Terrone

In the silence of a time that becomes presence, the Galleria d’Arte Moderna opens, from April 2 to July 6, 2025, to an experience that is not merely visual, but existential. Ugo Rondinone, wanderer between worlds and memories, unveils in Milan his most vulnerable, most grounded self: “Terrone” is not a title, but a confession.

You don’t enter this exhibition; you traverse it. Each work, each material, each space becomes a passage between what has been inherited and what one has chosen to become. Rondinone, born in Switzerland, son of departures and absences, resident of New York, shapes his path as an act of resistance against oblivion. By changing form and rejecting labels, he does not disguise himself—he reveals himself. And in that revelation, the “I” becomes a political “we.”

Caroline Corbetta doesn’t curate; she accompanies. Like a discreet guide, she constructs a path that goes beyond contemplation: it leads toward an identity-induced vertigo. Here, aesthetics merge with ethics, and the intimate is offered to the collective. The word “Terrone”, engraved in both language and flesh, is no longer just an echo of insult: it becomes the raw material of art, an alchemical gesture that transforms ridicule into encounter.

There is no rhetoric here, only layers of lived experience. Nostalgia does not inhabit these rooms, but a memory that breathes, pulses, and waits. Rondinone does not build a monument, but an organism. Plaster, wood, lead: humble elements that speak of the invisible. Traces of the South, among olive trees and sounds, whispers of fathers and mothers. And then Milan, which does not look down from above but draws near, welcoming—as one welcomes those who return, fully aware of where they began.

Pellizza da Volpedo’s Il Quarto Stato is not here as a relic, but as a mirror. There, the laborers; here, the migrants. Different paths, same desire: to exist through movement. Not walking to arrive, but to avoid dissolution. The step becomes an ontological act. The body, a flag of an identity found in displacement.

Rondinone interrogates the inner self as if it were a landscape. He already did so in the Nevada desert, among the Seven Magic Mountains, stones raised in the void like totems of a forgotten sacred. But here, in the halls of GAM, the threshold between who we are and who we remember being becomes flesh. Every room vibrates. Every absence weighs.

There is no heroism, no effect. Only the truth of the fragment. And that aesthetic of silence—so far from clamor, so close to the skin—asks us to pause. To listen to what is not said. To inhabit fragility as a form of knowledge.

Terrone lingers on the skin upon exit. But it has changed. No longer a stigma, but a trace. No longer an empty sound, but an embodied word. It is proof that one can pass through disorientation without denying it. Rondinone does not claim to give answers. Instead, he offers a space. A space where the past does not condemn but accompanies. Where identity is never fixed, but always becoming.

April 2 – July 6, 2025
GAM – Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Milan