Francesco Manacorda on Turin’s Collaborative Spirit

Vanessa Peterson How have you found your first year as director of Castello di Rivoli?

Francesco Manacorda For me, it’s been a homecoming. I grew up in Turin, but moved away in 2001 and have mostly lived abroad since – although I reconnected with the city when I was director of Artissima between 2010 and 2012.

Castello di Rivoli is an institution that I have always admired and it’s been great to get to know its inner workings – not only to see what it needs but, more crucially, to understand what its current audience, or any potential new audiences, might need from it. That’s what I’ve been focusing on, and trying to absorb feedback on, during my first year. The response has been very positive because it’s a much-loved institution, especially abroad.

VP How do you see Castello di Rivoli’s relationship to the local versus the international?

FM I think that’s one of the most interesting questions institutions currently face. I am trying to de-demonize the word ‘provincial’ because I firmly believe that it’s possible to be relevant both to your local community and on an international level.

I worked as artistic director of Tate Liverpool for five years [2012–17], but I don’t think I can apply Nicholas Serota’s method here and turn Castello di Rivoli into Tate Modern, which has five million visitors a year, because this is not a vast building in the centre of a huge metropolis. The culture is different here: for us, it’s a matter of hyper-localizing in order to become internationally relevant, which is an approach we’re currently devising different strategies for.

When I arrived back in Turin, I encountered a small but significant community of international artists, designers and curators, like Cally Spooner, who is originally from the UK. Cally offered to run a summer school at Castello di Rivoli, so I told her she could have operational carte blanche with one condition: we could only have people teaching on the course who live in Turin or the wider Piedmont region. The school was designed for Italian artists who have finished their studies but have not had international educational opportunities. We wanted to explore an approach that allows the local to flourish, otherwise we run the risk of parachuting in a programme that is relevant internationally but may not really speak to our immediate public.

VP Do you have a sense of the kinds of communities living in Turin that might be curious to visit but haven’t yet done so – particularly since Castello di Rivoli is located some distance from the city centre?

FM There are various communities in the local area that we’re trying to engage with. For instance, ‘Mutual Aid: Art in Collaboration with Nature’, the first show I’ve curated for Castello di Rivoli, is intended to attract people to the gallery who are interested in the question of interspecies collaboration and the natural world, even if they might not be familiar with contemporary art. The works in this show will enable them to experience something that makes them say, ‘Maybe this is relevant to me.’

The exhibition title, ‘Mutual Aid’, also nods to my approach to running the museum, which involves reaching out to Turin’s network of local institutions. Our approach shouldn’t be competitive: we should be working together and working with the public. It’s not about telling audiences what to do, what to think, or what to know; it’s about asking them whether there’s a way we can make what we do more relevant to them.

There is a barrier to access not only in relation to Castello di Rivoli, but to contemporary art more generally throughout Italy. Traditionally, museums are associated with academia and knowledge-creation: there’s this sense of division between the so-called experts and non-experts. The question is: how do we make our institutions relevant and appealing to those who operate outside of academia?

To that end, we are constantly experimenting with new methods. One thing we plan to do is to rehang our collection alongside 21st century artworks to try to make it as diverse as possible. I also want to transform the third floor into a museum for children. We’ll take iconic pieces from the collection by artists like Lucio Fontana and Claes Oldenburg, and, working with a group of children and young people, we’ll devise a narrative that articulates why these particular works are interesting. I’m going to turn the third floor into an ‘Enchanted Castle’ – this is the title of the project – because its aim is to re-enchant the works through the eyes of our younger visitors.

VP The wall panel at the start of ‘Mutual Aid’ acknowledges the exhibition’s non-human collaborators – different species of trees, for instance – alongside the artists whose works are on view.

FM I want to create as many instances as possible where the viewer is invited to interpret the work for themselves, rather than being guided by the curatorial presentation. Museums need to be places where one goes to ask questions, not to find ready-made answers. I want to give the audience as many tools as possible to formulate their own ideas and readings of the show while leaving some level of indeterminacy. That, I believe, is the job of cultural institutions.

You can present art on a theoretical level but, if your audience can’t understand what you’re saying, then you’re taking a top-down approach. To some extent, it’s trial and error, because different situations have different solutions. I’ve experimented with this in previous roles. When I was director of Tate Liverpool, for instance, we tried pairing artists’ exhibitions: Piet Mondrian with Nasreen Mohamedi [2014] and Jackson Pollock with Glenn Ligon [2015]. In the visitors’ book somebody wrote, ‘I came to see Mondrian, but I’m leaving loving Mohamedi.’ That, for me, was a sign of success. I call it a cybernetic approach: you need to be listening all the time, otherwise your programming becomes formulaic. My hope would be that, by the end of any show, I’ve increased the number and diversity of visitors.

VP Can you speak more to the idea of collaborating with other local institutions?

FM Since 2008, funding has been shrinking radically in the arts, and Castello di Rivoli is in a very different financial situation now than it was 15 years ago. So, I’m working with my institutional colleagues in Turin – Chiara Bertola at the Gallery of Modern Art, Sarah Cosulich at Pinacoteca Agnelli, Luigi Fassi at Artissima, Davide Quadrio at the Museum of Oriental Art as well as Beatrice Merz and Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo at the two eponymous foundations – to find more radical ways of collaborating. Together, we’re sitting down and asking, for example: can we share a press trip? It’s an unconventional approach but one that can break down ingrained ways of working that no longer serve us. If we join forces, we can go further and do more with the same budget.

VP Looking ahead, what are your hopes for the institution?

FM I hope to establish a truly collaborative relationship with Castello di Rivoli’s many audiences. Although the collection belongs to everyone and the building is publicly owned, I would like to see an increase in emotional ownership. The programme we have planned – which includes a range of new activities, performances, live music, etc. – aspires to achieve this goal of invested ownership. I want to capture new audiences by creating additional reasons for them to visit. Then, once they come and see the building, I’m confident they’ll fall in love.

‘Mutual Aid: Art in Collaboration with Nature’ is on view at Castello di Rivoli, Turin, until 23 March 2025

_{Main image: Precious Okoyomon, the sun eats her children (detail), 2023, installation view. Courtesy: Castello di Rivoli; photograph: Andrea Guermani}