds and return physically, emotionally, or spiritually transformed. There, the artist finds resonances with Christianity.
Sinking deeper into the underground of the Palazzo, Giovanni Giaretta’s media archaeology practice excavates fantasies of the cinema cavern and the minerality of our digital devices. Beneath slick surfaces, the extracted materials seep through. These excavations and extractions take us further down to the bitumen mines of Abbateggio, where Agnese Spolverini tells a story not only of hidden labor and oppressive working conditions, but the immense sympathy and solidarity needed to sustain life in this hostile environment.
Nothing stays underground for long when they are badly buried. The soil will erode, bringing secrets, suppressed knowledge, and social underworlds to light.
Curators
Jade Meili Barget
Jade Meili Barget is a curator based between France and Norway, currently working as Live Curator at Bergen Kunsthall. Her practice engages live formats with a focus on performance cultures, moving images, and experimental discourse. In 2025–2026, she was curator in residence at the MAH, Geneva, where she developed the performance programme First Impressions, casting a contemporary gaze on early image technologies and examining how artists play with and subvert today’s image regime. In 2024, she was co-curator of the 15th Gwangju Biennale, Pansori: A Soundscape of the 21st Century, a sonic investigation into the spatial transformations of our present. From 2021 to 2024, she was part of the curatorial team of transmediale in Berlin, dedicated to post-digital cultures. As an independent curator, she has developed two long-term projects: The well tempered and Fatal & Fallen. The well tempered examines contemporary imaginaries of energy and extraction. Fatal & Fallen, launched in 2021, is a programme of films and readings centred on the aesthetics of grindhouse cinema and B-movie revenge narratives from East Asia. This programme grew out of her engagement with inter-Asia and Southeast Asian geographies via XING, an experimental platform championing Southeast Asian artistic expression, which she co-ran from 2017 to 2021.
Naz Cuguoğlu
Naz Cuguoğlu is a curator and writer based in San Francisco whose work explores intersectional identities, diasporic experiences, collective practices, and the politics of joy. She is a curator at the Asian Art Museum, where she develops exhibitions, commissions, and public programs. In 2024, she co-curated the inaugural American Pavilion at the 15th Gwangju Biennale and received the Andy Warhol Foundation Curatorial Research Fellowship and the AAMC Propel Award. Her recent exhibition, Rave into the Future: Art in Motion (2025–26), examined rave culture as a site of collective joy, resistance, and speculative worldbuilding. Her curatorial experience includes exhibitions and programs at documenta fifteen, the 15th Istanbul Biennial, the Taiwan Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale, the 4th Istanbul Design Biennial, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, and Haus der Kulturen der Welt. She has previously held positions at KADIST, the Wattis Institute, the de Young Museum, and SFMOMA. Her writing has appeared in Art Asia Pacific, Hyperallergic, and Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art. As co-founder of Collective Çukurcuma, she explores collaborative curatorial practice through reading groups, research, and international exhibitions.
Alice Sarmiento
Alice Sarmiento is an independent curator, activist, and seamstress. In 2024, she joined the Faculty of Information and Communication Studies at the University of the Philippines – Open University, where she handles courses on art and multimedia. The following year, Alice founded Spare Bedroom, a time-bound curatorial platform that ran a seven-part exhibition program from July 2025 to July 2026 in Quezon City, Metro Manila. Aside from FSSR, Alice has completed fellowships in curation from the Japan Foundation Asia Center, as well as in Cultural Journalism from Akademie Schloss-Solitude, and Art, Theory, and Criticism from Kunstlerhaus Buchsenhausen. She has curated exhibitions with support from the Japan Foundation Asia Center and through commissions from the Cultural Center of the Philippines and the Iloilo Museum of Contemporary Art. She was part of the curatorial team of the 2018 Manila Biennale and curatorial lead for the 2023 Visayas Visual Arts Exhibition and Conference (VIVA ExCon), titled Suba sa Iraya, in San Jose and Sibalom, Antique. Alice is an active member of Rural Women Advocates, a feminist collective that uses creative labor to propagate action and awareness of issues concerning food security and genuine land reform in the Philippines.
