Beyond the Clouds
curated by Chiara Gatti, Paola Pedrazzini, Gianmarco Romiti
with the participation of Storyville
April 2 – July 5, 2026
An art exhibition, a theatrical triptych, and a sound experience
dedicated to the contemporary imagination of the sky and its metamorphoses.
XNL Piacenza
Via Santa Franca 36, Piacenza
From the mosaics of Ravenna to Giotto, from Dürer’s engravings to Correggio’s empyrean, from Constable’s Romanticism to Friedrich’s iconic Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, and the rarefied soundscapes of Claude Debussy, clouds have traversed the centuries as a symbol of a yearning for elsewhere.
Starting April 2, with the new project Beyond the Clouds, XNL Piacenza—contemporary art, theatre, and music center of the Fondazione di Piacenza e Vigevano—activates a polyphonic narrative that unfolds across and connects all its spaces, bringing into dialogue different contemporary languages around the theme of the sky and its transformations.
Until July 5, 2026, an art exhibition, a theatre program, a sound installation, and a dramaturgical path intertwine to offer the public a shared imaginary interpreted from multiple perspectives, highlighting XNL’s experimental vocation and its identity as a site of research and cross-disciplinary exchange among the arts.
Inspired by Kent Haruf’s Plainsong Trilogy—the work of the American novelist who passed away in 2014, in which landscape is not a place but an idea, a feeling that becomes space—Beyond the Clouds takes shape as a journey through contemporary art, cinematic narratives, sound environments, and poetic voices. It evokes the plains depicted in literature and cinema: a world where the senses inhabit the same landscape, suspended between silence and sound, isolation and connection, light and fog.
Curated by Chiara Gatti, Paola Pedrazzini, and Gianmarco Romiti, with the participation of the collective Storyville, the exhibition explores clouds in both their visual and symbolic dimensions, spanning art, literature, cinema, and poetry. The exhibition path is entrusted to the vision of twenty contemporary artists—Olivo Barbieri, Leandro Erlich, Laura Grisi, Jeppe Hein, Dominic Kiessling, Laetitia Ky, Piero Manzoni, Mirco Marchelli, David Medalla, Filippo Minelli, Marie-Luce Nadal, Mauro Pace, Gabriele Picco, Marco Ricci, Martin Romeo, Denis Santachiara, Mario Schifano, Fausta Squatriti, Alfred Stieglitz, Storyville—placed in an ideal dialogue with key figures from the ancient and modern worlds, taken as iconographic references of a timeless visual tradition.
The result is a journey that, beginning with an imagined disturbed 18th-century landscape by Marco Ricci—at the origins of landscape painting—moves through the 20th century among images, voices, and sounds by artists who have interpreted this soft horizon. Some have captured the white breath of clouds within glass cases; others have explored climatic phenomena—fog, thunder, rain—through new technologies; still others recreate their dense vapor, enveloping the audience in a muted haze.
Within a single sensory space, visitors drift among paintings, photographs, site-specific installations, and clouds made of wax, plaster, or soap. From the skies above New York captured by Alfred Stieglitz in 1929, to the fiberglass forms Piero Manzoni called his “clouds,” to Cielo anemico by Mario Schifano. Laura Grisi’s neon sculptures, Sunset Light, engage in dialogue with the shifting cirrus forms of designer Denis Santachiara, while David Medalla reflects on the fleeting mutability of things in his Foam Canyon, and Leandro Erlich captures illusory clouds within museum vitrines.
Metaphors for emotional states, tools for denouncing ecological crises, utopian visions of a better world, clouds guide the audience through a poetic and visionary journey engaging all the senses.
The exhibition interweaves paintings, sculptures, site-specific installations, and film sequences that have entered the collective imagination—from masterpieces by Federico Fellini, Ermanno Olmi, Akira Kurosawa, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Theo Angelopoulos—constructing, throughout the grand halls and Art Nouveau staircases of XNL, a unified sensory landscape that also involves XNL Teatro and XNL Musica in the creation of an immersive and visionary experience.