The Days of the Anchovy
Luigi Ratclif
Director, Turin Biennial

Everyone remembers it as the Biennial of the Anchovy.
In the spring of 1997 Turin, a city with no sea, chose the fish as a symbol for the eighth edition of the Biennial of Young Artists from Europe and the Mediterranean.
Why an anchovy? To explain its relationship with the Mediterranean Sea through the most ancient traditions: the typical dish of Piedmont is actually the "bagna cauda," a warm sauce of salted anchovies, eaten in winter with raw vegetables.
Turin, which is known the world over as the automobile city, had somehow always been affected by that image of a grey, tedious town. It was the stereotype of an unattractive European Detroit, definitely not worth visiting.
That image was in conflict with another Turin, the one of the great inventions, science, political and social movements, famous architecture, museums, great orchestras, editorial groups, contemporary art, and innovation.
In those years, faced with the difficulties of the Turin automotive industry, the town seemed to be doomed to a slow, inexorable decline: a negative economic trend was obliging the industry to restructure its own productive and economic system, and to redesign its future.
Since the elections in 1993, Turin had been run by a center-left government led by Mayor Valentino Castellani, who had started a great work of transformation and re-launching of the town in that direction. The City Council had intervened with determination on some priority and strategic lines of development: urban resettling, great works, infrastructures and transport, the economy and new productive systems, the social policies, employment, tourism, international promotion, cultural resources, intercultural approach and youth.
On these last themes we focused our activities with Councillors Fiorenzo Alfieri (International Promotion of the City), Carlo Baffert (Youth Policies), and Ugo Perone (Culture) in the second half of the nineties.
We carried out a broad, extraordinary program of interventions and activities, which was the basis of a process of a cultural re-launching of the town that would contribute-in the following years-to making Turin an important European center for the research and promotion of contemporary art.
Regarding policies in favor of the youth, on the other hand, Turin had a solid background.
The first "Youth Project" was actually born in Turin in 1977. For the first time in Italy, a public institution had established a charter of intents and coined the phrase "youth policies." Fiorenzo Alfieri, who was then Councillor for Youth, was in charge of the project. Some years later, in 1981, the first Italian program dedicated to young artists was started in Turin, with the aim of supporting and promoting the creativity of young people, facilitating access of the artists into the art market circuits, fostering international exchange and mobility.
This new formula quickly spread throughout other Italian municipalities, who started to cooperate and, in 1989, assigned Turin the leadership of the Circuit of the Young Italian Artists, an association of public institutions already operating in a network of thirty towns.
Furthermore, within the specific framework of the Biennial of Young Artists from Europe and the Mediterranean, Turin could rely upon a very close connection with that event. Our city had followed this event from its birth-in Barcelona in the autumn of 1984-cooperating with the Spanish colleagues and with ARCI Kids to the organization of "Tendencias," a prologue and "general rehearsal" of the first Biennial of 1985. Furthermore, Turin had started to draft the statute of the new International Association of the Biennial and held the responsibility for the management of the relationships with the new countries. In 1990 and 1992, it also organized two "previews" of the Biennials of Marseilles and Valencia, which were dedicated respectively to Rock Music and Theater.
Undoubtedly, this work of international relations in a cultural environment, together with an intensive activity deployed by the numerous institutions and associations of Turin, had contributed-in the late eighties-to conferring the town an important role in the European programs for the promotion of young artists.
At that time I was in charge, on behalf of the City of Turin, of the promotion of the program of young creativity, started in 1981, and I was the national secretary of the Circuit of Young Italian Artists. I participated firsthand in this activity of re-launching the cultural system dealing with programs connected to artistic innovation and to upcoming artists.
On the grounds of this complex and articulated activity, the idea of hosting the Biennial of Young Artists from Europe and the Mediterranean in Turin thus seemed to be a natural step. The event would certainly contribute to reinforce and underline the plan for re-launching and internationalizing Turin. It was an important strategic move in an important, strategic moment.
In the spring of 1995 Mayor Castellani, together with City Councillors Baffert and Perone, decided to submit to the International Biennial Committee the nomination of Turin as the seat of the 8th Biennial of Young Artists of Europe and the Mediterranean and it was accepted. The proposal was that the Biennial was to be held in the spring of 1997. I was, therefore, committed to its planning and the task of ascertaining the feasibility of the event within the framework of a series of guidelines we drew up.
