OPEN: Exhibition space at Palazzo Buontalenti

Where research and art collide

Curated by: Sergio Risaliti and Stefania Rispoli

Developed in dialogue with the research project Measuring the Invisible Economy by Johanna Gautier-Morin, Open explores economic life through its productive, reproductive, and destructive dimensions.

The exhibition creates a conversation between social science research and contemporary visual art. The shared intent is to make visible and open to questioning those processes, practices, and forms of value that classical economics has historically marginalised: the often invisible yet essential foundations that sustain our collective survival and flourishing, such as domestic care work, informal transactions, and the asymmetric extraction of natural resources.

Spread across the indoor and outdoor spaces of Palazzo Buontalenti, home to the EUI's Florence School of Transnational Governance, the Open exhibition invites visitors to reflect on four key concepts:

Gleaning: recovering the marginal, the residual, and the discarded as vital cognitive and material resources.
Exhaustion: examining the mental, physical, biological, and environmental limits characterising contemporary systems of production.
Irreversibility: acknowledging processes of no return that reshape social and ecological worlds. It challenges the cyclical imaginaries through which economic life is often measured and invites reflection on longer timescapes where damage and transformation accumulate without return.
Mutation: exploring forms of adaptation and the emergence of new modes of coexistence and relation.

The artists and spaces

The exhibition features site-specific installations and large-scale works by international artists across three main areas:

Exterior spaces: the historic garden welcomes the public with a large-scale, luminous pop installation by Riccardo Previdi interrogating global mobility. Nearby, Leone Contini presents an evolutionary, living botanical installation generated from the building’s restoration debris, alongside an unprecedented multi-stereo sound piece co-created by Johanna Gautier-Morin and Pierre Chastel that acts as a dynamic auditory archive.

During the inaugural evenings, this experience was enhanced in the central courtyard by immersive multimedia projections by digital artist Vincenzo Capalbo and an unprecedented sound garden broadcasting the Hymn to Peace by composer Andrea Portera.

Interior spaces: the central exhibition hall (the "piazza") and adjacent transitional spaces host a dispersed, collaborative installation by Elena Mazzi and Johanna Gautier-Morin. Realised with the active creative and operational contribution of six students from the Accademia di Belle Arti di Firenze, this work establishes an open space for collective co-creation utilising textual wall interventions and custom spinning chairs. Within the building's rooms, Elena Mazzi also conducts a rigorous visual investigation into the geopolitical transformations of the Arctic region through her Polar Silk Road project and the Sápmi Flatbed interactive sculptural topography. The interiors further feature the poignant sculptures of Berlinde De Bruyckere (including the monumentally draped Arcangelo and the visceral installation The Embalmer), the hypnotic video essay of Eglė Budvytytė deconstructing anthropocentric hierarchies, and the AI-generated video works (The Book of Flowers) and the Braudel Clocks by Agnieszka Polska, which destabilise linear chronology.
Sala delle Grottesche: a permanent institutional hub and narrative space dedicated to the Agenzia del Demanio, hosting Memory and Vision, a photographic exhibition by British artist Gina Soden documenting the structural transitions and historical memory of three iconic Florentine heritage sites subject to adaptive reuse.