The artwork Untitled (2023) by Margherita Raso wins the tenth edition of the Club GAMeC Prize, which since last year has been dedicated to the memory of President Giuseppe Casarotto and is being presented for the first time in GAMeC spaces.
Made of Jacquard fabric, Untitled intertwines history, image, and body, entering the space simultaneously as a painting and a sculpture. Silk, like other products that have shaped history, carries an economic, geographical, symbolic, and political memory that the artwork reactivates without ever explicitly declaring it. Upon this taut weft, human figures emerge, caught in the act of falling and rising again: unstable, incomplete bodies, suspended between vulnerability and resistance. Untitled serves as a reminder that every shared narrative is always partial, layered, and imperfect, and that bodies—both social and cultural—remain fragile spaces of transmission and resignification.
The artwork, which will be acquired by Club GAMeC and will become part of the Collection of the Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo, was selected by a jury of experts chaired by GAMeC Director Lorenzo Giusti and composed of Matteo Lucchetti, Director of ParCo – Parma Contemporanea; Ilenia Carnio Paneghini, Club GAMeC supporter and collector; Chiara Traversi, Club GAMeC board member and collector; and Eleonora De Blasio, curator of the 9th edition of the Club GAMeC Prize.
The artwork was chosen by the jury for the reflection developed by the artist on the role of the binary language that gave rise to Jacquard loom weaving, which today finds an echo in the logic of the algorithm governing our daily interactions. It was also selected for its original language, rooted in an initial recording of bodily movement understood as a dynamic of resistance that resonates through the manipulations of the warp and weft; and for the choice to evoke the loom through a metallic structure enclosing the piece (a solution that grants it an unexpected three-dimensionality, further suggested by the presence of a section of fabric where a technical error becomes another possible matrix for the artwork).
In addition to Untitled by Margherita Raso, the other artworks competing in this edition of the Club GAMeC Prize were Playing Hours (2024) by Isabella Costabile, Addio (2026) by Leonardo Devito, and Adoration (2026) by Alice Visentin. Until September 6, the four works will be on view in at GAMeC as part of the exhibition Alphabets of the Possible, curated by Giacomo Pigliapoco, which takes as its starting point two central concepts from the lexicon of Paulo Freire.
Here, alphabet is not intended as a closed, normative system of signs, but rather as a plurality of codes, images, forms, and knowledges through which the world can be read, questioned, and rewritten. For Freire, learning to read means acquiring the tools to recognize the structures that organize reality, to name what remains on the margins, and to critically transform one’s relationship with the present. From this perspective, the “possible” coincides with a threshold-space of transformation, a reserve of meaning, an unfulfilled potential to imagine and construct alternative forms of life, memory, and relation. If for Freire hope is an active practice, the possible is the very field in which this relational practice takes shape.
Within this framework, the works on display offer plural, critical readings of the world, shedding light on what is marginal or invisible. Starting from spaces of marginality and imagination, these evolving “alphabets” become devices for understanding the present and revealing its potential for transformation.