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The Enclave by Richard Mosse. Photos: EPA, Richard Mosse and Jack Shainman Gallery, Sigalit Landau

Eastern focus

The Palazzo Strozzi, a prime cultural venue in Florence, is courting Chinese support as it tries to ride out the latest turbulence of Italy's political chaos

LIFE
Hugh Chow

Tadashi Kawamata's - a flimsy desert island beach shack jerry-rigged from driftwood - perches precariously on the imposing stone facade of the Palazzo Strozzi, high above the heads of visitors entering the 524-year-old landmark in the historic heart of Florence.

The Japanese artist's creation - part of a series of wooden structures he's built as art installations around the world - heralds the arrival of a new exhibition aptly titled "Unstable Territory".

Italian exhibitions are renowned for being cancelled, rescheduled, changed, done at the last minute
James Bradburne 

Shortly before the show was due to open earlier this month, a gathering political storm looked set to topple yet another government in Rome, some 90 minutes by high-speed train to the southeast. Italy has had 14 governments since 1992.

"Politics is very tightly bound to most Italian cultural institutions," says James Bradburne, the British-Canadian director-general of the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi. "A very Italian weakness is the link between the political cycles of decision-making and the exhibition cycles and the cultural cycles."

A history of political instability and the sovereign debt crisis in the 17-nation Eurozone are just some of the challenges of running a cultural venue in a country which, by one estimate, is home to half the world's great art treasures.

"When I first took the job in 2006, in my first presentation, I said we had to break out of the … link [with politics]," says Bradburne, an architect and designer who had previously helped run museums in Frankfurt and Amsterdam. "Italian exhibitions are renowned for being cancelled, rescheduled, changed, done at the last minute because you can't make a decision."

The director-general's office at the palazzo is littered with clues to diverse interests: Chinese calligraphy; a gleaming red bust of controversial Chinese artist Ai Weiwei; a 3-D artwork that doubles as an optical illusion.

The Magic Circle of the Ritual by Vassily Kandinsky
The Palazzo Strozzi prides itself on being a little different. As cash-strapped governments around the world cut funding for the arts, the foundation champions a business model that mixes private and public funds, supplemented by "earned revenue" from ticket sales and other commercial activities. Only 37 per cent of its revenue last year came from taxpayers.

The venue operates as a temporary exhibition space and has no collection of its own, unlike Florence's Uffizi Gallery which houses Sandro Botticelli's or its Galleria dell' Accademia that boasts Michelangelo's statue of David.

The palazzo's aim is to create fun and accessible shows for visitors, especially children, the elderly and the disabled. It seeks to be educational, to make "specialist knowledge available to non-specialists", says Bradburne, without making visitors feel as if they're doing homework.

Images of Healingby Mikhail Larionov
"The Russian Avant-Garde, Siberia and the East" exhibition, which runs until January, offers booklets in Chinese and Russian for visitors who don't speak English or Italian. The show celebrates the art inspired by the future tsar Nicholas II's 1890-91 tour of the countries bordering his vast empire. Families can borrow an "explorer's map case", a multilingual board game complete with compass and maps, that helps parents and their children navigate the exhibits and create their own unique experience from their visit.

Last year's "The Thirties: The Arts in Italy Beyond Fascism" took a little-known fact - that wartime leader Benito Mussolini banned all American comic books except Mickey Mouse - and asked Italian cartoonist Giuseppe Palumbo to recreate a comic from the era.

Bradburne says potential shows are assessed on three criteria: they have to create new knowledge; the artwork should benefit from the restoration and conservation expertise in Florence; and the shows must "transform" visitors.

"Palazzo Strozzi is one of the most beautiful Renaissance buildings in the world. It's in the heart of Florence," says Leonardo Ferragamo, director of the Florence-based luxury goods empire founded by his father Salvatore, and chairman of the group of 40-odd companies that have pledged to support the venue.

A wooden idol made by the Nivkhi people.
The Palazzo Strozzi was built to express the power and wealth of its original owner. Commissioned by merchant Filippo Strozzi, the building was only completed some 49 years after the foundation stones were laid in 1489. The banking and mercantile aristocracy of the Italian city states of the time bankrolled the Renaissance, a period of great artistic and intellectual achievement in Europe.

When the early 20th-century architects of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York sought inspiration they looked east, across the Atlantic, to Florentine palaces such as the Strozzi and Vecchio for guidance. A century later, it's the turn of the custodians of the palazzo to look east for inspiration - to China.

The Palazzo Strozzi set up a charitable foundation earlier this year to pursue corporate sponsorship from the mainland. Donations will be used to showcase the work of Chinese contemporary artists and help fund internships in Florence for young Chinese.

Chinese donations will also help fund annual exhibitions in Florence inspired by the Royal Academy of Art's open submission Summer Exhibition in London. The first is scheduled to coincide with the Milan Expo in 2015, a year in which tourism authorities hope to attract one million Chinese visitors to Italy.

From next year, Chinese recipients of a visa issued by the Italian embassy in Beijing will be given a cultural "passport" titled "In the Footsteps of Leonardo da Vinci". The booklet - in Chinese and Italian - is a thematic guide to exploring Florence and Tuscany published by the Palazzo Strozzi.

"Our aim for them is to let them know we have other things for them to visit, not just the shopping mall or the outlets," says Cristina Cheng, one half of the Project China team.

Cheng, from Jinan in Shandong province, studied architecture in Florence; she also worked with Swiss colleague Elena Bottinelli to reach out to the Chinese community that has lived in Florence since the 1930s. "It's a really slow process," she says.

Amid Florence's photo-friendly historic buildings and marbled piazzas there are frequent reminders of another Italy: one with 40 per cent youth unemployment; where Roma "gypsies" pursue tourists for spare change; where peddlers sell knock-off handbags spread over plastic sheets laid on the ground.

"We've been trying to do more and more with less and less every single year," says Bradburne, referring to the difficulties posed by Italy's economic problems. "It has been very, very, very difficult."

While efforts such as the China foundation may help, Bradburne hopes the Palazzo Strozzi's reputation for innovation and design will translate into additional revenue from consulting work, branded products, documentaries and education programmes.

"We believe our exhibitions have to matter, we have to believe that with that content we can make a real change to visitors' lives," he says. "We don't mean that they're going to get richer, happier or find a wife or whatever, but we do mean that these are not going to be trivial."

This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: Eastern focus
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