The Fondazione Donnaregina per le arti contemporanee – museo Madre presents Cutting clouds. Tagliando le nuvole, a program that unfolds across various formats, including actions linked by the common denominator of the ephemeral and the impermanent: exhibition interventions, workshops and performance events, curated by Marta Ferrara and Marta Wróblewska.

This exhibition device is composed of interventions and works, scattered in the liminal spaces of Madre and has been conceived to coexist with the imminent second phase of the museum's maintenance works, in order not to interrupt the content offer and programming even during their course.

Cutting clouds. Tagliando le nuvole winds its way through various operations that aim to stimulate potential creativity by toying with known boundaries while appreciating the random, the improvised, and the indeterminate.

The title refers to Cloud scissors, a work conceived in the early 1960s by George Brecht (New York 1926 – Köln 2008), a leading artist among Fluxus exponents. A number of cards collected in a mailing envelope serve as instructions for a possible happening comprising several events. Random directions, to be followed in any situation, are thus designed to push back the limits to imagination through play and experimentation. The tools left in the wake of Brecht and his contemporaries—Yoko Ono (Tokyo, 1933), Arrigo Lora Totino (Turin, 1928–2016) and Dieter Roth (Hannover, 1930 – Basel, 1998)—now serve to trigger an exercise in imagination, being re-applied here in a program which will unfold in a range of different forms, like clouds that pass by fluidly and take shape through our gaze, change and never repeat.

Cutting clouds. Tagliando le nuvole chooses to focus on works which display a notion of potential or an idea of incompleteness, adopting various media—video, painting, poetry, graphics, photography, sculpture, drawing, sound, and performance. A number of paradoxical and utopian attempts at the definition and capture of the ungraspable—i.e. the works of artists from various generations, known on a local, national or international level—Marisa Albanese (Naples, 1947–2021), Francesco Arena (Torre Santa Susanna, 1978), Edoardo Aruta (Rome, 1981), Simone Berti (Adria, 1966), Gianni Caravaggio (Rocca San Giovanni, 1968), Carmela De Falco (Naples, 1994), Salvatore Emblema (Terzigno, 1929–2006), Irene Fenara (Bologna, 1990), Domenico Antonio Mancini (Naples, 1980), Eva Marisaldi (Bologna, 1966), Matteo Nasini (Rome, 1976), Perino&Vele (Emiliano Perino, New York, 1973, and Luca Vele, Rotondi, 1975), Alberto Tadiello (Montecchio Maggiore, 1983), Serena Vestrucci (Milan, 1986)—make for a highly decentered display path.

The opening of Cutting clouds. Tagliando le nuvole will be marked by performance events, aimed at unearthing poetry in the everyday dimension through disharmony and disequilibrium, through both an individual and collective multisensory experience. The museum will then be enlivened by the performance Da casa mia non si vede il mare by Gabriella Siciliano (Naples, 1990) and Fragments of silence, a site-specific sound performance by Renato Fiorito (Naples, 1987), conceived specifically for the spaces of the Sala Clemente.

In the context of the opening program, there will also be a presentation of ...e molte alrew cose, an installation by Cesare Pietroiusti (Rome, 1955) in collaboration with fifteen young Bologna-based artists and curators, now part of the Madre collection. The work was created in 2019 thanks to funding from the Italian Council, in a permanent workshop at MAMbo – Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna as part of the retrospective exhibition Un certo numero di cose 1955–2019, which featured the display of an object for each year of the artist’s life. Interdisciplinary investigations of the non-functional, the speculative and the fragmented, characteristic of Pietroiusti’s research, take on a sense of co-authorship in the meta-object, exploring the concepts of the instruction and delegation of the creative act and its potential and boundless reproducibility, in a work that—in the artist’s own words—is unfinished. Its nature provides the stimulus to stage it once more, as part of the Cutting clouds. Tagliando le nuvole program, as a workshop setup. In fact, on September 26, a selection of the works/objects/years made in Bologna will be presented to the public in the Sala delle Colonne, where Verbo, a work by Paolo Puddu and Ninì Sgambati, is currently installed. Subsequently, the project will also feature new encounters, exchanges and production involving artists and curators linked to the Neapolitan area, drawing on five new works by Pietroiusti corresponding to the years 2020–2024.

The program of activities will then continue in November with a second chapter, featuring interventions by the artists Kamilia Kard (Milan, 1981) and Nuvola Ravera (Genoa, 1984) and the Turin-based publishing house and bookstore Paint it black, which will go on to occupy additional spaces throughout the museum.