Some projects cannot be summarized in a list of activities and products because their logic is fundamentally processual: ART.it – Art in Transition, conceived by Cristina Francucci, former director of Accademia di Belle Arti di Bologna, and developed under the scientific responsibility of Maria Rita Bentini over the course of more than a year with the involvement of five institutions – the Accademie di Bologna, Catania, and Ravenna, the Alma Mater Studiorum, and the Università di Macerata – belongs to the category of projects in which the working method is also, and perhaps above all, the result. Funded within the PNRR framework through the MUR for AFAM institutions, the formative project developed around four interconnected thematic nuclei (Art and Environment, Art and Inclusion, Art and Regeneration, Art and Contemporary Technologies).
Laboratorio con l’artista Jorge Orta presso lo Studio Orta Les Moulins di Lucy+Jorge Orta (Francia) © ABA Catania, courtesy ART.it – Art in Transition
The programme involved twenty-four students from the Accademie di Bologna, Ravenna, and Catania in a cycle of international residencies held at different institutions: the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, the Galleria Continua at Les Moulins in France, and the central hub of the journey, Studio Orta, the complex of studios and archives of Lucy and Jorge Orta also located at Les Moulins, where artistic practice coexists with a political reflection on the conditions of existence in the age of global crises. It is in this place that the group worked in direct contact with the duo, participating in the gestation of the film Precarious Life (2026, duration 37 minutes, directed by David Bickerstaff), a work that concentrates in cinematic form the decades-long research of Lucy and Jorge Orta on the relationships between ecology, community, and shared vulnerability. The choice of title, drawn from Judith Butler’s 2004 essay of the same name, is the explicit declaration of a conceptual belonging — the precariousness of life understood as a political category before an existential one, as a condition that affects bodies differentially according to geographies, passports, genders, and social backgrounds.
Lucy + Jorge Orta, “Precarious Life”, 2026. Double screen film projection. Still photography by Paul Bevan, courtesy ART.it – Art in Transition
The film, which will have its world premiere on 27 March 2026 (h. 17.00) at the DAMSLab in Bologna in the presence of the artists and the director, constructs its narrative structure through a series of collective performative actions in which conflict, understood broadly, from geopolitical violence to everyday oppression, is first staged and then traversed by gestures of repair and solidarity. The images documenting some of these sequences, realized in the industrial space of Studio Orta with military vehicles, white overalls, and boats resting on piles of discarded clothing, reveal a visual grammar in which allegory always functions in close relation to the materiality of objects: the white and blue boat that four female figures attempt to row above a sea of abandoned garments evokes the crossings of migrants; the woman in a white coat reading a passport aloud, standing on a platform before a truck with stencilled lettering, transforms the identity document from a bureaucratic instrument into a text to be deciphered; the flag sewn from the flags of dozens of countries fluttering on an isolated pole against the sky inflates in its lightness the weight of every national belonging. Jorge Orta has explained that the film is born in response to the most recent geopolitical crises, but has its roots in historical events the duo has addressed previously: the Argentine dictatorship of the 1970s, the wars in the Balkans and in Iraq, the ongoing conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East; the continuity of these memories in the present is not rhetorical, it is rather the starting point from which the work constructs its own possibility of meaning.
Lucy + Jorge Orta, “Precarious Life”, 2026. Double screen film projection. Still photography by Paul Bevan, courtesy ART.it – Art in Transition
The film will be viewable on 28 and 29 March 2026 in continuous double-screen projection at MAMbo, and the exhibiting choice of the screen split into two surfaces showing complementary or divergent images amplifies the dialogic structure of the work, which entrusts to the viewer the task of finding connections between sequences that attract and repel one another. The environmental installation that will transform the Foyer of MAMbo for the three days of the closing event (27–29 March) – with guided visits by the students on the final morning – is the place in which the project attempts to account for itself to a public that has not lived the journey from within. The challenge is not trivial: to transform a complex collective experience into a communicable environment without reducing it to illustrative documentation. The Foyer will be transformed into a space devoid of exhibiting hierarchies, in which the sensory dimension prevails over the informative one: the floor and the soft sand-colored seating – inflatable bodies, rollers, modular cushions that come together without forming a predefined geometry – create a soft and traversable topography that invites one to linger. On the ceiling, a site-specific video installation projects images drawn from the project’s shared archive – such as fragments of the residencies in Denmark, France, and the Italian academies – reworked with floating words in Italian and English that transform the visual surface into a discontinuous text, readable in fragments but not synthesizable into a message.
