10 March 2022

“Dèibambini”: the MUSEC exhibitions series comes back

From 17th March it will be possible to visit the exhbition: THE INFANCY OF SIGNS. Drawings of New Guinean Children from the Wirz Collection. The temporary exhibition curated by Anna Castelli and Isabella Lenzo Massei is the tenth episode of MUSEC successful “Dèibambini” series, which took place at the Villa Heleneum between 2006 and 2014. The move of the museum to Villa Malpensata marked an interruption of the original project, but at the same time stimulated a critical rethinking of its methods. The idea of conceiving the museum as a privileged place for the making of "virtual universes" on a child's scale is maintained and the works of children's art of the past considered as a starting point and model for the thematic elaboration of expressive grammars. 

There are 79 drawings of New Guinean children on display at Spazio Maraini in Villa Malpensata, all made between 1952 and 1953. The children's drawings come together with 7 serigraphs on paper from the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt am Main made by Timothy Akis (c. 1944-1984) and Mathias Kauage (c. 1944-2003) — two Papua New Guinean artists who belong to the same generation of the young artists featured in the exhibition — and 11 works of Sepik ethnic art from the Brignoni Collection (MUSEC). The ethnic art works are exhibited both in the Spazio Maraini, with the children's drawings, and in the Spazio Tesoro, together with a video interview with Dadi Wirz, conducted at the end of 2021 by Moira Luraschi and Paolo Maiullari, researchers at MUSEC.

Manifesto