Coordinator
Lucrezia Calabrò Visconti
Lucrezia Calabrò Visconti (Desenzano del Garda, 1990) is a curator and art writer. She is currently Head Curator at Istituto Svizzero in Italy, where she curates the programmes across its venues in Rome, Milan, and Palermo. Her recent projects include the monographic exhibition how we always survived by Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz and the group show Con lo zucchero in bocca in Rome; the exhibitions Deadline With The World by Gabriele Garavaglia and Miriam Laura Leonardi and The House of Dorothy by Vincent Grange in Milan; and the public programme Time is on my side by Helvetropicos in Palermo (all 2025). She previously served as Chief Curator and Head of the Curatorial Department at Pinacoteca Agnelli in Turin. At Pinacoteca Agnelli, she curated and co-curated major monographic exhibitions such as Salvo. Arrivare in tempo; Lee Lozano. Strike (Pinacoteca Agnelli and La Bourse – Pinault Collection, Paris, 2023–2024); and Sylvie Fleury. Turn Me On (2022); as well as new commissions including Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster. PISTARAMA and exhibitions such as Lucy McKenzie and Antonio Canova. Vulcanizzato (2023). For Pinacoteca’s Pista 500, she curated projects and new commissions by artists such as Chalisee Naamani, Monica Bonvicini, Shirin Aliabadi, Nina Beier, Julius von Bismark, Mark Leckey, Cally Spooner, VALIE EXPORT, Sylvie Fleury, Liam Gillick, Marco Giordano, Nan Goldin, Shilpa Gupta, Louise Lawler, Alicja Kwade, SUPERFLEX, among others. She curated exhibitions and programmes for institutions in Italy and abroad. In 2018 and 2019, she was the curator of the New Entries section at Artissima, Turin. In 2018, she curated the main exhibition of the 6th Moscow International Biennale for Young Art, titled Abracadabra, and co-founded the collective platform The School of the End of Time, with whom she co-curated the public programme accompanying the Biennale. From 2018 to 2021, she worked at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo as curator and head of the Young Curators Reisdency Programme. From 2015 to 2018, she co-founded and curated the programme of CLOG Project, a research-driven independent space with a focus on contemporary arts and culture, autonomous education experiments and self-production projects. As a writer and journalist, her essays and texts have been published in various exhibition catalogues, publications and journals. Her book In the studio: Lee Lozano was recently published by Hauser & Wirth Publishers (2025). She is a co-founder and currently vice-president of AWI – Art Workers Italia, the first association established to advocate for contemporary art workers in Italy, since 2020; and she sits on the board of the Milano Art Community since 2025. She received her education in visual and performing arts from IUAV University in Venice, in curatorial studies from De Appel, Amsterdam and Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, and specialised in critical social theory at the University of Milan – Bicocca and at the Critical Curatorial Cybermedia research Master at la HEAD, Geneve.
Artists
- Jacopo Belloni
Jacopo Belloni (b. 1992, Ancona, lives and works between Rome and Geneva) graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts of Brera, Milan (2014), the University of Milan (2018), and earned an MFA from the Work.Master program at HEAD, Geneva (2021). Belloni has exhibited his work in international institutions and art spaces, including: Galeria Municipal do Porto (Porto, PT); Biennale Gherdëina 10 (Ortisei, IT); Kunstverein SALTS (Basel, CH); MAXXI Roma (Rome, IT); Halle-Nord (Geneva, CH); MAXXI L’Aquila (L’Aquila, IT); FRAC Île-de-France (Paris, FR); Musée de Cluny (Paris, FR); Société des Arts de Genève (Geneva, CH); Palazzo delle Esposizioni (Rome, IT); Sans Titre (Paris, FR); ADA (Rome, IT); Aargauer Kunsthaus (Aarau, CH); CAC la Ferme du Buisson (Marne-la-Vallée, FR); Kunsthalle Bern (Bern, CH); Swiss Institute (Rome, IT); Palazzo Re Rebaudengo (Guarene, IT); CAC Genève (Geneva, CH); Gessnerallee (Zurich, CH); Archivio Conz (Berlin, DE); Palais de Tokyo (Paris, FR). Belloni was resident in international institutions, including: Triangle-Asteridés (Marseille, FR); Fondazione Officine Saffi (Milan; IT); Istituto Svizzero (Rome, IT); Fondation Boghossian (Brussels, BE); Dena Foundation (Paris, FR). In 2025, he won the Italian Council 14th for the international commissions and the UBS Kulturstiftung for Visual Arts. In 2023 and 2025, he was selected for the second round of the Swiss Art Awards and in 2021 for the second round of the Kiefer/Hablitzel Prize. In 2021, he was also selected for the Biennale College Arte of the 59° Biennale of Venice.
