A five-month event dedicated to circularity in Europe, in which art, information and debate took shape together.
The ideas behind The Circle, and the artist at work. The film opened the exhibition in the Arena, the first room of the route, before visitors entered the rooms.
In 2023 the journey found its first landing: a five-month event dedicated to circularity in Europe, in which art, information and debate took shape together.
At the Gallerie d’Italia in Turin, Intesa Sanpaolo’s museum, The Circle unfolded across some 5,000 square metres of underground galleries. Curated by Elisa Medde and developed in collaboration with the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, the exhibition brought together around seventy photographs and video works from nineteen places in ten countries – from the geothermal fields of Iceland to the mussel farms of Galicia.
The images were not left to speak alone. Along the route, the interactive and static information design of Federica Fragapane set data beside the photographs, so that each place could be read as well as seen. In the museum’s immersive room, the #INSIDE talks turned the exhibition into a place of discussion, where science communicators, architects, journalists and representatives of industry met the public around the everyday practice of circularity. The conversation reached beyond the museum, into schools and the streets of the city.
The Circle was conceived not as a conclusion but as a first chapter: a way of looking closely at a transition already under way, with its possibilities and its contradictions.
With the support of Fondazione Compagnia di San Paolo and Fondazione Cariplo
The exhibition unfolded as a continuous route, from the volcanic landscapes of Iceland to the undersea world, and closed its own circle in the museum’s immersive room.
After the Arena, the route opens in Iceland, which in Locatelli’s vision represents the closing of the circle: a country that generates all of its electricity from renewable sources. At the threshold hangs a curtain showing the swing carousel inside the cooling tower of Kalkar, in Germany – a nuclear reactor completed shortly before Chernobyl, never put into operation, and now an amusement park.
Beyond it, the Hellisheiði geothermal field and the injection site where carbon dioxide is dissolved in water and turned into stone underground in less than two years, imitating and accelerating a natural process.
In the vaulted gallery, Iceland’s geothermal energy powers the production chain of the food of the future: microalgae grown for human consumption and as fish feed, in a facility integrated with one of the largest geothermal plants in the world, where the plant’s own waste becomes a resource.
The Icelandic images find their counterpart in Larderello, in Tuscany, site of the world’s first geothermal power plant in 1911. At the centre of the gallery, Federica Fragapane’s interactive table invited visitors into the data behind the images.
The central room is a journey into the bowels of former mines: the Turda salt mine in Romania, now an underground theme park; a former mine in Norway converted into a hyper-efficient datacenter; and Ferropolis, an open-cast coal mine in Saxony-Anhalt turned into a venue for music, presented through double-sided lightboxes, photographs and video.
Around them, the recovery of raw materials: non-wearable textiles sorted and given a second life, fishing nets regenerated into nylon, paper made from the algae of the Venetian lagoon, end-of-life aircraft dismantled for recycling, and insects reared in Piedmont for natural fertilisers.
A darkened passage holds an immersive projection on the ceiling: the first high-altitude floating solar park, built on Lac des Toules in the Swiss Alps. Its bifacial, transparent panels capture light reflected by both water and snow; the pilot installation covers two per cent of the lake and tests the feasibility of a park that could cover more than a third of it.
The route turns to the nature-based solutions of the undersea world. Off Noli, in Liguria, air-filled biospheres anchored to the seabed grow plants beneath the sea. Off the coast of Galicia, mussels farmed on ropes suspended from floating rafts filter the water and increase the biodiversity of the water column. Under the microscope, an aquatic plant returns to the key to life on earth: photosynthesis.
The route then closes its own circle in the immersive room, with a collection of video material summarising the subjects on show.
The book of the exhibition: the photographs, the visual data design and the texts of the curator and the partners, printed on Favini papers made from algae of the Venetian lagoon and from agro-industrial residues.
Along the entire route, interactive and static data visualisations bound the photographic narrative to the intellectual experience – in Elisa Medde’s words, “between vision and information”.
An interactive table in the vaulted gallery introduced visitors to the potential of circular solutions, to Europe’s material flows and to their own habits as consumers. Five large-format visualisations then accompanied the rooms, from geothermal energy and land recycling to the mitigation potential of the oceans, closing with the solutions catalogued by Project Drawdown.
The CIRCLE was made possible by an alliance of institutions committed to the ecological transition. Their words, from the exhibition catalogue.
“The Gallerie d’Italia gives space to photography not only for its artistic value, but precisely because it is a powerful and effective means of spreading topical and profound content, involving the wider public, and questioning us all about the challenges to be faced in the present and future.”Giovanni Bazoli · Chairman Emeritus, Intesa Sanpaolo Gallerie d’Italia ↗
“There are many ground-breaking solutions already in place that have the potential to scale and accelerate the transition to a circular economy – some of which are included in the CIRCLE. They show us what is possible.”Joe Iles · Circular Design Programme Lead, Ellen MacArthur Foundation Ellen MacArthur Foundation ↗
“Culture plays a very important role in these transformation processes; indeed, it actually becomes an agent of change.”Francesco Profumo · Chair, Fondazione Compagnia di San Paolo Compagnia di San Paolo ↗
“To be successful, it is necessary to work together – institutions, companies, service sector – in local communities, with a focus on the most fragile and an eye towards the rest of the world and the future of the forthcoming generations.”Giovanni Azzone · President, Fondazione Cariplo Fondazione Cariplo ↗
Quotations from the texts published in the CIRCLE, Gallerie d’Italia | Skira, 2023
During the exhibition, the Gallerie d’Italia – Intesa Sanpaolo organised #INSIDE, a programme of Wednesday talks held in the museum’s immersive room, transformed for the evening into an auditorium, among the projections of the exhibition.
The series devoted to The Circle opened with the artist in conversation, and brought together voices from science communication, design, fashion and industry around the everyday practice of circularity.
A selection of the international and Italian coverage that accompanied the exhibition.