On Michelangelo Pistoletto’s Glacial Threads at Castello Gamba

There are exhibitions that illustrate an artist’s concerns; there are exhibitions that extend a practice into the public sphere. Glacial Threads belongs to the second category. Installed within the cool timbered rooms of Castello Gamba, Pistoletto’s project stages a proposition that is at once formal, ethical and technical: how might art act as a connective tissue between forest management, material innovation and the civic practices necessary to slow the erosion of landscapes we thought immutable?

The show’s premise is deceptively simple. Starting from cellulose-based fibres—sourced from sustainably managed forests—and a working pilot that substitutes fossil nonwovens with biodegradable geotextiles, the project reframes what protection of glaciers can mean: not merely an engineering gesture, but a circular choreography in which the very fabrics that shield ice can later be woven back into garments and civic narratives. The initiative’s technical claims—confirmed in field tests and presented publicly by Lenzing—are not ancillary; they are woven into the exhibition’s dramaturgy, so that visitors encounter empirical evidence and speculative aesthetics within a single itinerary.

Pistoletto’s practice has long been invested in notions of repair, reunion and the invention of a “third subject” (Terzo Paradiso) born from the collision of binaries. Here those motifs are literalized: mirrors and fragments (echoes of the artist’s Segno Arte and mirrored works) converse with patched garments and sculptural dresses produced by designers working with the Cittadellarte platform. The garment becomes emblem and laboratory. A jacket born from glacier-cover geotextiles—displayed within a Segno Arte frame—operates on two registers: as evidence of feasibility, and as a metaphor of mending that scales from the singular body to the planetary polity.

Curatorially, Fortunato D’Amico arranges the museum’s rooms to enact a micro-ecology: room by room, the visitor moves from forest (the origin of fibre, the laboratory of growth and sequestration) to the glacial field (vulnerability and protection) and finally to the atelier and archive where circular futures are imagined. This sequencing is not rhetorical ornament; it is a pedagogic device. By staging science—photographic studies of ice, documentation of pilot outcomes—and placing them alongside Pistoletto’s emblematic sculptural lexicon (the apple-as-mend, trunks with inserted mirrors, participatory mirror works), the exhibition compels a different temporality. It asks us to persist in an attentiveness that institutions too often abandon: the patient work of translation between disciplines.

What makes Glacial Threads singular is the way it refuses binary oppositions: nature versus industry, aesthetics versus utility, art versus policy. Instead, it offers a triangular model—artist, enterprise, civic body—where each vertex performs a necessary task. The reinscription of industrial process into poetic form is not romanticization; it is a tactical move. To see a laboratory result (a geotextile that reduces melt in a small tested area) framed with the same attention as an artwork is to acknowledge that aesthetics can operate as a public technology: it mediates understanding, suspends cynicism, and renders technical possibility thinkable in the civic imagination.

Yet the exhibition is not merely proof of concept. It is also an ethical provocation. Pistoletto’s insistence on mending—on the visible seam that repairs an injury—functions as a paradigm for cultural response to climate rupture. To mend is not to restore a pristine past but to invent forms of co-habitation that accept transformation as condition. The garments that circulate in the galleries, made in collaboration with designers and circular-economy partners, are gestures of responsibility: they insist that the afterlife of protective materials be planned, traceable, and beautiful enough to demand care.

If there is an uneasy tension in the project, it is the one that always confronts art that enters technical fields: will aesthetic mediation neutralize the urgency of policy, or will it mobilize publics? Pistoletto’s answer, staged with rare clarity at Castello Gamba, is that art must be infrastructural in the broadest sense: it must produce relations, protocols and imaginaries alongside experiments and evidence. The museum, here, becomes a node in a larger ecology of action—hosting not only objects but conversations, workshops, and an international catalogue that records both practice and argument.

To leave Glacial Threads is to carry a modest paradox: the reminder that protection can be poetic and that poetry can be procedural. The mountains beyond Castello Gamba—those very Alps that have been reduced to topographical footnotes in climate reports—are called back into discourse through dresses, mirrors and the measured language of a materials science report. The work is not to choose between beauty and policy; it is to recognize the mutual dependency of both. If Pistoletto’s project succeeds, it will be because it enlarges the field of responsibility: artists, scientists, manufacturers, museums and citizens become co-authors of repair.

Glacial Threads asks us to inhabit a practice of attention: to learn the grammar of materials, to follow their life cycle, and to accept that civic care can begin with the stitch. The exhibition is a plea and a programme—an invitation to imagine textiles as regenerative agents and museums as laboratories of collective repair. Visit before 28 September to witness, in situ, a rare experiment in art that insists on material consequence.

© Charlotte Madeleine Castelli | All rights reserved