STEFANO BOERI SAYS GOODBYE TO THE TRIENNALE MILANO

Andrew Ayers: When you took over the reins of Triennale, back in 2018, how did you approach the challenge?

Stefano Boeri: From the beginning I decided to drastically change the way Triennale gathers investment from the private sector. Instead of seeking sponsorship for single exhibitions, I chose to select and promote very precise and specific relationships with companies that were interested in the institution’s general strategy. That was a very important change, which allowed us to develop a cultural program that, from the beginning, had the ambition to last not only one month or three months but several years. We established an eight-year-long partnership with the Fondation Cartier, for instance, and Lavazza is investing in Triennale’s general strategy. This policy has helped us do two things that for me are very important. The first is to continue the program of international triennial exhibitions, which started up again in 2016 after a 20-year break. The second is what I call “Back to Muzio,” which is about bringing the Triennale’s building, the Palazzo dell’Arte, back to the spirit envisioned by its architect, Giovanni Muzio, in 1933.

Your mandate has seen three triennial exhibitions, which I believe you intended as a trilogy.

Yes, absolutely. I imagined them as three different perspectives on the relation between the human sphere and the natural sphere — three different ways of trying to decipher how we could better understand what we should do in the near future. When I arrived, Paola Antonelli from the MoMA started to work with us on Broken Nature, which we showed in 2019. That was fantastic. It looked at the ways in which humans have become severed from the natural world and put forward ideas for restorative design. The second exhibition was Unknown Unknowns in 2022. We worked with, among others, the architect Francis Kéré, and asked an astrophysicist, Ersilia Vaudo, who is the chief diversity officer at the European Space Agency, to be the overall curator. She used the opportunity to address themes such as gravity, deep space, mapping, and extraterrestrial architecture. This year’s triennial show comprises a group of exhibitions and installations gathered together under the title Inequalities. I acted a bit like an editor in chief, which is what I’ve always done — when I was at Domus, or in my office as an architect. I don’t think it’s possible to give a complete, comprehensive view of the theme of inequalities, but I assembled a group of ten curators who together provide many ways into the topic.

In this, your final triennial show, what can visitors see?

You find two main environments. On the ground floor, we’re approaching the issue through the frame of geopolitics, so focusing on cities and how the polarization of societies and environments is accelerating. On the second floor, the exhibitions are more about biopolitics. There’s one, curated by Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley, that explores the universal fear of bacteria, and another, overseen by Telmo Pievani, that’s more about the paradoxes of biodiversity in different parts of the world. Then we have a long part on health, longevity, and life expectancy, curated by Nic Palmarini with Marco Sammicheli. And there’s a very precious display curated by Giovanni Agosti and Jacopo Stoppa about a very Milanese story, the Ospedale Maggiore, known as the Ca’ Granda. The hospital was founded at the end of the 15th century, and started out as a poorhouse financed by the richest families in Lombardy. All the donors had their portrait painted, so we’re telling the story through those. It’s beautiful! Moreover, given the theme of inequality, we decided to make access to the triennial show free during the entire month of August, so that those Milanese who can’t afford to leave on vacation could come, and we’ve been offering free access to students.

As well as the exhibitions, there are installations, including one about Gaza. That’s not an easy subject to tackle.

The display is about Gaza during the 471 days between October 7, 2023, and the fragile ceasefire of January 19, 2025. It depicts, in three dimensions, the number of casualties every day, in two categories, Israeli and Palestinian. Exhibition designer Midori Hasuike’s decision to show this information in that way was very strong. The display doesn’t only map the casualties in terms of numbers, but also shows how desires, dreams, love, and human relations are bound up in these losses. We decided to do this because we felt we couldn’t stay silent. We worked with the Jewish and Palestinian communities in order to try to find a balance. That’s impossible, of course, but we did our best to make it the most objective it could be.

You also have national contributions in the exhibition, from countries as diverse as Angola, Armenia, China, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Togo.

Yes. Triennale is the only cultural institution that’s a member of the BIE in Paris, the Bureau International des Expositions. So that means, like with the World Expos in Dubai, Milan, Osaka, or wherever, that every three years we go to Paris to propose a theme that the countries respond to with a “pavilion” within the Triennale building. This year’s pavilions are very diverse and thought provoking.

On the subject of the building, how have you been going “back to Muzio”?

I really think that what makes the Palazzo dell’Arte unique is the peculiarly heterogeneous collection of voids it hosts. As you walk through the building, the proportions keep changing. That’s amazing. But, from the outset, my perception as an architect was that this characteristic had been diminished by a series of superimpositions and interventions that reduced its spatial power. So that’s why this idea of “Back to Muzio” was one of my main goals. And honestly, we’ve made very good progress in that direction thanks to the public and private resources we’ve received during my mandate. First, we redid the theater, then we opened the archive center Cuore in one of the galleries, which we restored, and this year we opened the whole garden-level space, Piano Parco. Part of it had been turned into a nightclub, another part was offices, but we’ve taken it back to the spirit of what Muzio imagined — now there’s a public restaurant, there’s a space called Voce which is only for music and sound, not images, and the theater finally has a bar and foyer. Muzio’s concept was for a building with two entrances on different levels, so we’ve brought that back. Elsewhere what I’ve done is to remove a series of interventions that in my opinion didn’t respect the building’s character. It’s a paradoxical place, monumental and rather static in its layout yet able to accommodate all the different varieties of art, architecture, design, as well as all the live disciplines such as performance art, music, and so on.

What more is left to do before you leave next spring?

We’re working on a kind of legacy to leave to the next scientific committee, a document that will address three or four different issues. With respect to “Back to Muzio,” I think we’ll have to give it a rest, because it’s very complex to achieve given all the bureaucracy that comes with a public institution. What makes Triennale unique is that the majority of the employees are aged between 25 and 35, so there’s an energy here that I’ve never experienced in other institutions. It’s amazing! Basically, they’re all here because they feel a real passion for this space, for the challenges, and that’s how we were able to do so much.

I know that Luca Cippelletti, the architect who worked on the “Back to Muzio” interventions, is very keen to see Muzio’s impluvium reinstated. It was a very beautiful open-air courtyard in the center of the building that was later covered over and divided into two floors.

So now I’ll be very honest — this should have been my last intervention!

You still have a few months...

Well, it’s complicated, not only because it would involve redesigning the building’s roof, but also because we’d lose a space that’s become very important to us, the cube-shaped gallery where the Ca’ Granda paintings are currently on display. But I totally agree that it should be the next step if we seriously want to go back to Muzio!