- Irene Coppola
Irene Coppola (Palermo, 1991) is a visual artist based in Palermo, Italy. Her interdisciplinary practice unfolds through sculpture, photography, moving image and installation, investigating landscape as a living archive where ecological, historical and cultural processes are embedded in material forms. She studied at NABA in Milan and the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam, and has participated in international residency and research programs across Europe and Latin America. She is a recipient of the Italian Council (VI and XII editions), the Cantica21 Grant and the inaugural Ca’ del Bosco Sculpture Award (2024). Her work has been exhibited at Palazzo Strozzi, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, PAV – Parco d’Arte Vivente in Turin, the Italian Cultural Institute in Dakar and Cercle Cité in Luxembourg. In 2024, she co-founded spaziomateria, an independent studio and project space for contemporary art and architecture in Palermo. She is part of the 2026 cohort of Art House School in Shkodër, Albania.
- Alessandro Di Pietro
Di Pietro’s practice explores monstrosity and art history as open, un-objective formulas in which artistic references blur with biographical ones through speculative fiction, sculpture, film, animation and installations. In 2023, Di Pietro was awarded the 11th edition of the Italian Council for GHOSTWRITING PAUL THEK – TIME CAPSULES AND RELIQUARIES. Developed through research, film and sculpture, the project reimagines the work of Paul Thek through a speculative process of attribution, extending the artist’s production beyond his lifetime. Presented at Watermill Center, CAN – Centre d’Art Neuchâtel, Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio and Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, the project culminated in the inclusion of the resulting works in the permanent collection of MADRE, Naples. Recent solo projects include LA VITA AGRA, Annet Gelink, Amsterdam (2026); BUENA VISTA, at Miart, Milan (2026); LONG STORY SHORT, Galleria Zazà, Naples (2025); and ESSENTIAL CONFIDENTIAL, Ferramenta Drovetti, Turin (2025). His work has also been presented at Basel Social Club, FRAC Corsica, Sitterwerk and Palazzo Sandretto Re Rebaudengo. His residencies include the American Academy in Rome, Gasworks, London, and the Watermill Center, New York. In 2020, Di Pietro was awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant.
- Agnese Fieno Spolverini
Agnese Fieno Spolverini (b. 1994, Viterbo, Italy) is an artist and a cultural worker based in Italy. Through writing, sound, installations, workshops, drawing, reading and singing, she explores the points of friction and connection between macropolitics and micropolitics, between the intimate and the public sphere, with a particular interest in the structure of feeling and the affects that go through the experience. Her practice responds, resonates, or reacts to the contexts in which it takes shape, through a site- and time-specific approach. Fieno Spolverini’s interdisciplinary practice seeks to establish connections and proximity, and strive to create bonds, activate presences and imaginations, and make perceptible the tensions that emerge between bodies, spaces, and the politics that traverse them. She has participated in residencies, solo and group exhibitions, in institutions and independent spaces, including: Pillows like Pillars at Barriera; Una Boccata d’Arte; Badly Buried at Palazzo Re Rebaudengo; La Festa dei Corpi Feriti at Kora; Every Food is a Landscape at Polo del ‘900 in Turin; Chì ghe pù Nissun! at Fondazione Elpis. She studied Art Praxis at the Dutch Art Institute and Painting and Visual Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts in Urbino.
- Giovanni Giaretta
Giovanni Giaretta (b. 1983, Padua) is an Italian artist based in Amsterdam. After graduating in Design and Production of Visual Arts at IUAV University of Venice, he participated in several international residency programmes, including the Dena Foundation for Contemporary Art (Paris), De Ateliers (Amsterdam) and Deltaworkers (New Orleans). In 2011 he attended the Advanced Course in Visual Arts at Fondazione Antonio Ratti with Susan Hiller as visiting professor. His work has been exhibited internationally at institutions including Framer Framed, RADIUS, West, De Appel (Netherlands), Museo Fortuny, MAMbo, MACRO, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo and Galleria Tiziana Di Caro (Italy), as well as La Criée and the Musée Départemental d’Art Contemporain de Rochechouart (France). His films have screened at IFFR Rotterdam, IDFA, Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen and Go Short. His practice combines moving images, installation, photography and writing, investigating the intersections between cinema, geology, memory and imagination through long-term research and collaborations with scientists and local communities. Since 2019 he has been a lecturer in Fine Art and Moving Image at AKI ArtEZ in the Netherlands.
