Alberto Garutti, invited on the occasion of the 5th edition of Arte all’Arte by Roberto Pinto and Gilda Williams, chose to work in Colle di Val d’Elsa.
Alberto Garutti, the only Italian artist in this edition, began an investigation into places, understood as spaces of inhabiting and above all of everyday life. An investigation that necessarily passes through dialogue and contact with the people who animate the place where the intervention will take place. In fact, Alberto Garutti’s recent works, located in public spaces, always attempt to touch the sensibilities of the people who live there, entering into a dialectical relationship with their needs, hopes, and desires: “Art must rediscover its connection with the reality of life.”
In this case, the artist, after spending a fairly long period in Colle di Val d’Elsa, and thanks to the collaboration of people he met there, discovered and decided to restore the building where a local choir, the Vincenzo Bellini—one of the city’s most symbolically significant institutions—meets and rehearses. This public building, which had required serious maintenance for decades, was restored to its original condition, becoming the tangible symbolic object of this relationship between the artist, the environment, and the social context.
In these kinds of interventions, the artist’s role as discoverer and creator of beauty is clearly surpassed; Garutti seeks a new task for the artist, closer to that of a director of situations, a cultural mediator who tries to channel energies and emotions in order to create a collective work for the community. Naturally, even the object-based idea of the artwork is called into question; the only visible sign, as an integral part of the work, is a plaque installed on the external wall of the building, with an inscription that tells passersby—and not just art experts—the thought behind the intervention.
To ideally complete the work, on the day of the Arte all’Arte inauguration, the Vincenzo Bellini musicians and choir performed a concert in the Duomo, returning to the public—this time through the art of music—the emotion and participation that Garutti’s intervention had sparked among the residents."
Roberto Pinto and Gilda Williams, “Arte all’Arte V“, 2000