Proiezione doppio schermo del film “Precarious Life” di Lucy + Jorge Orta, MAMbo – Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna, ph. Claudia Gentile, courtesy ART.it – Art in Transition
The sound project, developed in collaboration with sound artist Paola Samoggia, works on the audio archive gathered during the journey, recombining it into a texture that accompanies the visit without imposing an interpretive direction upon it. The students’ logbooks, both in digital form through the website artintransition.art and in printed form, punctuate the space as surfaces to be leafed through; the site, conceived as a metaphor of the journey and structured as an archipelago of islands – each residency as an island, the event at MAMbo as a landfall – also offers, in its educational section, access to an artificial intelligence model trained on the project’s materials, which interacts with the public by suggesting connections between the documented experiences and the themes of sustainability in contemporary art. The fact that this function is integrated into the site as a navigation tool signals a precise stance with respect to AI: a device of cultural mediation, not a substitute for curatorial competence.
Installazione ambientale Foyer MAMbo – Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna, ph. Claudia Gentile, courtesy ART.it – Art in Transition
On 28 March in the Conference Room of MAMbo, the three publications that document the project from different angles will be presented: the general catalogue “Art in Transition. Le arti tra sostenibilità ambientale e innovazione digitale” (Silvana Editoriale, 280 pp.), with contributions from figures such as Tomás Saraceno, Tim Ingold, Marjetica Potrč, and Robertina Šebjanič, which situates the work in an already articulated field of reflection on the interweaving of artistic practice and ecology; the proceedings of the international conference in Ravenna “Art in Transition. Sensibile materia” (Silvana Editoriale, 160 pp.), which deepens the relationship between art, nature, and the restoration of the contemporary; and “Art in Transition. not (a) book” (Sagep Editori, 160 pp.), constructed in seven autonomous fascicles as a “non-book” in which the students experimented with different forms of editorial practice, culminating in a foldable map that traces the constellation of journeys undertaken. This last volume suggests something important about the overall meaning of the project: the editorial form that resists the compactness of the traditional book, that comes apart into autonomous fascicles and closes with a geographical map, carries within it the same processual and decentralized logic that has oriented the entire experience, so that the final product does not capitalize on the journey but replicates it in its structure.
Installazione ambientale Foyer MAMbo – Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna, ph. Claudia Gentile, courtesy ART.it – Art in Transition
What ART.it – Art in Transition has built in these months is something that artistic education still struggles to formalize: a model in which learning occurs in the friction with different institutional, geographical, and human realities, in which artistic production is the result of a collective process that does not cancel singularities but places them in tension, and in which the relationship with artists such as Lucy and Jorge Orta is not illustrative of programmatic content but generative of questions that the programme had not anticipated.
Info:
ART.it – Art in Transition, closing event. MAMbo – Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna, Via Don Minzoni 14, Bologna. 27–29 March 2026. Lead institution: Accademia di Belle Arti di Bologna. Partners: Accademia di Belle Arti di Catania, Accademia di Belle Arti di Ravenna, Alma Mater Studiorum – Università di Bologna, Università degli Studi di Macerata. Concept: Cristina Francucci. Scientific director: Maria Rita Bentini. Precarious Life (2026, 37 min.), directed by David Bickerstaff, with Lucy + Jorge Orta. Environmental installation curated by Elisa Tranfaglia with the students of the project. Sound project: Paola Samoggia. Website: www.artintransition.art.
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