In fact, the Biennial was meant to communicate the vocations of the town, optimize the internal resources and its assets in terms of international relationships, involve the citizenship, open new spaces for cultural fruition and production, strike up alliances with the institutions, start a profitable system of relationships within the territory of the region, involve the associations and cultural institutions as a whole, solicit the interest of the components of the productive sector and convey economic resources, focus the floodlights on the local artistic scene in a European context.
In drafting the project, we also highlighted the need for a reformulation of the general setup of the Biennial as it had been developed up to that moment. We believed we needed to activate connections with other European networks and new countries on the other shore of the Mediterranean, but also in other European areas, promoting new forms of political and cultural dialogue. It was indispensable that the Biennial become a privileged space of training and production, developing links with the art market, show business, cultural entrepreneurship, and the media.
An important contribution to the formulation of the project and to part of its realization was given by the national ARCI Association and its Turin section that had actively participated in the processes of birth and development of the Biennial of Young Artists from Europe and the Mediterranean since the very beginning.
In the following two years, with the establishment of the Organizing Committee for the Biennial of Turin '97, which involved the City of Turin, the Province of Turin, and the Piedmont Region, we started to draw up the program with the gradual involvement of the entire cultural system of Turin.
Chaired by Mayor Castellani and by the two Deputy Chairmen Giampiero Leo, Councillor of Culture in the Piedmont Region, and Walter Giuliano, Councillor to the Natural and Cultural Resources of the Province of Turin, the committee promoted the search for sponsors, managed the economic resources and the contributions which were donated in favor of the event, found the experts of the different sectors and started all the activities in the promotional, planning, organizational, economic, and financial fields. Furthermore, the project could rely on the full support of both the Province and the Region through the direct involvement of the two respective presidents of the time, namely Mercedes Bresso and Enzo Ghigo. Also the Italian Government, through a large part of its Ministries, as well as the European Union and UNESCO, supported and gave full trust to the Turin event which was being organized.
These were very intensive, exciting months. The major cultural institutions, the artistic communities, the associations, the economic realities, the intellectuals, the entrepreneurs, responded unanimously and readily accepted the invitation of cooperating in the 1997 Biennial project.
An Organizational Office was established within the committee and entrusted the overall management of the "Biennial machine." I led that office together with the best professionals of the sector and with young collaborators who have now gone a long way, also thanks to that experience.
A Scientific Committee was appointed with the task of assuring the quality of the different activities included in the program, determining the cultural lines of the Biennial, and establishing connections with Italian and European institutions. This committee was comprised of Italian and foreign personalities, artists and writers, among whom Franco Battiato, Alessandro Baricco, Tahar Ben Jallun, Giorgetto Giugiaro, Jack Lang, Predrag Matvejevic´, Gianni Vattimo, and was chaired by Ugo Perone, City Councillor for Cultural Resources and Communication. Another committee, the Planning Group, involving the most significant cultural operators of Turin, was appointed to set up a general project within the framework of the program lines. Its task ended by the overall definition of the program.
A great job was accomplished regarding the spaces that housed the event. In particular, the Biennial is remembered for having returned one of its most charming and prestigious historical areas to the town: the Cavallerizza Reale (Royal Riding School), a group of eighteenth-century buildings located in the command area of the Savoy capital, which housed in its 4,500 square meters the exhibition section, designed by architect Carlo Viano. This was a momentous undertaking, which Councillor Perone was determined to bring to fruition; a strenuous challenge, won through hard work. Furthermore, another sixty spaces were reserved in town and throughout Piedmont for the different exhibitions of the program: "Biennale Off," "Sull'onda della Biennale" ("On the Wave of the Biennial"), and "Alta Marea" ("High Tide"). The "Murazzi del Po," the Lingotto factory, Via Garibaldi, and the Docks Dora became a brand new itinerary of the young Turin.
Another extraordinary fact for BJCEM and for the history of the cultural events organized in Turin was the wide, unexpected response of the economic and financial world, which contributed more than 30% to the budget of the event; an innovative fact which involved twenty-five big enterprises, not only from Turin. Furthermore, more than thirty-five important cultural institutions and associations participated in the program, thus giving life to approximately three hundred appointments on the regional territory. The project of the Turin Biennial also obtained generous financing from the 10th General Direction of the European Commission within the framework of the "Kaleidoscope" program.
