‘I was raised in a family surrounded by artists and actors, people from the theater and music world, and other intellectuals. My father understood, years before it became a trend, that synergy between fashion and the cultural disciplines is crucial. He loved spending time being inspired and confronted by culture. In 1996 he started Fondazione Nicola Trussardi in the company’s headquarters [in Milan] – the 19th-century Marino alla Scala, next to La Scala opera house – which he envisioned as a multifunctional building open to the public with art exhibitions, a fashion boutique, a bookstore, a restaurant, and a café. The main idea was that he wanted the building to be open to the public. Now it is a very common concept, but it was innovative at the time.
‘I was studying art and working at museums in New York, and when I came back to take over the company after my father’s death in 1999, I was surprised and disappointed that people in Milan thought contemporary art was Picasso. So I thought about what I could do to bring contemporary art to people and to increase the number of visitors. It took about one year of meeting different people, and then I bumped into Massimiliano Gioni. He liked my idea of transforming the foundation into a kind of public institution, and we created this formula of a nomadic museum. We took inspiration from the New York Public Art Fund and Artangel, but it was very challenging to apply it to Italy, a context full of important historical art and architecture with so many layers of meaning.
‘We choose the space first and then the artist is chosen according to the space. The dialogue that emerges between the artist and the environment is something really unique. We have a very detailed map of Milan now because we used to go around the city and visit and look at places. We decide which one to use according to what we want to express as a message in the specific context and the moment we are living in. Since we use places that don’t belong to us, we have to rent or occupy them for a particular period. It depends on whether they are available, and it can be a long process, especially when we need to get permission from the public administration. For A Friend, in 2019, Ibrahim Mahama completely covered the gates of Porta Venezia [with jute sacks] and we had to ensure that the traffic wouldn’t be adversely affected by the intervention. We always have to consider conditions beyond the artistic point of view when we produce a new piece.
‘Until now we have chosen places that are not used anymore or have been used for other functions, and after we leave, the public administration may rethink them for different uses. That has succeeded for a few of them, although not necessarily in a way we expected or desired. Palazzo Litta, where we displayed Peter Fischli and David Weiss’s retrospective, in collaboration with Tate Modern and Kunsthaus Zürich in 2008, was the headquarters of the Ferrovie dello Stato, the public railway company, for more than 50 years. After our show closed it hosted other exhibitions and now houses a multidisciplinary space as well as offices of the public administration. In 2016 we displayed Sarah Lucas’s Innamemorabiliamumbum in the Albergo Diurno Venezia, the underground baths designed in the 1920s by Piero Portaluppi, next to the subway station. Now the FAI [Italian heritage foundation] is responsible for the space and plans to implement some projects.
‘We think of the foundation as a contemporary patron, like the mecenati of the Renaissance – among whom the most famous were the Medici. But they commissioned artists to create work for their own palaces and what we do is temporary, in the sense of space. It’s part of being itinerant, of being mobile. We come by surprise in an expected way and we disappear. What we do lives on only in your mind. So there’s no reason to keep the work and to put it in a permanent place. The piece stays with the artist, who is free to sell or give it to a gallery or an institution. What is important is that if you have the possibility to experience these projects, they stay in your memory. For example, we don’t have any documentation at all of the 2008 Tino Sehgal retrospective at the Galleria d’Arte Moderna of Milan because it is the artist’s practice not to produce any material. For the poster we used an image of Massimiliano and the team jumping in the entrance of the palace. Can you imagine that the museum had the same number of visitors that month as they did over an entire year?
‘Fondazione Nicola Trussardi works nationally, anywhere in Italy, and the new Beatrice Trussardi Foundation will be working internationally. We started in Switzerland this year, with Pawel Althamer’s Franciszek because we wanted to confront nature and the authenticity of the territory. And because it’s basically next door, in the center of Europe. You don’t have crowds in nature, of course, and if you want to see the project you have to walk, bike, or take a horse carriage to this mountain hut in Val Fex, in the Engadine. It is a local law that cars are not permitted unless you have a house or a business there. This condition was very important to us because the experience of reaching the location, the journey, is part of the artist’s message. We don’t expect that only people interested in what we do will go, but also lots of tourists who will find it by chance. The fact is that we are existing in this specific moment, when travel is limited by the pandemic, so what is really accessible now?
‘We came up with two projects in 2020, when most institutions and museums were forced to close. We are used to working quickly and produced the online Viaggi da camera in a very short period of time. The second was the performance of Ragnar Kjartansson’s The Sky in a Room, staged between lockdowns in the Church of San Carlo al Lazzaretto [in Milan], built [in the 16th century] as a place of worship for victims of the plague, and because of COVID-19 limitations only 15 people at a time could enter. Compared with many other shows of ours, not many people could see it – still, 10,000 people attended the exhibition and it was meaningful at a time when we don’t know what the near future will bring.
‘We like to say that art doesn’t give answers, it raises questions and inspires different possibilities and perspectives. It’s about the viewer. We are not planning the next project yet. This is not because of the pandemic but because it’s our way of working. We are very focused on what we are doing now and when it’s over it’s always kind of a restart. Each time is a new chapter that’s completely different from the others. We are lucky – it turns out that our formula is very, very contemporary.’
Cathryn Drake is a freelance writer and editor who has contributed to Artforum, frieze, Men’s Vogue, BBC Travel, and Time, among other publications.
Captions for full-bleed images, from top to bottom: 1. Pawel Althamer, Szopka [Crib], 2021. Clay, fabric, hay. 38 x 21 x 10 cm. Commissioned and produced by the Beatrice Trussardi Foundation, 2021. Photo by Marco De Scalzi. Courtesy of the Beatrice Trussardi Foundation. 2. Installation view of Sarah Lucas's Innamemorabiliamumbum, Albergo Diurno Benezia, Milan, 2016. Photo by Marco De Scalzi. Courtesy of Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, Milan. 3. Installation view of Pawel Althamer's Franciszek (2021) in the 17th-century mountain hut Val Fex. Mixed media. Commissioned and produced by the Beatrice Trussardi Foundation, 2021. Photo by Marco De Scalzi. Courtesy of the Beatrice Trussardi Foundation. 4. Beatrice Trussardi. Photo by Marco De Scalzi.