ASACAZZIP
Alberto Fanni solo show
Curated by Andrea Ceresa
10-17 apr. 2025
Era una casa molto carina
Senza soffitto, senza cucina
Niente matricole, solo ragazze
O lavoratori con il garante
Non si poteva entrarci dentro
Perché non c'era il pavimento
Tra Saragozza e la Bolognina
600 euro una stanza piccina
Non si poteva andarci a letto
In quella casa non c'era il tetto
Vista nei gruppi, ho scritto in privato
Non mi hanno risposto, ma visualizzato
Bologna, the learned, has been home to a university for a millennium and the Academy of Fine Arts for over three centuries.
Ancient anecdotes and modern chronicles recount the epic episodes of those who study, today numbering nearly one hundred thousand, in constant rotation. This hospitality has necessarily shaped the city, both in body and soul.
Yet Bologna in recent, very recent times has appeared unrecognizable to many: the news reports speak of sky-high rents for dark, damp, inhospitable corners. This process, which accompanyes that of gentrification—which sees the construction of student residences that are perhaps a little too luxurious and expensive compared to actual need—has been underway more visibly for about ten years (only the pandemic, briefly, managed to reverse it).
The ceiling of the Pizza Casa workshop collapsed in November 2022, marking the closure of the historic location in the university district. There are no more lines, nor the stacks of empty boxes of €2.50 Margherita pizzas. Bologna, the fat city, in its guise of a hungry, nocturnal student, is no longer the same. The news causes a stir: someone, spontaneously, organizes its funeral, someone leaves a nostalgic epitaph on the lowered shutter, demonstrating their affection for the place.
Bologna, having survived the armed repression of the 1970s since the days of the glossators, is accustomed to change, yet today it is overwhelmed by emergencies that perhaps not even it would have ever expected, which have caught it unprepared. The Pizza Casa episode is not just about the closure of a business, but represents one of the effects of this wave of change.
Talking about it is discussing the city, yesterday, today, and tomorrow.
ASAC AZZIP is an exhibition by Alberto Fanni, curated by Andrea Ceresa, hosted in the studio of Riccardo Bellelli and Riccardo Michelini. It will last a week, during which Alberto will live in the little house he built for himself, subsisting only on pizza. Anyone interested is invited to join him at his meals, every lunch at 1 pm and every dinner at 8 pm, recreating those moments of social gathering outside the restaurant.
For the exhibition, in addition to the pizza house that will host him for a week, on which he has printed the graphics of the Cubo Pizza boxes, once stacked in the restaurant and used for takeout, a plexiglass sculpture and silkscreen prints will be installed.
The title ASAC AZZIP recalls those shops that, once out of business, turn their signs backwards to avoid the shadow tax.