Art institutions can often fall into a pattern of short-termism. The need to have a regular rhythm of exhibitions can mean that while having to be planned up to a few years in advance because of international loans and the logistics of mounting an exhibition, a museum can struggle to be read as anything beyond a place where exhibitions repeatedly pop up then disappear. All institutions speak a mean game in community connection and rootedness in place, but often such intent can run outside of and out of kilter with the exhibition churn.




The Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo – known as GAMeC – is trying something a bit different. Under the directorship of Lorenzo Giusti, the institution formed only in 1991 has created a curatorial umbrella running for two years underneath which a diverse exhibition programme will be organised in tandem with outreach, community, and contextual activities. With the framing of Pensare Come una Montagna – or Thinking Like a Mountain – GAMeC is mounting a series of projects with twenty artists or artist groups, designed to spread far beyond the gallery into the wider Province of Bergamo, northern Italy, with thematically exhibitions, events, workshops, installations, and performances.

The title Thinking Like a Mountain is a phrase adopted from Aldo Leopold’s book A Sand County Almanac, published posthumously in 1949. In it, Wisconsin-resident Leopold collected reflections upon nature of his local area with consideration to a deep spatiotemporal interconnectedness with the ecosystems’ elements. Relocating that phrase from the US Midwest to the massifs of the Alpine and pre-Alpine mountains offers opportunity for GAMeC to think outside of its Bergamo HQ.




The two-year project started in May, and while it looks into the landscape beyond the 15th century former monastery home of the institution, it kicks off with a major gallery exhibition of the work of Lin May Saeed. Born into a German-Jewish family in 1973, and sadly passing away during the planning of this exhibition, her work explores the interconnected ecosystem theme with a menagerie of works now acting as a memorial and a celebration to the artist’s dedication to human and non-human narratives.

Saeed mainly worked with the unlikely material of polystyrene. Initially choosing it while studying at the Düsseldorf Art Academy due the ease of finding waste fragments she could carve into, she went on to adopt it as her primary material, celebrating its lightness, fragility, and ubiquity while aware of its petrochemical backstory and how its use speaks to modern-day concerns into the Anthropocene.

In Saeed’s hands, however, polystyrene loses its disposable coarseness and every-day mundanity. Into it, whether as a relief or sculpture, Saeed carved detail and tales with wit and care, weaving stories from Islamic, Christian, and Hebrew histories in with the lives and histories of animals. A lifelong vegan and proponent of animal rights, Saeed’s work was dedicated to conflating human and non-human histories through the most-human of materials, albeit one as fragile as the ecosystems and animal lives we threaten the future of.



 
At the entrance to GAMeC the mountain theme takes a more literal, if functional, position. Studio Ossidiana, who work across architecture, design, and landscape with both production and research, have created Massi Erratici, a collection of functional objects and furniture which acts as the visitor’s introduction to the place but also interrogates the very material of the mountains. Using stone fragments – secondary raw materials otherwise headed to landfill – the studio created three different pigmented concrete mixtures in the production of new terrazzo units that can be arranged and rearranged into various configurations.

In GAMeC’s entrance, it forms the ticket desk and library, with fun additions of draughts and chess boards, while a separate space shows the process of material repurposing and construction towards the making of the elements. In 2026, GAMeC will leave its historic home into an exciting new gallery designed by C+S Architects, repurposing Bergamo’s former Palazzetto dello Sport to create a new centre for contemporary art. Massi Erratici’s terrazzo units will find a new home here as a table within the new entrance hall.


 

Outside of the current and future galleries, Giusti has also commenced the two-year programme with the first of a number of site-specific creative projects. Two sculptures from Bergamo-born artist Chiara Gambirasio, who graduated from Milan’s Brera Academy of Fine Arts in 2019, take the curatorial theme into the landscape. Giusti states that the desire for the project is for GAMeC to reach out into the ecosystem, and makes a point that strategically this means partnerships with local companies and organisations as a method for reaching new communities. To use capitalist relationships as a tool to explore civic connectedness and a deeper connection between people, place, and non-human neighbours, could be considered a neoliberal process more benefit to the corporate partner than the cultural originator. That said, in the early days of Thinking Like a Mountain it has led to Gambirasio’s first work and can offer a quick route to interesting locations beyond the gallery.

The artist worked with several women who in their youth had attended the summer camp of Dalmine, a metal working company with a Fondazione. The old summer camp building, an abandoned rotunda on a nearby hill, overlooks Gambiriaso’s multicoloured arch that sits upon a redundant bridge, next two the later-replacement, the three creating a triptych of arches. The colours were derived from workshops with the women, exploring their sense of loss for shared childhoods in the location

A short distance away, and a little further up the river valley is M’ama, another sculpture from Gambirasio. Placed in the small hamlet of Rusio outside a small church, the cement mortar and glue form reads as a natural form out of place, drawing from the participants reach for memory coupled with a collective sense of distance from nature and rootedness. The sculpture is shaped as an emerging mountain fused with a wooden stump, the artist inviting visitors to embrace the work with a hug.




The two-year programme will include a mixture of creative acts. Indeed, in May Mercedes Azpilicueta already presented Que Este Mundo Permanezca – May This World Remain in English – as a performance in the Oasi della biodiversità in Brembate. In the landscape, undergoing environmental regeneration and recovery after a sand-quarrying past, the artist considered three local birds – the green woodpecker, kingfisher, and hoopoe – and worked with participant performers to explore their characters and personalities.

Bergamo is a city of two parts. The fourth largest city in the Lombardy region, the historic and fortified city is a UNESCO World Heritage Site encircled in massive Venetian defensive systems. The modern city travels further down the hillside and into the landscape, with the current and future GAMeC buildings in late-modern extension of the city as it grew following the 1815 Congress of Vienna. Thinking Like a Mountain finds also finds a place in the historic centre with a presentation of a new site-responsive work from British artist Sonia Boyce, found in the Sala della Capriate, part of the Palazzo della Ragione.

Here, Boyce has mounted a multi-screen audio and video work reflecting on the local function of music to both unite and divide. Recalling Covid-era experiences of Italians singing the song from balconies as an act of solidarity and togetherness, Boyce recorded local musical students singing radical and political folk song Bella Ciao from balconies overlooking the historic Piazza Vecchia, where the venue is located. In her video collage, further footage documents the students improvising with sound amongst the neighbouring Angelo Mai Civic Library spaces, alone and rooted in place.




The starkly-shaped financial towers of Milan can be seen in the near distance from the historic centre of Bergamo, as can the highly industrialised plains across the whole region. Such development continues through to the Alpine and pre-Alpine ranges, though it intermingles with rich biodiversity and natural history – from urban and rural forests, through agricultural areas, and into more wilderness-oriented ecosystems. Lorenzo Giusti’s Thinking Like a Mountain is an ambitious project for GAMeC to look further than its gallery walls, and further even than its home town, and into the human and non-human communities beyond. It has a close relationship to the current Biennale Gherdëina – also curated by Giusti and which presents the other half of the important Lin May Saeed exhibition – located deeper into the Dolomites, centred on the city of Ortisei.

The project will not only feature local and international artists, as these early examples show, but ongoing workshops, laboratories, seminars, and opportunities for other forms of cultural engagement in the effort to explore ways for art and art institutes to develop new forms of relationships with people and place, all of which will be archived with supporting writing and research on the project’s website: www.pensarecomeunamontagna.gamec.it