An idea of museum and collection through Calvino and Del Giudice

Abstract

The perspective writings of Italo Calvino and Daniele Del Giudice anticipate the contemporary trend towards a large number of exhibition writings that propose the experience of the Wunderkammer again and towards the increasing attention to collecting both from critics and artists, as a research procedure but also as a private obsession. Calvino's works of the Eighties, Una pietra sopra (1980), Palomar (1983), Collezioni di sabbia (1984), Lezioni Americane (1988), and, as an extension, the works by Del Giudice - his recognised heir - Atlante occidentale (1985), Nel museo di Reims (1988), Orizzonte mobile (2009), are complex and articulate points of view on exploration of visible. They are narrative palimpsests that construct a variable taxonomy that opens on the theory of exhibition in contemporary museums: from wonder to manifold, from collection to classification, from encyclopedia to atlas. In this way there is a flying horizon, which has the museum, real or imaginary, with its various transformations, as a background. This essay, with a double perspective, from the past to the future, from illusion to reality, analyzes the dialogue between this written universe and the contemporary and subsequent museological debate.