The Turin Biennial constituted a unique occasion and an opening to the most varied and remote cultural realities, thus acting as a stimulus and efficient catalyzer. In fact, the Biennial stretched over the entire territory of the Piedmont region: initiatives, shows, and events in the different provinces put the young artists of Piedmont together with those coming from the most diversified cultural and geographic realities. Artists arriving from all over the world were called on to operate side by side with the local ones, thus activating an actual involvement of the existing cultural tissue and priming a thick web of relationships, connections, and common interests and creating a lively communication between the different expressions of young creativity.
The "Biennale Off," organized in cooperation with ARCI Nuova Associazione, proposed some hundred productions: exhibitions as well as musical, theater and dance performances, by more than 250 artists from Piedmont and 50 from Italy and abroad.
Thanks to the cooperation of the then called Provveditorato agli Studi di Torino (Turin Education Office), an important pedagogic project, open to all the schools, was implemented. The schools and the workshops of the educational departments of the various Museums in Turin-Progetto Cultura, Modern and Contemporary Art Gallery, Egyptian Museum and Castello di Rivoli-all worked together for the first time. The world of education was considered as one of the most important interlocutors of the Biennial.
A great activity of promotion and information was therefore carried out with the high schools. The purpose was to give the students an opportunity to learn by visiting the art places, thus familiarizing them with contemporary art.
The eighth edition of the Biennial was officially opened at the Cavallerizza Reale on the afternoon of 17 April 1997, in the presence of more than 5,000 people. Some 600 artists participated from Algeria, Cyprus, Croatia, France, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Republic of San Marino, Slovenia, Spain and also Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Palestine, Lebanon, Israel, Malta, Turkey, Bosnia and Albania. Holland, Finland, Argentina, and Germany were the non-Mediterranean guest countries.
Fifty-nine towns participated in the event. The following days were very lively and dynamic for the whole town. An impressive collective party filled the streets and the numberless spaces of the urban centers and outskirts with shows, concerts, performances, exhibitions, debates, seminars, and conferences. Turin had turned into a large aquarium with fish everywhere: in the streets, on the streetcars, in the houses, even on the Mole Antonelliana.
A joyful, spontaneous spirit contaminated the people and invaded every location. On the banks of River Po, 6,000 people rushed, accompanied by a military fanfare, to the "great fish fry," prepared in a gigantic pan by thirty-five Ligurian cooks with two tons of anchovies and 1,000 liters of olive oil. And also, at the "Ferrante Aporti" juvenile detention center, artists and young convicts carried out a collective work of art-along the entire length of the prison-titled "The Way Out."
In the first two days, more than 5,000 people had visited the exhibitions at the Cavallerizza, and by the closing of the exhibitions on May 18 the spectators and visitors of the Biennial totalled 138,000. A success that conquered the public and the national and international critics, setting the happening among the greatest European events of the year. On April 21, 1997 art critic Olga Gambari wrote in the daily newspaper La Repubblica: "It actually seems that Turin-thanks to the Biennial-has definitely left behind its image of a dull, rigid town.
These first days have received a unanimous, enthusiastic welcome, which has contributed to creating a lively international atmosphere. Strolling around the town during the weekend, you might have felt as if one great party had invaded the streets, with theater performances and musicians at every corner. And then a lot of people-tourists, natives and artists-wandering around, clapping and participating in this Mediterranean happening of the anchovy." Moreover, the current director of our Modern Art Gallery, Pier Giovanni Castagnoli, wrote in the same paper a few days later, on April 27: "The fact is that you can see as many people swarming along the halls and courts of the Cavallerizza-where the heart of the event is located-and in the many other areas which house the Biennial as you can perhaps only see in Venice, in the pavilion where the other-far more famous-Biennial exhibition is held." Operators and managers of cultural networks from all over Europe and the Mediterranean countries were invited to the event. Within the framework of the relationships our city was developing with the different countries of Northern Europe, the idea matured of organizing a twinning between the Biennial of Young Artists from Europe and the Mediterranean and the one of the Baltic Sea ("ArtGenda"), thus moving-the following month of June-the whole exhibition of the Cavallerizza to Helsinki. The exhibition was opened on June 5 at the Cable Factory, an important cultural center in the former electric cable factory in the harbor area, and marked the beginning of a fruitful collaboration between Finland and the network of the Biennial of Young Artists, which is still in force. Turin's Biennial was certainly an unprecedented feast of culture, but also a precious opportunity for deep reflection and open confrontation.
