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May 1923 – May 2023. One hundred years ago, the Triennale Milano museum opened its doors. It was on May 19, to be precise, that Villa Reale in Monza hosted the first Biennale of Decorative Arts, an event that after 1930 became an international exhibition held every three years. In 1933, it moved to Palazzo dell’Arte in Milan, a building designed specifically to host the event by architect Giovanni Muzio.
“In its one hundred year history, Triennale di Milano has addressed the great socio-cultural changes and has anticipated trends,” commented Triennale president, Stefano Boeri. “It was an open forum where designers, architects, artists, and thinkers from around the world discussed their visionary ideas.”
Same place, same date – on May 19, Villa Reale is hosting a conference on the founding of the Istituto Superiore per le Industrie Artistiche, which happened during the first Biennale of Decorative Arts.
Senza Titolo (Untitled), a site-specific performance installation by Romeo Castellucci, Triennale Milano’s distinguished artist-in-residence for 2021–24, is already inviting us to step inside the celebrations from May 2 through 7. The project, specifically commissioned for this important milestone, has transformed Triennale’s Salone d’Onore into a stage where the performers execute a series of repetitive movements resembling a primordial rite that extend out from the body into a dance and a kind of prayer to our ancestors. Director, and set, light, and costume designer Romeo Castellucci is well known throughout the world for creating a language based on the totality of the arts that aims to achieve an integral perception of his work. Active since the early 1980s, the artist’s works have been presented and produced by some of the most important international theaters and festivals in over sixty countries and in every continent.
From May 11, the Triennale’s summer calendar of events kicks off and continues through to September. Intended to get the whole city involved, the first event is the Triennale 100 Sweet Years festival, including talks, concerts, and performances that will breathe even more life into the fourth Giardino di Triennale exhibition. From the next day through to September 10, the exhibition Home Sweet Home, curated by Nina Bassoli, will open its doors. By looking at works from a century of international shows and exhibitions at the Triennale, the exhibition investigates the changes taking place in the home and the evolution of how we live. The themes of past exhibition projects will be reinterpreted through a contemporary lens, revealing revolutions in the differences between home and work, male and female, production and reproduction, public spaces and private spaces. This telling of history will interweave with ten site-specific shows-within-the-show curated by contemporary designers, including the London-based Assemble Studio, French landscape architect Céline Baumann, designer Matilde Cassani, the Canadian Center for Architecture (CCA), US studio Diller Scofidio + Renfro (winner of the 2019 Pritzker Prize), the DOGMA architecture studio, architect Maria Giuseppina Grasso Cannizzo, the duo Lacaton & Vassal (2021 Pritzker Prize), Catalan studio MAIO, and the Sex and the City collective.
Projects and events celebrating the centenary of the Triennale will continue throughout 2023. Another highlight will be an exhibition of contemporary Italian painting curated by Damiano Gullì, which will run from October 2023 through January 2024. The event will focus on the tradition of mural painting at international exhibitions through history, offering a journey through the works of over 100 artists who were active in Italy from the 1990s through to today. In December, the Triennale will open its archives to the public, sharing this vast heritage that has previously been locked away inside Palazzo dell’Arte.
“For us, it makes sense to see the centenary as a new beginning,” concluded Boeri. “We want the Triennale to have a unique, innovative, and international profile. We want it to be seen as a school for doing research and finding answers, through the languages and disciplines of contemporary culture, to that question about the future that hangs over our difficult present.”
