Stefano Bessoni. THE MOLE OF WONDERS

The National Museum of Cinema presents Stefano Bessoni. La Mole delle Meraviglie (the Mole of Wonders), curated by Stefano Bessoni and Domenico De Gaetano, the first major exhibition dedicated to the creative genius of the director, illustrator and animator, on display from 10 May to 11 September 2023 on the Mole Antonelliana's ground floor, with free admission during museum opening hours.

Over 150 works will be on display - mostly from Bessoni's private archive and from the collections of the National Museum of Cinema – telling  the story of the pivotal areas of his expressive research: from fairy tales to the world of science, from illustrations to stop-motion animation and puppet-making, to his great love for cinema.

We find ourselves immersed in Stefano Bessoni's world through an itinerary populated by puppets, illustrations, films, artefacts and scientific formulations between the fantastic and the fairytale world; a fascinating Wunderkammer inside the most majestic and imposing of Turin's ‘Wunderkammer’, the Mole Antonelliana.

'Stefano Bessoni's exhibition pays tribute to everything that cinema represents for Turin,' emphasises Enzo Ghigo, president of the National Museum of Cinema. It is an entertaining and fascinating account of the history of the museum, which is also the history of our city, as well as a tribute to our founder Maria Adriana Prolo. This very year marks the 70th anniversary of the establishment of her association, at the core of everything that our institution represents today and its concern with preserving and enhancing the heritage of its collections'.

"Stefano Bessoni is a true talent of Italian cinema," says Domenico De Gaetano, director of the National Museum of Cinema. His creative freedom and style have built a personal fairy-tale universe that is both fascinating and disturbing. His unique visual style, on a par with the greats in the history of cinema, is perfect for narrating Maria Adriana Prolo, a scholar, collector and visionary, founder of the National Museum of Cinema, who gave life to a dream with her determination and dedication that only Bessoni's dreamlike and fairy-tale language could portray so well'.

The exhibition evolves around five illustrious figures, Antonelli, Prolo, Darwin, Lombroso and Greenaway, who, albeit in different eras and fields, share a common vocation: to collect and catalogue objects and ideas. Bessoni interprets them, translates them into graphic lines and objects, in an alternation of colour and black and white, between the real and the imaginary. Stefano Bessoni's art and work recount this fil rouge.

"I wanted to describe the Mole Antonelliana as a mammoth Wunderkammer, designed and built by the visionary architect Alessandro Antonelli, a dreamer of colossal architecture with dramatic symbolism. And as if by magic, La Mole was truly transformed into the wunderkammer of the Seventh Art. At the turn of the new century, it was destined to become the Museum of Cinema, including among its many wonders the fruit of the tireless collection of Maria Adriana Prolo, the founder of the museum and a genuine hunter of mirabilia and memorabilia related to the art of cinema. As in the ancient Wunderkammer, I followed the free logic of amazement and wonder in the exhibition. Thus, a subtle thread, made up of my personal fascinations, unites the various thematic rooms dedicated to Maria Adriana Prolo, Alessandro Antonelli, Charles Darwin, Cesare Lombroso and Peter Greenaway in an evocative journey made up of illustrations, puppets, objects, exhibits and scientific preparations. It also expands into imaginative ramifications and suggestions arising from the many elements of my expressive research, from the world of science and false science to fairy tales and occult traditions. I consider my work–in all its facets– as a chamber where I enclose everything that sparks astonishment and wonder in me, and I find it peculiar that the camera is called so* because it allows us to capture, store and preserve, overcoming the concept of death in a totally random way." (*camera translates as chamber in Italian)

Numerous display cases complete the set-up and contain puppets created by Bessoni for the stop-motion technique, as well as skeletons, taxidermied animals, shells and zoological preparations from the naturalistic collections of the Liceo Classico e Linguistico 'V. Gioberti' of Turin – cleaned, studied, catalogued and enhanced by the high school students and teachers. The section dedicated to Lombroso exhibits French phrenological busts with anthropometric compasses, didactic models on human anatomy and races, old identification photographs of criminals from the Nautilus collections and a graphic elaboration of the original drawings of tattooed criminals kept in the Archives of the 'Cesare Lombroso' Museum of Criminal Anthropology.

At the centre of the itinerary, the original desk that Maria Adriana Prolo used at Palazzo Chiablese, the first seat of the National Museum of Cinema, with the original of the volume Storia del cinema muto italiano (History of Italian Silent Cinema), written by Prolo and published in 1951, whose anastatic reprint (revised and published ) will be presented at the Salone del Libro on 18 May at 6.30 pm.

Two volumes will be accompanying the exhibition. A catalogue, published by Silvana Editoriale, featuring the works on display, with introductions by Enzo Ghigo and Martino Gozzi, and texts by Domenico De Gaetano, Alfredo Accatino, Santo Alligo, Ivan Cenzi and Telmo Pievani, plus an interview with Stefano Bessoni by Claudia Gianetto and Marco Grifo.

At the same time, Logos Edizioni published Stefano Bessoni's book Maria Adriana Prolo. La signorina del cinematografo. Published in two languages, it recounts the story of the woman who led to the birth of the National Museum of Cinema.

In addition to the exhibition, a series of initiatives featuring Stefano Bessoni and his art are planned.

On Friday 12 May 2023 at 10:00 a.m. in the Sala Blu of the Palazzo del Rettorato, Stefano Bessoni will be in dialogue with Domenico De Gaetano during the Masterclass Stop-motion. L'anima nera dell'animazione (The black soul of animation), organised by the National Museum of Cinema in collaboration with the University of Turin and the Holden School. The talk will be followed by a guided tour of the exhibition (free of charge, subject to availability).

On Friday 12 May at Cinema Massimo at 8:30pm, the feature film Krokodyle will be screened, with an introduction by director Stefano Bessoni and Domenico De Gaetano, the director of the National Museum of Cinema.

A series of workshops organised by the National Museum of Cinema of Turin and the Holden School in collaboration with the University of Turin are also planned for June and July.

The artist

Stefano Bessoni is a director, illustrator and animator. His experimental films have received awards at national and international festivals. After feature films Fragments of Inexact Sciences, Imago Mortis and Krokodyle, he started telling his stories with picture books; he approached animation cinema, and was dazzled by them. Bessoni firmly believes in auteur policy and cinema as a form of expression. His main points of reference are Peter Greenaway and Jan Švankmajer.

After years of lecturing in directing, he is now coordinator of the illustration and animation course at IED Rome.

He holds a highly specialised course in puppet making and stop-motion animation at the Holden School in Turin.

He does not rule out returning to filmmaking one day. To distract himself from the tribulations of filmmaking, he has devoted himself to publishing and teaching and has revived his passion for entomology by breeding giant tropical beetles.

The Wunderkammer

The Wunderkammer is the archetype of today's natural history museums and can be likened to the Cabinets of Curiosities of the Renaissance period; it stems from the desire to bring together in one place collections of natural objects, oddities and amazing artefacts. Its heyday came to an end around the middle of the 18th century with the advent of modern scientific thought, although the impulse to create chambers of wonder survives above all in the field of art ­­– think of the works of Joseph Cornell, André Breton or Kurt Schwitters.

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