On April 17, the day of the inauguration of Turin's Biennial, the newspaper La Stampa published an article by Nico Orengo entitled "The Challenge of Coexistence," which stated: "Rewriting the town. Or finding the invisible town, one of infinite possibilities, behind the town we usually traverse. This is the challenge of the 1997 Biennial of Young Artists from Europe and the Mediterranean. From Algeria, Greece, Slovenia, Bosnia, France, Spain: from the borders to the inside of this great sea of common and different civilizations, young artists will try to intertwine the knots of fantasy and pacific coexistence. If it is a restless, internally torn Mediterranean we see today, the utopia of the artist is-besides criticizing the fractures-looking for a unity, finding that extended deep soul Braudel was speaking about. And in an increasingly multiethnic town such as Turin, we wish to capture from the young artists-through their works-the memory, the emotions, the look which enables us to grasp the essence of this 'other' and of this 'elsewhere' we contact every day and in relationships which are not always easy."
In fact, the image the Mediterranean Sea was offering in the spring of 1997 was not reassuring, as-unfortunately-it is not even today. It was difficult to look at the Mediterranean as a coherent unit without taking into account the fractures and deep conflicts that were tearing the whole area apart. It had to be considered as a crossing point of civilizations, peoples, religions and cultures, and its unity and difference had to be seized as an expression of modernity, in its different forms, with its issues and richness. In spite of these difficulties, in Turin we deemed we had first of all to trust the youth, believe in their ability to look for new ways of meeting which did not mean moving backwards, but rather looking forward, at difference and complexity.
The invitation to meet, confront, participate was therefore one of the elements of strength of the Turin edition of the Biennial. An edition that did not leave the town without traces; on the contrary, it contributed to a significant action of re-launching the activities connected to contemporary artistic research. The Biennial strengthened and underlined Turin's vocation as a town of experiments. It highlighted the activity of the artistic communities, the young ones in particular, at an international level. It demonstrated that the different cultural components of the territory could be joined into a system, at regional level as well. It revived interest and attention to the world of the Turin economy, and started an important dialogue between culture and enterprise, which is still fertile in our town. It experimented an original organizational formula, capable of optimizing the resources, accelerating the implementation processes, building up a new way of cultural expansion, so that-in the following years-it was adopted as a model by many operators in the cultural world.
Furthermore, the Biennial managed to bring the public at large closer to contemporary art and its messages, which are often difficult to decode, through new instruments, spaces, and modalities of dialogue and approach with the people.
Above all, the Biennial contributed to recovering and reusing some forgotten spaces of the town for cultural purposes such as the Cavallerizza Reale, a symbolic place of this new season of rebirth which started in that spring of 1997: the spring of the anchovy.
In an article published in La Stampa on April 23, Gabriele Ferraris described the climate, the enthusiasm of those days and the mark Turin's Biennial was leaving: "It is time for balances. The ones of the Biennial are positive. Thirteen thousand spectators at the Cavallerizza, this is yesterday's datum. Thirteen thousand people who have discovered the "forbidden town," the architecture of the royal stables, the stuccos saved from ruin, a recovered asset. Recovered forever, unless tomorrow's carelessness makes today's enthusiasm useless. And these thirteen thousand have seen drawings and installations, clothes and projects, photographs and sculptures. The dreams of a whole generation, the young people who are building their future, who will form the tastes, the ideas, the aesthetic values which one day will belong to us.
How can you tell how many people were at the Basse di Stura, singing and playing with Luca Morino of the Mau Maus, drinking the wine and tea offered by the gypsies at the Cliostraat happening? How many have been contaminated by the "urban epidemic" of the A12 Group from Genoa, unleashed through the streets to distribute mysterious boxes, as mysterious as the "prophylaxis instructions"?
Then, there is the balance of the spirit, which cannot be pigeonholed into a ledger, into a table, but which counts as much as the balances consisting of figures. Because it is important that this town has lived the days of the Biennial. They have been days of cheer. And they have indicated a possible way for Turin's future. Capital of culture. Today more than ever."
This-as much as it can be summarized in few pages-is the Biennial we have loved, dreamed about, and carried out with the help of an entire city. So that it could appear in all its beauty and potential.
So that this city could smile and become irresistible, as Turin sometimes manages to be.