For the 11th edition of Opentour, P420 in collaboration with the Academy of Fine Arts of Bologna and Fondazione Zucchelli presents Sensemaking. Acts of interference, an exhibition curated by Collettivo Etcetera, composed of Elisa Bocchi, Gabriele Cavagnino, Valentina Galli, Eleny Kiriakopoulos, Sveva Mazzoli and Aurora Secchia.

The exhibition is the result of the work of a group of students in the second year of the Master’s program on art and cultural mediation of artistic heritage inside the course of studies on curating coordinated by Prof. Marinella Paderni. With the support of the teacher and the gallerists of P420, the young curators have formulated the idea of the show and selected works by seven artists from the Academy, studying in the three-year and two-year programs in Visual and Applied Arts.

The exhibition explores the generative potential of disorientation: not loss of meaning, but an opportunity to produce it. The perception of reality today is constantly fragmented and ambiguous. In this context, “sensemaking” – the concept theorized by the psychologist Karl Weick in the 1970s – becomes a tool with which to assign meaning to experiences and events, above all in moments of uncertainty or precariousness. Each work of art offers an angled perspective on familiar forms, metaphors, stories and symbols, which in turn provide keys of interpretation capable of transforming chaos into comprehensible signs. The pieces by the artists thus become poetic, capable of rendering existing schemes visible while suggesting alternative pathways in a complex and contradictory world.

On view, Alessandro Aprile (Modica, 1999) explores the expressive possibilities of the monotype technique, through which he avoids the frustration of white space and creates the tensions inhabiting his canvases. Elysee Farazmand (Tehran, 2000) presents an installation that pays tribute to the history of Galleria P420 through a sculptural-narrative diagram where every chromatic shading harbors deposited and invisible memories. Claudia Gentile (Sulmona, 1998) engages in an intimate investigate of the body and its fragility, overturning its limits through the original gaze of her photography.

Through different languages, Tunahan Havrandere (Izmir, 2003) reflects on biographical experiences, the sense of belonging and diasporic identity. Riccardo Michelini (Modena, 2001) deconstructs the pictorial language through an installation that questions the codes of painting and disrupts the format of the canvas. Paolo Saputo (Palermo, 2001) brings a work that stems from the desire to restore visibility to a prohibited gesture, coming to grips with a childhood sensation censored by an oppressive system of education. Ismaele Soraperra (Canazei, 2001) focuses on the unstable nature of perception and the alienation of the contemporary world, revealing the mechanisms of a hyper-saturated and ambiguous reality.