Torino Artscape is Artissima’s column highlighting current exhibitions in the city’s leading contemporary art institutions: a regular feature offering a glimpse into the most compelling exhibition programs, curatorial visions, and artistic expressions that animate Turin’s contemporary art scene. Torino Artscape invites you to explore Turin as an essential destination for art lovers, offering inspiration and cultural enrichment throughout the year.
This new episode is dedicated to PAV – Parco Arte Vivente.
The Park
More than a museum, PAV is an open-air laboratory where contemporary art, ecology and research converge within an ever-evolving landscape. Conceived by artist Piero Gilardi, the park extends across a former industrial site spanning over 23,000 square metres and is home to permanent installations that engage with the environment and its living processes.
Among them is Trèfle (2006) by Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, the first artwork commissioned for PAV, which transforms the four-leaf clover into a walkable landscape inviting visitors to experience the space from multiple perspectives. Designed and built by architect Gianluca Cosmacini, Trèfle draws inspiration from two landscape-architectural references that merge into a single form: the medieval Ethiopian Coptic churches carved into the rock of the sacred city of Lalibela and the Grand Canyon. The installation thus becomes an inverted landscape, an echo of the ancient world that unexpectedly reveals itself beneath the horizon line.
A more recent addition is adobe garden project_2020, an installation composed of ceramic structures designed as habitats for pollinating insects, where artistic research, biodiversity conservation and educational practice come together in a single experience.
Metamagico. Claudio Costa
Up to 11.10.2026
A display case contains bones, terracotta, wax and fragments of plant matter. Nearby, panels, photographs and installations seem to belong simultaneously to an archaeological museum, a scientific archive and a ritual space. At first glance, they appear to be relics from a distant past; only through closer observation does their artistic nature emerge, suspended between document, relic and symbolic construction.
This ambiguity forms the starting point of Metamagico, the major solo exhibition that PAV dedicates to Claudio Costa (1942–1995), curated by Marco Scotini. The exhibition focuses on the core body of work produced by the artist during the 1970s, shedding light on a practice that continues to occupy a singular position within the history of post-war Italian art.
The project is part of PAV’s long-term research programme exploring the origins of the relationship between art and ecosystems, extending its focus to artists who, as early as the 1960s and 1970s, anticipated many of the issues that are now central to contemporary debates on ecology, biodiversity and the memory of living systems. Within this context, Claudio Costa stands apart as a figure who resists easy categorisation. While engaging with the cultural climate of Arte Povera, Conceptual Art and Fluxus, he developed an independent artistic language grounded in an anthropological investigation of matter and history.
In Costa’s work, nature is never simply a subject to be represented. Instead, it becomes an archive of signs—a material shaped by time, capable of preserving traces of both individual and collective histories. Bones, clay, slate, terracotta, wax and vegetal elements are gathered, classified, transformed and recomposed into assemblages that simultaneously evoke archaeological artefacts, ritual objects and works of art. It is precisely this constant oscillation between different disciplines that constitutes one of the most radical aspects of Costa’s practice.
The exhibition takes its title from Costa’s 1978 work Metamagico, which effectively encapsulates the conceptual core of the exhibition. In Marco Scotini’s interpretation, magical thought is not understood as a nostalgic return to archaic forms of knowledge, but rather as a critical alternative to the rationality of Western modernity. Through an ideal dialogue with the thought of Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and Ernesto de Martino, ritual, myth and artistic practice emerge as epistemological tools capable of reactivating forgotten relationships between humanity, the environment and memory.
