The Fondazione Valentino Garavani e Giancarlo Giammetti was born from the desire to give continuity to an extraordinary creative legacy, transforming it into a force capable of engaging with the present and opening up possibilities for the future.
The experience built by Valentino Garavani and Giancarlo Giammetti carries with it a culture of form, material, gesture and making: a history grounded in research, quality, intuition, and the ability to transform a vision into something designed to endure.
Today, this legacy continues its journey through the Foundation. Experiences, knowledge, relationships and sensibilities developed over time become fertile ground for new encounters, new artistic practices and new perspectives.
Memory becomes movement.
History becomes living matter.
What has been built creates space for what can still be imagined.
For the Foundation, contemporary patronage is an active form of cultural production: it means creating the conditions for an artist to develop a practice, engage with a place and give form to a new work.
Commissioning means making this process possible. It means providing resources, time and context; supporting the creation of the work; and creating the conditions for it to enter into a relationship with the space for which it was conceived and with the audiences who experience it.
A commission thus becomes an encounter between visions. The Foundation identifies an artist and a context, supports the creative process and makes a new production possible; the artist brings the research, language and interpretation of the place.
It is within this balance between support and creative autonomy that patronage acquires a contemporary meaning: contributing to the creation of new works and offering artists the opportunity to develop their practice in relation to specific places, contexts and audiences.
This is where Beauty Creates Beauty takes shape.
The creative history of Valentino Garavani and Giancarlo Giammetti thus continues to generate new possibilities: supporting artists’ research, giving form to new works, and creating opportunities for art, places and audiences to come together.
ART, SQUARE, CITY
Piazza Mignanelli holds a special place in the history of Valentino Garavani and Giancarlo Giammetti. It is a place deeply connected to their creative experience and, at the same time, a square in the heart of Rome: crossed every day, observed, inhabited, photographed and encountered almost by chance.
In recent years, the Foundation has contributed to restoring a new cultural and relational dimension to the square. For a long time also used as a taxi waiting area, Piazza Mignanelli has gradually taken on a new configuration, becoming a place capable of hosting contemporary art and creating new opportunities for encounters with the city.
The platform installed in the square has also become part of this transformation: a space designed to host installations and artistic interventions, bringing works into dialogue with the architecture of the square and with the movement of people.
With Sky Mirror by Anish Kapoor, presented in Piazza Mignanelli on the occasion of Orizzonti | Rosso, the sky, the architecture and the people became part of the work itself. The large concave mirror transformed the square into a space of perception, continuously reflecting a changing image of the place and of those moving through it.
With Joana Vasconcelos’s VENUS project, this relationship with the urban space expanded into a true journey through the city.
I’ll Be Your Mirror, the large mirrored mask installed in Piazza Mignanelli, marked a new stage in this journey. It was followed by Solitário, on the Pincio Terrace, bringing a monumental work to one of Rome’s most recognisable viewpoints. With Drag Race at the Ara Pacis, the dialogue expanded further, placing Vasconcelos’s artistic research in relation to one of the emblematic sites of the city’s history and architecture.
With Selva, Tresoldi’s work further consolidates a model of collaboration in which private initiative and public institutions work together to create new cultural possibilities within the urban space.
On one side, the Fondazione Valentino Garavani e Giancarlo Giammetti, bringing vision, planning and the capacity to make new artistic productions possible. On the other, Roma Capitale and Municipio Roma I Centro, supporting these projects in their relationship with the city, its places and the communities that inhabit them.
This alliance between public and private has enabled contemporary art to enter into dialogue with Piazza Mignanelli, the Pincio, the Ara Pacis and other symbolic locations in the capital, creating a cultural geography that intertwines history and the present.
The city thus becomes part of the artistic experience.
For those who live in Rome every day, a contemporary artwork can momentarily interrupt the familiarity of the gaze and reveal something new in a place they know. For those arriving from elsewhere, it introduces a presence of the present into a city often encountered through the layers of its history.
The two perspectives meet in the same space: that of those who recognise a place and can rediscover it, and that of those encountering it for the first time.
Art thus creates a shared threshold between belonging and discovery, between those who permanently inhabit the city and those who become, even for only a few days, temporary inhabitants.
WHY EDOARDO TRESOLDI
The artist’s practice is deeply connected to space and architecture. His metal-mesh structures create monumental presences, yet remain permeated by light, landscape and the gaze.
Each work exists through what surrounds it.
Architecture, sky, people and the movement of the city remain visible and become part of the composition. Transparency allows the place to continue to exist within the work while, at the same time, inviting us to observe it from a different perspective.
This is a particularly meaningful approach for Piazza Mignanelli: a place already shaped by many histories, where memory and the present coexist on a daily basis.
The commission of Selva, developed within the framework of the collaboration between the Foundation, Roma Capitale and Municipio Roma I Centro, thus continues the dialogue established in recent years between private patronage, public space and the city.
Entrusting Piazza Mignanelli to Tresoldi’s vision creates a new encounter between art and architecture, nature and construction, sedimented memory and contemporary presence.
A work conceived for this place and capable of existing through it.
“SELVA”
By Piergiorgio Caserini
It is well known that building has always carried a symbolic order within it. A sanctuary, a temple, a house, a village or a skyscraper is built in places capable of sustaining and amplifying the visions of those who build. It is in the astonishing outcome of wonder that the sacred first reveals itself. In the spring that rises from a plain, in the rocky ridge that recalls the profile of a face. It is in such instances that the landscape seems to speak to the cosmos, and in those visions it enters and takes root like a spirit. That is where one builds. To offer others the blessing of something a gaze has happened to perceive, or to preserve forever what one has experienced.
There are, then, architectures that preserve forests in their forms, others that echo plains, rivers and mountains, and still others that evoke cities. Is it not possible to see a hut in every architecture, and a forest in every hut?
Tree trunks support their crowns, which, stirred by the wind, play with light upon a carpet of leaves. Does one not already glimpse, in such images, the idea of a house — the suggestion of a construction yet to come? Is it not true that one enters a room through a square of poplars? That every column firmly rooted in the ground supports the back of the sky, carrying with it the image of that tree within the forest?
With Selva, Edoardo Tresoldi invites us to remember and draws from the natural oblivion of history this genetic and foundational structure of architecture: the enduring image of the column, considered in its formal necessity and in the echo of the tree that it carries within it.
Not out of nostalgia, nor as warning or lesson, but to clearly reiterate what is always implicit in inhabiting: a place in which the principles of attachment, origin and existence are expressed, where sky and earth are bound together in a single gesture.
The memory of a form of dwelling that is not transitory, but that reaffirms a gaze and a need so profound that they embrace the history of an entire species.