- Eleonora Luccarini
Eleonora Luccarini (b. 1993, Bologna) lives and works in Bologna. Her interdisciplinary practice explores the performative potential of language through worldbuilding, meta-narrative strategies and the crafting of alter egos, across mediums such as poetry, video and performance. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna, Università IUAV di Venezia and Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam. Recent exhibitions include: MAMbo – Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna (2026), Fondazione Michetti (Chieti, 2025), MACTE – Museo di Arte Contemporanea di Termoli (2024), MACRO – Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Roma (2022), Baleno International (solo show, Roma, 2022), Fondazione smART (solo show, Roma, 2022), Manifattura Tabacchi (Firenze, 2021), Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo (Torino, 2021) and Quadriennale di Roma (Roma, 2020). She recently performed at OGR Torino (2025), Fondazione Adolfo Pini (Milano, 2023), PAV – Parco Arte Vivente (Torino, 2022) and Istituto Svizzero (Milano, 2021). She is the winner of Italian Council 2026 research grant, Premio New York 2025, ClubGAMec Prize 2023 and Pini Art Prize 2021-2022. Her work is part of public and private collections such as GAMec – Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo.
- GianMarco Porru
GianMarco Porru (b. 1989, Italy) is a visual artist, researcher, and director. He lives and works between Sardinia and Milan, where he is a visiting professor at NABA. Through installation, film, photography, and performance, his practice explores the cultures and syncretic mythologies of the Mediterranean, bringing oral traditions into dialogue with contemporary visual cultures. His recent research considers Sardinia as a speculative territory from which to critically reinterpret notions of authenticity, ritual, and the archaic. His imagery is populated by dissident figures drawn from a layered pantheon where astrology, mythology, community beliefs, and popular knowledge converge. His work has been presented at Solar dos Abacaxis and Tropigalpão (Rio de Janeiro); Re-Mapped Festival at Pirelli HangarBicocca (Milan); Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo; Fondazione Sozzani; MilanOltre; Museo MA*GA; Museo Nivola; PAV; Museo del Novecento; Museo MAN; Photovogue Festival; Piccolo Teatro di Milano – Teatro d’Europa; and MAO Museo di Arte Orientale. In 2023, he was artist-in-residence at Solar dos Abacaxis through the Italian Council (12th edition). In 2025, one of his installation entered the permanent collection of the Biblioteca Sormani in Milan.
- Massimo Vaschetto
Massimo Vaschetto was born in 1980, Torino. He lives and works in Milan.
- Ilaria Vinci
Ilaria Vinci was born in 1991, Cisternino. She lives and works in Zurich.
Jury
Andrea Lissoni
Andrea Lissoni is the artistic director of the Haus der Kunst in Munich. Since 2014 he has been Curator of Film and International Art at the Tate Modern in London. He holds a PhD, has been curator at Hangar Bicocca in Milan since 2011, was professor at the Brera Academy from 2001 to 2013 and at Bocconi University since 2007. Co-founder of the cultural organization Xing, he is co-director of the international festival Live Arts Week-Gianni Peng in Bologna. He is curator and co-creator of the magazine Cujo and regularly collaborates with Mousse. He has been curator of group exhibitions including Circular (San Siro Stadium, Milan, 2004), Collateral. Quando l’arte incontra il cinema (Hangar Bicocca, Milan and SESC Pompeia, Sao Paulo, 2007), Check-in Architecture (Venice Architecture Biennale, 2008), Tudo (Pitti Immagine, Florence, 2011). Between 2011 and 2014 at HangarBicocca, he curated solo exhibitions by Céleste Boursier Mougenot, Angela Ricci Lucchi & Yervant Gianikian, Wilfredo Prieto, Carsten Nicolai, Tomàs Saraceno, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Mike Kelley, Ragnar Kjartansson, Micol Assael, Joan Jonas and Celine Condorelli.
Renaud Proch
Renaud Proch is Independent Curators International (ICI)’s Executive & Artistic Director, and from December 2009 to March 2013, he served as ICI’s Deputy Director. Prior to this, he was the Senior Director at the Project in New York, as well as the Director of MC, in Los Angeles. Originally from Switzerland, Proch studied in London and moved to the West Coast of the U.S. in 2001. He co-founded ART2102 of Los Angeles in 2003, a non-profit organization that realized projects by artists and curators on- and off-site; and the backroom in 2005, a growing artists’ archive and itinerant research-oriented project presented in five cities in the U.S., Mexico and France. In 2011, he co-curated with Khwezi Gule a retrospective of South African artist Tracey Rose for the Johannesburg Art Gallery, South Africa, and the Umea Bildmuseet, Sweden, which also traveled to the Nikolaj Kunsthal, in Copenhagen, Denmark.
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