Some exhibitions are conceived as representational devices; others present themselves as preliminary gestures, openings, pretexts for actions that continue elsewhere. Tanto per iniziare un discorso, at the independent space IEedificio57 in San Gimignano (Siena), clearly belongs to the latter category. It is not a simple juxtaposition of two authorships, but the deliberate creation of a discursive field where the encounter between two practices, distant in origin and formation, takes root in the non-rhetorical possibility of speaking together.
Mohsen Baghernejad Moghanjooghi, “We’ll See”, 2022, refractory bricks with carved writing, 128x310x12 cm, ieedificio57, 2025, courtesy ME Vannucci Pistoia, ph Erika Pellicci
Michelangelo Consani – b. 1971, Livorno – invites Mohsen Baghernejad Moghanjooghi – b. 1988, Tehran – to share not only a space, but a moment of exposure. There is no curatorial urge to manufacture affinities and that is precisely why the exhibition works: because it leaves connections suspended, merely suggested, never overexplained. On the ground floor, Baghernejad Moghanjooghi works with the brick as a generative, fragile element, evoking an architecture that is both shelter and trace. His is a subtractive construction practice, one that moves between personal memory and symbolic archaeology. A wall of partial, imperfect bricks becomes a figure of instability and anticipation. The title We’ll See, engraved on one of the bricks, is more than an open-ended statement: it is a manifesto of indeterminacy as a political form, an invitation to linger in incompleteness, in the oscillation between making and unmaking.
Michelangelo Consani, “Fukushima 50”, 2025, plaster sculptures and metal and wood base, 100×100 cm, ieedificio57, 2025, courtesy ieedificio57 San Gimignano, ME Vannucci Pistoia, ph Erika Pellicci; Mohsen Baghernejad Moghanjooghi, “We’ll See” (detail), 2022, brick matrix, ieedificio57, 2025, courtesy ME Vannucci Pistoia, ph Erika Pellicci
Upstairs, Consani responds with a radically different stance: his work does not build, it accumulates fragments. The fifty-one angels of Fukushima 50 are thresholds, remains, ruins, interrupted forms that both resist and embody disaster. Consani engages with a post-industrial imaginary, where history folds back on itself and spirituality must reckon with entropy. The monochrome made of Nori seaweed contaminated by radiation becomes a threshold-object, a time-laden residue in which energy is still present, but muted, suspended. What connects the two artists is not a shared material or form, but a common attentiveness to what remains. Both construct works that relate to duration, to the possibility that an artwork is never truly complete but always exposed to a future. If Baghernejad works with the tension of the brick that wants to become a wall but isn’t one yet, Consani acts upon the failure of the monument, on its very impossibility.
Michelangelo Consani, “so close yet so far”, 2025, gilded bronze casting, 7×7 cm, ieedificio57, 2025, courtesy ieedificio57 San Gimignano, ME Vannucci Pistoia, ph Erika Pellicci
Tanto per iniziare un discorso is not the title of a show, but a declaration of method. It is the attempt to generate a space (mental before physical) where the language of art does not explain but interrogates. Where matter becomes voice, and gesture (whatever form it takes) becomes a temporal stance. In this sense, the exhibition is a beginning that refuses closure: an open, fragile and necessary conversation.
Info:
Michelangelo Consani / Mohsen Baghernejad Moghanjooghi: “Tanto per iniziare un discorso”
04/05 – 31/07/2025
IEedificio57
Via di Berignano 57, San Gimignano (SI)
www.ieedificio57.org
Art Curator and Art Advisor, graduated in Visual Arts and Cultural Mediation, with Master in Curatorial Practices, born in 1995, lives in Naples. He collaborates with Galleries and Independent Spaces, his research is mainly focused on Emerging Painting, with a careful and inclined gaze also on other forms of aesthetic language.
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