I 31 che curano la realtà ferita (English version)

At IULM University in Milan, a group of students has been entrusted with curating an exhibition on the work of Velasco Vitali, centered on environmental awareness. "Thanks to them for recognizing that, in thirty years of work, I have remained consistent. This discovery has given me stability," says the artist.

An Artist, Thirty-One Curators
This collaboration takes place at Milan's IULM University, featuring Velasco Vitali—painter, sculptor, and an artist who has spent years exploring new materials and languages, installations, and canvases. The curators are second-year students in the Master's Degree Program in Art, Enhancement, and Market within the Faculty of Arts and Tourism, training for a future in and for the arts. Their partnership led to the creation of the exhibition Listen Better, running until November 24 at IULM, showcasing a selection of Vitali's works connected by a central theme: the climate emergency. This is both a global issue and a pressing local one, as seen in Milan and beyond in recent months. The artworks depict landscapes and ruins, a nature at risk, turned into an adversary by human actions, and extend an urgent invitation to heed the warnings nature sends. Listen Better is a call to action. The phrase, Vitali explains, is borrowed from Hermann Hesse's novel Siddhartha: "It’s a book many of us read during high school. For some, it left a deeper impact, but either way, it’s part of our collective memory. By choosing it, I wanted to connect it to the stage of life these students are in as curators: a time when it's essential to develop a perspective on the world that offers both detachment and awareness." Siddhartha's journey—finding the right distance to truly listen—serves as a metaphor for the exhibition’s aim.

 The exhibition, critically coordinated by Anna Luigia De Simone, is part of IULM’s Word of the Year initiative, an annual project led by Rector Gianni Canova, which builds university events and activities around a chosen word. This year’s word is "risk." For the students, collaborating with Vitali was an opportunity to apply their academic knowledge. As Vincenzo Trione, art historian, critic, and dean of the Faculty of Arts and Tourism, explains, Listen Better "fits into IULM's tradition of exhibitions that aim to bridge the gap between academia and the professional world." For Vitali, working with the students was a novel and revealing experience: "I immediately accepted the proposal because experimentation is fundamental to my work. A journey without a clear destination is always the right one. Exploring new paths and taking risks has always been a vital part of my practice." The collaborative process spanned eight months, during which students and the artist exchanged ideas, visited Vitali's studio, and studied his extensive body of work before identifying the central theme for the exhibition. The final result is an exhibition structured into three parts: A Fistful of Dust, I Perceived the Scene, and Predicted the Rest, and Desolate Land. Together, they traverse Vitali’s artistic journey from the late 1980s to today.

For Vitali, the curators’ work illuminated a previously unrecognized thread in his art: "They revealed a tight relationship between past and present that I hadn’t fully appreciated. It gave me a sense of stability and coherence, the feeling of still being myself after thirty years."
 Environmental concerns have been present in Vitali's work since 1987, when a devastating flood in Valtellina—an area deeply meaningful to him—inspired his series Erased Landscape. That disaster, he recalls, marked a turning point, both personally and politically: "It was the first time we witnessed such an event live on TV. It was a seismic shift, not just in natural terms but also politically." From that traumatic episode arose a series of forty paintings titled Erased Landscape, revisited today in the Milan exhibition. "From there, from that experience," notes Velasco, "comes perhaps the strongest element of my early work: the intersection of painting with the chronicle of events, with the present. Since then, my artistic research has never been separate from current events. I believe that being an artist necessarily involves engaging with the events of one’s time." From the past to more recent and personal episodes that evoke the same sense of precariousness and risk: the exhibition at IULM opens with a video—a few seconds on a loop—that accompanies visitors along their path. Kolmanskop, named after a Namibian city swallowed by sand dunes, is a 2011 video directed by Francesco Clerici. It documents the real collapse of the artist's studio following a landslide in a nearby building. “These are images,” Vitali explains, “that I’ve wanted to show for years. The concrete, the partially liquid debris spilling over my paintings, over years of work. And below it all, the relentless, hammering rhythm of firefighters trying to clear the rubble. To me, it feels like a metaphor for what is collapsing right before our eyes but that we fail to see.”

To conclude the exhibition, there is an outdoor segment: on the IULM campus, a site-specific installation evokes hope for a possible future, even in places that seem no longer inhabitable. This is Red Forest, a poetic transformation symbolizing an escape from the burning city, brought to life through a series of intensely colored trees.Echoing The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot, the original message resurfaces: Listen Better, pay attention—hearing nature’s cry of distress might be the only way to prevent the worst. Can art help us and thus take on a civil role?"An artist can be an activist, or not, but they are always in dialogue with their time. Art," Vitali concludes, "is an open eye on the world and certainly an eye of conscience. It has the ability to look deeply and to create beauty—a function that remains fundamental in our lives."