The fourth cycle of The Orobie Biennial -Thinking Like a Mountain program, held by GAMeC that engages local communities through the participation of international artists, will open on June 7, 2025.

The Linificio e Canapificio Nazionale in Villa d’Almè will host Spin and Break Free, a performance by Cecilia Bengolea, while works by Julius von Bismarck and Francesco Pedrini will be presented in the municipalities of Dossena and Roncobello.

CECILIA BENGOLEA
Spin and Break Free
June 7, 2025
Villa d’Almè

An artist, choreographer, and dancer whose practice spans video, sculpture, and performance, Cecilia Bengolea (Buenos Aires, 1979) often exploits dance as a means through which to stimulate empathy and encourage emotional exchange.

In her recent research conducted at the National Linen and Hemp Mill in Villa d’Almè, Bengolea links the era of the Industrial Revolution to the practice of “Free Dances”: devised by both well-known and lesser-known choreographers between the two World Wars, which she often makes use of. The one elaborated by the Argentine artist herself is a reflection on contemporary alienation. The result is a performance specially conceived for Thinking Like a Mountain and for the spaces of the former spinning mill.

Observation of the rotary and mechanical movements of the machinery used in the hemp and linen spinning rooms, as well as the repetitive movements of the manual labor performed by the workers, was the source of inspiration for the choreography of Spin and Break Free. Specifically, the six young male and female dancers from the Danzarea school in Mozzo, Bergamo—Francesca Carobbio, Martina Galluzzi, Alessia Morganti, Francesca Opini, Umberto Rota, Virginia Gotti—were invited by Bengolea to work on a rotary and repetitive movement, that of spinning, which by repeating a single action activates a meditative, generative, and potentially liberating state of mind. The condition induced by the repetitive rotation of the performers’ bodies, in fact, may trigger energies that translate into movements endowed with spontaneity and vitality, capable of interrupting mechanical repetitiveness while leaving room for improvisation.

These movements are complemented by some repertoire drawn from the Free Dances of the 1930s. In particular, the artist worked with the dancers drawing on the teachings of François Malkovsky that it was necessary to rediscover “natural human movement.” The French dancer and choreographer, among the pioneers of the School of Free Dance in Paris, was inspired by the movements of natural elements or children’s gestures in his search for the “right movement,” of which gravity, fluidity of gesture, breathing, momentum, and economy of effort formed the mainstay.

Along with the choreography, Bengolea designed the stage costumes worn by the dancers using hemp stems and linen fibers, the characteristics of which vary depending on the stage at which the fibers are processed. Made in collaboration with costume designer Alberto Allegretti, they are inspired by the Theyyam ritual, which takes place annually in Kerala, India, during harvest season, when the dancers wear clothes made from the fibers of pepper, cardamom and vanilla plants.

Costumes play a key role within the performance: interpreted as living sculptures, the dancers are invited to interact creatively with the costumes, which sometimes affect their movements or restrict certain parts of their bodies such as their eyesight or arms. Much like continuous rotational movement, costumes—in interaction with the dancers—can potentially shape new gestures and movements that are freer and more spontaneous, thus rejecting the alienation induced by repetitiveness.

The costumes come to life along with the dancers in a form of material animism evoked by the words of the mill workers, interviewed by the artist, who state how they often used to “talk” to the linen, attributing a kind of will to it. The workers’ voices are integrated into the soundtrack that accompanies the performance, composed by the artist especially for the occasion.

Spontaneity-mechanicalness, repetition-release, improvisation-constriction, alienation-rebellion: these are all opposites that permeate every element of the performance: starting from the performers’ initial mechanical movements, it evolves into collective choreography and elements of the Free Dancerepertoire, integrated with House Dancerhythms, until it culminates in the finale, when the dancers break free in a playful ronde, evoking the naturalness of childlike gestures.

The performance is held as part of the fourth edition of ON AIR – Argentina–Italy Art Residency, the residency program arising from a partnership between GAMeC and Fundación PROA in Buenos Aires, to activate exchanges of experiences aimed at enhancing the artistic potential of the two countries.

JULIUS VON BISMARCK
Landscape Painting (Mine)
June 7 – September 14, 2025
Dossena

In Dossena, in the oldest mining district of the Brembana Valley from which ferrous material and fluorite have been extracted for centuries, German artist Julius von Bismarck (Breisach am Rhein, 1983) creates his fifth landscape painting: a painting both of and in thelandscape, in which the pictorial gesture dissolves the boundary between the subject portrayed and the support on which it is created.

For his intervention, the artist is inspired by the aesthetics of etchings and landscape studies that have characterized the research of many leading figures in art history, from Albrecht Dürer to Caspar David Friedrich, from Paul Cézanne to Paul Klee. In particular, von Bismarck’s main references are Italian vedute, woodcuts and copperplate engravings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which set out to depict landscapes as realistically as possible.

In a diametrically opposed approach, the artist intervenes on the rock walls inside the mine by creating an “inverted” trompe-l’œil: instead of rendering three-dimensionality through optical illusions, he paints lines and hatches—typical of the engraving techniques of the past—that transform the view of the quarry into a two-dimensional image. An entire portion of the mine’s first tunnel, selected for its perspective qualities and monumental scale, is simplified into an entirely black-and-white landscape, of which the three-dimensionality may then be reconstructed in the visitors’ imaginations.

Von Bismarck, unlike the engravings that circulated in print between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, is not interested in portraying the grandeur of the landscape, but in physically entering it by confronting its grandeur, in an action that is at once measurement, struggle, conquest, and transformation. The pictorial stroke, applied directly onto the rock, thus becomes a monumental intervention that, while transient, effectively marks the environment: the pictorial image will slowly fade away over the years through the action of weathering.

