When Memory Refuses to Leave: Alessandro Bulgini Turns a Former Childhood Institute into a Permanent Artwork
At Flashback Habitat in Turin, Alessandro Bulgini does not reopen a former childhood institute as a neutral exhibition space. He lets memory return to the place that once produced it.
With Una vita migliore, Alessandro Bulgini transforms the former Provincial Institute for Childhood of Turin into a permanent artwork of memory, return and consequence
From July 2, 2026, Alessandro Bulgini’s Una vita migliore. Frammenti di storie dell’Istituto Provinciale per l’Infanzia della Provincia di Torino has entered a new permanent form at Flashback Habitat in Turin. Curated by Bulgini and created in collaboration with the Città Metropolitana di Torino, the work occupies the third floor of Pavilion B, inside the former Istituto Provinciale per l’Infanzia in corso Giovanni Lanza 75.
Some places cannot simply be reopened. They have to be listened to first.
Una vita migliore was born in 2023 as a choral work inside the former foundling hospital of Turin. It gathered fragments of stories from the “nativi” and “native” of the IPI, the children who passed through the institution, together with traces of the “tate”, the women who cared for them. Now the work changes condition. It is no longer only a temporary project. It becomes permanent.
Bulgini does not describe it simply as an exhibition. He calls it an artwork and an act of love. The distinction matters.
An exhibition can be installed, visited and dismantled. An artwork of this kind behaves differently. It does not use memory as a theme. It allows memory to return to the place that generated it.
The IPI, inaugurated in 1954, hosted around three hundred children every year while they waited for adoption. Many were born in corso Lanza 75 and were later placed with families, generally before the age of three. It was a place of care, but also of separation. A place where life began and, almost immediately, moved elsewhere.
Today, many of those children, now adults, return to corso Lanza and recognize it as their first home.
This is the emotional and critical center of Una vita migliore: a place of passage becomes a place of return.
A Place That Learns to Speak Again
Una vita migliore unfolds in the pavilion where the infants of the IPI were once fed. Each room functions as a small world, a space where visitors enter the stories rather than simply read about them.
Across the rooms, the work brings together audio-video portraits, archival photographs, documents, maps and testimonies. The protagonists, the “nativi” and “native” of the Institute, answer a simple question: Mi racconti? Will you tell me?
They speak in profile, not frontally.
It is a precise choice. The profile does not expose the face completely. It suggests an elsewhere: a mother never known, a childhood without images, another version of the self, a memory that cannot be fully recovered but can still be spoken.
The speaking portraits are accompanied by images from a photographic exhibition once dedicated to the place, staged at the time of the closure of the foundling hospital. Each room is also enriched by a narrative map, layered with photographs and documents from public and private archives.
For this reason, Una vita migliore is not an illustrated archive. It is a living structure of restitution.
The documents are not there only to prove what happened. The voices are not there to create emotion. The rooms are not neutral containers. Everything works together to ask a more difficult question: what does it mean to belong to a place from which one was once taken away?
The passage from temporary project to permanent artwork gives the work its real force. The Institute was built around transience. Children arrived, were cared for, and left.
Now the movement is reversed.
The artwork stays. The memory stays. The people return. What was once a place of departure becomes a place where stories are no longer abandoned.
Asterismi: Motherhood After the Icon
The new permanent form of Una vita migliore is expanded by two projects, conceived as further contributions, as new layers: Asterismi and Nuovi Sguardi. They are not decorative additions. They open Bulgini’s work in two directions: origin and recognition.
The word Asterismi matters. Asterisms are unofficial constellations. They are born from the way we look at the sky. It is our gaze that decides to connect luminous points into a figure. The relation is not given. It is created.
Inside Una vita migliore, Asterismi works in the same way. In the central rooms, three new walls bring together three works on the theme of motherhood: Giacomo Moranzon’s Madonna che adora il Bambino (Madonna dell’Umiltà), Giuseppe Gallo’s Mater dulcissima and Fabio Bucciarelli’s Occupied Territories #69, Gaza, 2018.
Six centuries, three languages, three very different ways of approaching motherhood. What unites them is not chronology. It is proximity of meaning.
