On view from May 7th to October 12th, 2026, OPEN activates Florence’s Palazzo Buontalenti as a civic platform where contemporary art and academic research enter into direct exchange. Curated by Sergio Risaliti and Stefania Rispoli, with historian Johanna Gautier-Morin, the project links artistic practice and scientific thought as parallel tools for reading social change, collective memory, and invisible systems of care.
OPEN resists a fixed structure, operating instead as a shifting laboratory where experimentation, public participation, and research intersect. Spread across the palace’s Renaissance halls, courtyards, and gardens, the exhibition draws attention to four recurring conditions: gleaning, exhaustion, irreversibility, and mutation.
Palazzo Buontalenti becomes a living laboratory for art and research
Recently restored and reopened, Palazzo Buontalenti—former Medici complex on Via Cavour—enters a new cultural phase as a site for installations, screenings, workshops, and site-specific interventions moving between historical architecture and contemporary inquiry.
The lineup includes Agnieszka Polska, Berlinde De Bruyckere, Eglė Budvytytė, Elena Mazzi, Leone Contini, Riccardo Previdi, and Pierre Chastel. Their works probe hidden labour systems, ecological pressure, migration, fragility, and the unseen economies shaping daily life.
Belgian artist Berlinde De Bruyckere presents sculptural works that hold the human body in a tense space between attraction and decay, where vulnerability becomes physical language and emotional residue.
Alongside OPEN, the new Sala delle Grottesche presents Memory and Vision, a permanent photographic project by Gina Soden focused on architecture in transition and repair. After dark, Vincenzo Capalbo’s projections with sound by Andrea Portera extend the experience into the courtyard.
Installation views, OPEN, PALAZZO BUONTALENTI, Florence, Italy, 2026 © Berlinde De Bruyckere
Courtesy of the EUROPEAN UNIVERSITY INSTITUTE
Photography by ELISA NORCINI
