Art Site Fest returns to Turin, an itinerary dedicated to storytelling, observation and listening in the city’s iconic cultural heritage sites: this year’s programme explores the profound value of stories.
The Francesco Garnier Valletti Fruit Museum is hosting two events: a site-specific installation by the Iranian artist Bahar Heidarzade and a narrative journey based on Karel Čapek’s book *The Gardener’s Year*.
The pomegranate is a fruit with strong symbolic significance that spans all Mediterranean cultures: it therefore represents a vehicle for encounter and exchange that binds peoples, their lands and their histories together. In Iran, on the night of Yalda, the winter solstice, families still eat pomegranate seeds today to invoke the return of light: it is a rite of resistance. For the Iranian artist, presenting a pomegranate – thereby virtually completing the Garnier Valletti collections at the Academy of Agriculture – is a way of drawing the public’s attention to the need for cultural encounter and dialogue.
Karel Čapek, the Czech writer best known for his science-fiction play *R.U.R. Rossum’s Universal Robots*, in which the word ‘robot’ first appears, published a book in 1920 comprising articles he had written for his newspaper on the subject of gardening. For a whole year, Čapek recounts the misadventures and passions of a hobby gardener: amidst disasters, unexpected events and fleeting moments of satisfaction, gardening becomes a veritable obsession!
Sara D’Amario, an actress and writer from Turin, brings the gardener’s story to life by creating, for the Fruit Museum, a journey through the seasons that visitors can download via QR codes in the exhibition rooms.
Via Pietro Giuria 15, Torino