Moranzon’s Madonna che adora il Bambino (Madonna dell’Umiltà), carved around 1445 in painted and gilded wood, belongs to one of the foundational images of Western visual culture: a mother contemplating her child.
But there is nothing triumphant here. No throne, no sovereign gesture, no monumental rhetoric. Mary appears absorbed, collected, almost withdrawn into the silent time of care. The joined hands and the gaze directed toward the Child transform the scene into a form of absolute intimacy. Motherhood appears before doctrine. Relation comes before representation.
Giuseppe Gallo’s Mater dulcissima, made in 2004 in bronze, moves that image into matter. The sculpture, 45.8 × 25.7 × 33 cm and shown courtesy of Galleria dello Scudo, does not simply represent a maternal figure. It behaves like a body-house, a cavity, a shelter.
The work evokes the mantle of the Madonna, but also a rock shaped by time, a primordial cave, a maternal womb. In Gallo’s sculpture, the mother becomes a symbolic space where memory, nature and creation are not separated. Origin is no longer only biological. It is also the experience of being protected, received, held.
Then Fabio Bucciarelli brings everything into the present.
And here the line breaks.
Why One Mother Becomes Heritage and Another Becomes Accusation
In a conventional critical reading, the passage from Moranzon to Gallo to Bucciarelli could be easily absorbed: the Madonna, the maternal body, the contemporary photograph of motherhood in a territory marked by conflict. A new Pietà for our time. Art history would know how to digest it.
But Bucciarelli’s Occupied Territories #69, Gaza, 2018 does not enter our Western gaze with the same ease as Moranzon’s Madonna.
The photograph, printed on Hahnemühle Photo Rag® Bright White 310 gsm, 70 × 100 cm, and shown courtesy of Fabio Bucciarelli, belongs to a present that cannot be safely placed in the museum of inherited forms. It is not an icon already absorbed by centuries of devotion, theology and art history. It is an image from Gaza. It arrives with the weight of war, occupation, humanitarian crisis and political discomfort.</p>
Here, the Western eye betrays itself.
The Madonna is acceptable because the West has had centuries to absorb her. Christianity, museums and art history have transformed maternal suffering into an image we can contemplate without being truly disturbed. We know where to place it. We know how to admire it.
A mother holding a child in Gaza is different. That image does not arrive as heritage. It arrives as accusation. It carries the contradictions of our present. It does not allow us to hide behind beauty, devotion or distance.</p>
The gesture may be the same: a mother and a child. But our response changes. One image is allowed to be eternal. The other is treated as too political, too current, too uncomfortable.
Inside Una vita migliore, this fracture does not appear as an external theme. It belongs to the same question that runs through Bulgini’s work: which lives are allowed to become memory, and which are kept in the condition of emergency?
This is where Asterismi becomes more than a reflection on motherhood. It exposes the threshold at which contemporary art is already in crisis: the threshold of consequence.
Visibility is no longer the problem. There is too much of it. Awareness too: we are drowning in awareness. What is missing is consequence.
A mother holding a child remains a slow image. It resists the speed of vision. It asks us not only to look, but to remain.
The Constellation Does Not Explain. It Connects.
The force of Asterismi lies in the fact that it does not flatten these works into the same image. Moranzon is not Bucciarelli. Gallo is not an intermediate step between the fifteenth century and Gaza. The section does not ask the visitor to see a single, universal mother outside history.
It asks something more difficult: to understand how motherhood changes when it moves from devotion to matter, from matter to crisis, from icon to body, from the protected space of art history to the exposed space of the present.
This is why the title Asterismi is exact. The constellation is not official. It is not imposed from above. It is created by the act of looking. Each work keeps its identity, but acquires another meaning in relation to the others. The public is asked to trace the invisible lines.
And those lines return, inevitably, to Bulgini’s work.
The stories of the “nativi” and “native” of the Institute are also stories of motherhood in its most concrete form: being born, being welcomed, being separated, searching for one’s origins, reconstructing a community. Asterismi does not illustrate Una vita migliore. It expands its field of meaning.
