The exhibition, curated by Sergio Risaliti and Stefania Rispoli, inaugurates a new exhibition at Palazzo Buontalenti in which scientific investigation and imagination merge.
By bringing Johanna Gautier-Morin’s academic research into dialogue with the works of six contemporary international artists –Agnieszka Polska, Berlinde De Bruyckere, Eglė Budvytytė, Elena Mazzi, Leone Contini, Riccardo Previdi, Pierre Chastel – the exhibition explores the themes of economic life in its productive, reproductive and destructive forms.

Developed in dialogue with the research of historian Johanna Gautier-Morin, the OPEN exhibition explores economic life through its productive, reproductive, and destructive dimensions.

The conceptual core of OPEN resides at the very intersection of contemporary artistic practice and academic inquiry. The shared intent is to make visible and open to questioning those processes, practices, and forms of value that classical economics has historically marginalised: the often invisible yet essential foundations that sustain our collective survival and flourishing.

Unfolding across the historic interior and exterior spaces of Palazzo Buontalenti (home to the EUI’s Florence School of Transnational Governance), the OPEN exhibition invites visitors to reflect on four key concepts:

• Gleaning: Recovering the marginal, the residual, and the discarded as vital cognitive and material resources.
• Exhaustion: Examining the mental, physical, biological, and environmental limits characterising contemporary systems of production.
• Irreversibility: Acknowledging processes of no return that reshape social and ecological worlds. It challenges the cyclical imaginaries through which economic life is often measured and invites reflection on longer timescapes where damage and transformation accumulate without return..
• Mutation: Exploring forms of adaptation and the emergence of new modes of coexistence and relation.

The San Marco / Michelangelo Garden hosts a luminous installation by Riccardo Previdi, a site-specific artistic and botanical intervention by Tuscan artist Leone Contini, and an original sound piece by Johanna Gautier-Morin and composer Pierre Chastel.

The Interiors of Palazzo Buontalenti feature the poignant sculptures of Berlinde De Bruyckere, immersive video narratives of Eglė Budvytytė and Agnieszka Polska, alternative maps by Elena Mazzi, and the site-specific installation co-created by Elena Mazzi and Johanna Gautier-Morin.