June will see the opening of Through the Clouds, the first temporary exhibition to be held at IBSA Foundation’s headquarters, Carlo Cattaneo House in Castagnola-Lugano, in partnership with MUSE Science Museum in Trento.
From 12 June to 7 September 2025, two thought-provoking and at times hypnotic activist artworks will invite the public to reflect on issues we can no longer shut our eyes to: environmental crisis, collective perception, and the shared future.
Giacomo Segantin and g. olmo stuppia – the two artists featured in the exhibition, curated by Stefano Cagol and staged as an educational display – encourage us to look through the current haze of art, science and contemporary emergencies with two video artworks.
Giacomo Segantin: through smoke, clicks and catastrophes
Giacomo Segantin’s digital collage, Looking through the clouds (2021), is a visual sequence of video clips taken from the web: a rapid succession of natural catastrophes, social protests and chemistry experiments designed to go viral. The common thread is smoke – a symbolic and visual element running through every scene: fog, eruptions, explosions, real or simulated clouds that obscure our ability to discern, understand and observe in depth. The video, after which the exhibition is named, echoes the sheer bewilderment of a reality filtered by social media and its hasty grammar of short attention spans and automatic gestures.
g.olmo stuppia: exploring debris of the past and future
Sposare la notte [Marrying the night] (2022) by g. olmo stuppia, created as part of the Italian Pavilion’s Public Program at the Venice Biennale, is a thought-provoking artwork that is equally powerful. The artist produced the work as the result of a collective gesture: a walk on the outskirts of cities, where nature meets neglect, like on the artificial island of the Venetian lagoon that served as a dumping ground for Murano glass. The participants collected fragments – quite literally: glass chips, shards and debris – that were then transformed by the artist into a symbol of our times. We are walking on broken glass, the artist seems to be telling us, and we are a long way from cultivating fertile and solid ground on which to build the future.
Two artworks from the Anthropocene Collection
The exhibition stems from the collaboration between IBSA Foundation and MUSE Science Museum in Trento, sponsor of the Anthropocene Collection, from which the two artworks were selected – an artistic and scientific project focusing on the not-always-healthy relationship between humans and the Earth.
The initiative is perfectly aligned with the Foundation’s mission to promote “Science for all”, making science accessible and popular, for us all to share. The language of art becomes the medium here: direct, sensitive, capable of creating connections and making us reflect, even if only for a moment, on where we are going.
IBSA Foundation is scaling up its activities at its headquarters in Carlo Cattaneo House, building relationships with various cultural stakeholders in Lugano and establishing itself as a beacon for culture in the city.
A fruitful network is thus being built, where Through the Clouds is yet another opportunity to promote the fusion of art and science. This exhibition is an invitation to look beneath the surface, to allow ourselves to experience doubt and to rise consciously to the challenges of our times.
Exhibition opening times👇
The exhibition is free of charge and will be open to the public from Monday to Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