Across six centuries, the section suggests that motherhood is one of the places where human beings build belonging, transmit memory and imagine the future. Not because motherhood is pure, sentimental or universal in a simple way, but because it is one of the first forms through which life becomes relation.
Nuovi Sguardi: Who Has the Right to Be Seen?
If Asterismi opens the work toward origin, Nuovi Sguardi opens it toward recognition.
Curated by Tea Taramino, the section brings together works by Girolamo Della Malva, Laura Biella and Luca Romano, artists connected to the field of art brut, outsider art and what in Italy is often called arte irregolare. But the point is not to include the “irregular” as a generous gesture from the art system. That would be too easy.
The real question is more uncomfortable: who decides when an artwork can be seen without being reduced to the biography of the person who made it?
Taramino has spent more than forty years questioning the borders between contemporary art and irregular art. Through the laboratory La Galleria, the Collezione Civica di Arte Irregolare della Città di Torino and today the PARI, Polo delle Arti Relazionali e Irregolari, her work has created spaces where art becomes, before anything else, an occasion for encounter, listening and mutual transformation.
Inside Una vita migliore, this is not a marginal question. The former Institute was also a place where lives could risk being reduced to files, procedures, documents and categories. Nuovi Sguardi asks for another possibility: to see without reducing, to recognize without explaining away, to allow a work to exist without turning the artist’s life into a cage.
The display itself matters. The corridor windows, once used to watch over the children, are transformed into luminous displays. A device of control becomes a device of vision. What once served to monitor now allows other images to appear.
Girolamo Della Malva, Laura Biella and Luca Romano: Seeing Without Reducing
Girolamo Della Malva, known as “Giorgino”, turns marker pen into a form of almost architectural rigor. His works I gemelli, from the 1990s, and Senza Titolo, from the 2000s, both courtesy of Archivio Mai Visti, Città di Torino, are built through grids, geometries and chromatic structures that light up like medieval stained glass.
Laura Biella’s watercolors move in another direction. In Annunciazione, 2011, and Donna con uccellino, 2013, both courtesy of Archivio Mai Visti, Città di Torino, angels, Madonnas, animals and small narrative worlds are reimagined with tenderness, irony and a delicately comic-like line. Her scenes do not ask to be corrected by the adult gaze. They ask to be entered.
Luca Romano’s works Autobus 67 (retro), 1990, and Teleferica (retro), 1988, both courtesy of Archivio Mai Visti, Città di Torino, revolve around a repeated desire: to “take bus 67 alone”. Across hundreds of drawings, this desire becomes almost a prayer. His figure returns again and again, sometimes hidden and dissolved in color, sometimes built through small marks until it slowly emerges from the matter of the work.
Placed inside Una vita migliore, these works do not function as a separate display. They echo the entire project. Bulgini’s work asks us to recognize a community founded not only on genealogy, but on relation. Nuovi Sguardi proposes a similar shift: every authentic work has the capacity to generate new forms of encounter and new ways of reading the world.
Difference is not exhibited here as spectacle. Nor is it erased in the name of inclusion. It is allowed to become a field of knowledge.
The Archive Is Not Enough
One of the most delicate aspects of Bulgini’s work is its refusal to treat the archive as an end in itself.
Archives can preserve. They can also freeze. They can protect a trace, but they can also turn a life into a document. In Una vita migliore, the archive matters only because it is reactivated by presence, voice and return.
This is why the work is not nostalgic. It does not ask the visitor to contemplate the past from a safe distance. It asks what happens when the past is still active in the bodies of those who return.
Memory here is not behind us. It is not a closed room. It is something that keeps asking for a form.
The Art of Staying
The title Una vita migliore, A Better Life, could sound consoling. But the work is not naive. It does not say that everything has been repaired, not turn origin into a happy ending and not transform the wound into beauty.</p>
Its strength lies elsewhere.
It gives memory a form that does not abandon people a second time.
At Flashback Habitat, the former Istituto Provinciale per l’Infanzia is not simply remembered. It speaks again.
And perhaps the most radical thing an artwork can do today is not to produce another image, but to create the conditions in which a story, once made invisible, can finally stay.
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