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 Museo Nazionale della Montagna.
The New Orchestra
Up to 31.05.2026
What can the mountain still teach us today about the meaning of community? In a hyperconnected present, dominated by speed, individualism, and increasingly intermittent relationships, high-altitude territories seem to preserve an alternative possibility for inhabiting the world. The mountain thus emerges not as an idyllic or nostalgic place, but as a political and human laboratory — a space in which to rethink the relationship between individual, collective, and environment. Despite the difficulties that life in these territories entails, mountain communities have historically fostered encounter, sharing, and solidarity, nurturing that sense of belonging that urban-industrial societies seem to have progressively lost.
The exhibition The New Orchestra, on view through May 31, 2026 at the Museo Nazionale della Montagna in Turin, unfolds precisely within this tension. Through installations, sound devices, videos, and sculptural objects, the works do not attempt to represent the Alpine landscape, nor to return a romanticized image of it. Rather, they operate as dispositifs for reflection — fragments of dialogues and relationships capable of questioning the present while suggesting new possibilities for coexistence. Each work emerges as the trace of an encounter, of reciprocal listening, of a collective passage that seeks to rethink the very notion of care, not only among human beings, but also in relation to the natural ecosystem.
Curated by Andrea Lerda with Sofia Baldi Pighi, Gabriele Lorenzoni, and Alexandra Mihali, the exhibition originates from six artistic residencies developed in dialogue with communities across the Alpine and Apennine regions. The projects by Hannes Egger, Olivia Mihălţianu, Rebecca Moccia, plurale, Eugenio Tibaldi, and Emilija Škarnulytė thus take shape as instruments of listening and relation, born from encounters, shared experiences, and practices of permanence within the territories involved. Through different languages and approaches, the artists address the contemporary need to redefine relationships between human beings and, in parallel, those between human and other-than-human entities, opening a reflection on the possibility of imagining more ethical and sustainable forms of coexistence. Avoiding definitive solutions or fully formed utopian visions, The New Orchestra instead allows questions, tensions, and still-unresolved possibilities to emerge.
– Text by Guia Agazzi