In this process, one in which the mountain dissolves into the black lines on a white background of the drawing, the artist deconstructs the history of landscape painting with the intention of exposing its contradictions, showing how the representation of nature has always been filtered through anthropocentric idealizations and perspectives.

Referring in particular to the images printed in newspapers and magazines, circulated for decades throughout Europe between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, provided by explorers of overseas lands, particularly from Africa and India (who emphasized the wild nature of the landscapes they traversed) the artist attempts to problematize the role that the media played in spreading the idea of an unspoiled nature ready to be conquered, firstly by travelers and later by colonizers. An idea in some ways still alive today in the imagery promoted by mass tourism.

While mines have long been a typical subject of artistic production, von Bismarck’s intervention in Dossena questions the supposed neutrality of the landscape to highlight its relationship with the human presence that inevitably marks the environment, sometimes irreversibly. Some of the elements visible and incorporated in Landscape Painting (Mine), such as the ladder and other objects used in the past by miners, constitute a necessary incursion to undermine the notion of nature as something other than itself and thus to relocate the human being within it.

His intervention thus intensifies reflection on the relationship between the human and nature, ultimately conceived not as a pre-human or “other” entity, but as a cultural construct that changes throughout history.

The relational aspect was also at the basis of the process that gave rise to the work: as part of the Na.Tur.Arte – L’Area Wilderness Valparina tra ospitalità, Arte e Natura project, the Municipality of Dossena, the Mines Association and the Menna Ortighera Forestry Consortium were, from the earliest stages, indispensable interlocutors with whom the museum established an intense collaboration based on the sharing of intentions and the construction of a common path. The continuous dialogue between the young volunteers and professionals of the Association, and the museum together with the artist, has woven an interweaving of technical and territorial knowledge, rooting the realization of Landscape Painting (Mine) in the cultural, social and geological reality of the place, to which the work from this moment belongs.

Conceived in close relationship with the mining landscape of Dossena, von Bismarck’s intervention—for the execution of which the artist availed himself of the collaboration of Nikita Popescu, Natasha Rivellini and Nicola Zanni—thus aims to trigger new gazes on a geological heritage of extraordinary relevance, strengthening its visibility and public enjoyment. An intervention that intends to give back to the community, first of all, and to the visitors themselves, an opportunity to know and belong to a fascinating place, steeped in history and individual and community stories.

FRANCESCO PEDRINI
Magnitudo
June 7 – September 14, 2025
Roncobello

Francesco Pedrini’s (Bergamo, 1973) project for the community of Roncobello involves the construction of a new observation point of the heavenly vault at the Vendulo Pass.

The choice of the site was determined by a combination of historical and fortuitous elements: the Upper Brembana Valley is a site of great archeo-astronomical interest, and the Vendulo Pass is a crossroads of paths, including the one leading to the Porta delle Cornacchie. Here, in an area where spruce trees afflicted by the bark beetle—an insect that attacks this type of plant in particular, feeding on the inner part of the trunk—had to be removed, a congenial space was created to host a new “poetic observatory of the sky,” as the artist calls it.

Pedrini’s work stems precisely from a reflection on the transformation of the forest ecosystem due to climate change and the spread of spruce tree monocultures that have encouraged the proliferation of the bark beetle, which is destroying large swathes of forest.

Inspired by Jaipur’s Jantar Mantar, a famous Indian astronomical site, Magnitudo will have simple but evocative functions, and will consist of three installations that are not only aesthetically valuable, yet which are genuine observation tools: Posa is a flat area, leveled with planks of wood, which functions as a horizontal sundial and will come to life over the next year thanks to community participation: until May 7, 2026, every month, various people will be invited to bring a small stone to be set in the spot marked by the sundial’s shadow. A simple yet meaningful gesture that will be repeated until the twelve stones trace a solar analemma: a geometric figure reminiscent of the infinity symbol. A tangible sign of belonging, memory, and sharing; a living work, generated by the community and returned to it as a permanent symbol of a time experienced together.

The other two works are made of larch wood, typical of the area and resistant to the weather: Polaris is a log inclined at about 42 degrees—like the latitude at the Vendulo Pass—that guides the observer toward the North Star, which has always been a reference point for explorers and scientists. A work that symbolizes stability and guidance, and invites reflection on our origin and infinity.

In Aerofono, the tree is transformed into a hollow structure that collects the sounds of the sky, offering an immersive listening experience. The surface of the trunk is furrowed with lines that, while recalling the marks left by the bark beetle, actually draw inspiration from the winding path of the Valsecca River in the valley, from the Baite di Mezzeno to Bordogna.

Starting June 13, the works of Francesco Ferrero, Gianmarco Cugusi and Roberto Picchi, winners of the 2024 edition of Sentieri Creativi: a project born from the synergy between Bergamo per Giovani, the Municipality of Bergamo and the “Donizetti-Carrara” Polytechnic of the Arts, in which GAMeC collaborated to activate a new format of the residency program, will also be presented in the municipalities of Dossena and Roncobello. The start of the summer cycle will be preparatory for the announcement of the winning artists of the 2025 residency program, who will stay in Dossena and Roncobello between June and July to produce new works.

The interventions by Julius von Bismarck and Francesco Pedrini, as well as the works by Francesco Ferrero, Gianmarco Cugusi and Roberto Picchi are produced in partnership with the municipalities of Dossena and Roncobello as part of the Na.Tur.Arte project L’Area Wilderness Valparina tra ospitalità, Arte e Natura (“The Valparina Wilderness Area amid Hospitality, Art and Nature”).