Image: civic art gallery
Giovanna Silva will install a site-specific photographic work across central Trento this autumn, using commercial and institutional billboard supports to carry images devoted to the memory of the 1985 Stava disaster. The project, ‘Arte pubblica’, runs in two phases: from 7 September to 2 October on Via Giusti, and from 19 October to 1 November on Via Travai and at the San Severino car park. It is developed in collaboration with Fondazione Stava 1985.
Silva’s photographs are of Val di Stava, where the collapse of a mine’s tailings basins in 1985 overwhelmed the settlement in one of Italy’s gravest industrial disasters. Mart describes the tension in the pictures between memory and apparent normality: the landscape now looks to have almost reabsorbed the catastrophe, so the images, posted in the ordinary space of the street, abruptly reintroduce a wound that tends to become invisible. Silva has often noted that inhabiting a place also means living with what was traumatic there. By entering the visual fabric of the street, the intervention turns signage and fly-posting into a temporary exhibition device, and the museum frames it as a question: when a community recomposes the visible, is that a working-through, or does the return to order risk a fresh erasure?
‘Arte pubblica’ belongs to the public programme of ‘Pietre di pane. Memorie di geografie fragili’, on view at the Galleria Civica in Trento from 17 July to 15 November 2026. The exhibition is organised by Mart with the Comune di Trento and curated by Giulia Colletti and Gabriele Lorenzoni; admission is €5, reduced €3. The public programme spreads across the city from September and includes a performance by Alice Visentin on 10 September 2026 at 11am in Piazza Santa Maria Maggiore, in the Portela quarter, made with Fondazione Franco Demarchi and Fare Comunità and free to attend without booking.
The exhibition borrows its title from a collection of essays by the anthropologist Vito Teti and continues research Mart began with ‘Paesi perduti. Appunti per un viaggio nell’Italia dimenticata’ at the Galleria Civica in 2022–23. It considers the progressive emptying of some territories against urban growth and concentration, avoiding nostalgic accounts of abandoned villages in favour of the complexity of inhabiting places marked by historical and social fracture — including Teti’s notion of ‘restanza’, the deliberate choice to stay. Some 50 works by 31 artists are grouped as four ‘villages’ organised around latencies, frictions, drifts and reactivations, presented as an open interpretive map rather than fixed sections.
Works from the Mart collections include rarely shown pieces by Richard Long and Mirella Bentivoglio, alongside site-specific commissions from artists such as Francis Offman and Marina Caneve and loans from galleries and private collections, among them Ana Mendieta, Shilpa Gupta, Zhanna Kadyrova and Giorgio Andreotta Calò. Other artists in the show include Carla Accardi, Giovanni Anselmo, Antonio Biasiucci, Maria Lai, Piero Manzoni, Marzia Migliora, Sarker Protick, Mario Schifano, Santiago Sierra, Mladen Stilinović and Silva herself. A catalogue published by Mart is forthcoming, with a preface by Teti and an essay by Gianluca Cepollaro. Cultural partners are Arte Sella, Fondazione Franco Demarchi, Fondazione Stava 1985, STEP – Scuola per il governo del territorio e del paesaggio, and Trento Film Festival.
