Vittoria Matarrese As A New Director Of The Bally Foundation

The Bally Foundation announced that Vittoria Matarrese will lead Foundation in a new capacity as Director. Boasting an international profile in the worlds of contemporary art and culture with twelve years at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris as curator and director of performing arts and 2 years at the Villa Medici as artistic director in Rome, Vittoria will draw on her proven experience to drive a new stage of further development and take up new challenges for both the Foundation and the city of Lugano.

The Bally Foundation is committed to supporting art and culture and facilitating its accessibility to the public. As Director, Vittoria Matarrese will be developing a project which intends to consolidate and expend the Bally Foundation work with and beside artists. This new phase in the Foundation’s history will be an essential chapter in the effort to understand the changes taking place in our societies, raise awareness of an ecological and inclusive approach, engage with creatives in all fields, and create a vibrant space that is open to all generations.

The aim is to create a place where culture is accessible to a large audience and that offers diverse perspectives in a familiar, welcoming and warm environment. Moreover, the development of all collaborative activities with institutions established in the area, where MASI and USI are the most prominent representatives, will be a major priority. The experience of the new management will be beneficial to those initiatives.

Nicolas Girotto, Chairman of the Bally Foundation, comments: “We are particularly proud to be able to count in Lugano on the presence and experience of a European figure of the art and culture. I am confident that Vittoria will take our foundation’s cultural program to a new level of excellence.”

Vittoria Matarrese will be officially taking her new role of director of the Bally Foundation on Friday, 11 November, at Villa Heleneum, the foundation’s headquarters located in Lugano, with a Sera di acqua dolce (Freshwater evening) of art and dialogue, featuring performances by Chassol and Ola Maciejewska. This occasion will be the ideal setting to highlight the visions and values which, in the future, will distinguish this splendid mansion owned by the city of Lugano and intended as a place of creative inspiration and international exchange.

VITTORIA MATARRESE

Trained as an architect, Vittoria Matarrese was successively responsible for the international communication of the Film Festival at La Biennale di Venezia (2001–2005), editor-in-chief and producer
of the film programs for TV5 Monde (2005–2008), artistic director of Villa Medicis in Rome (2008–2010) then director of the performing arts program and curator at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris  since2010. With her transdisciplinary career and her vision as an architect, Matarrese has always been interested in the porosities that exist between disciplines, places and their surrounding environments. Taking the model of urban space, like that of the Agora, for example, Matarrese’s practice studies the intersection of disciplines, without closing them in one-way schemes, in a perspective of dialogue, transformation and inclusiveness.

Always full of life, sometimes exuberant, her curatorial proposals pay, particular attention to emerging, hybrid scenes and to the performative medium, many of which are often taken outside the stage space, questioning the place, the notion of unity of space, frontality and duration. At Villa Medicis, Matarrese started Villa Aperta, a program of festivals, exhibitions and interventions in the gardens. During her 12 years at the Palais de Tokyo, she has notably imagined the Entrouverture program in 2012 upon the arrival of Jean de Loisy; founded the Do Disturb performative festival and directed five editions of it between 2015 and 2019; she created La Manutention, an artist-in-residence program, and has maintained a rhythm of four residencies per year since 2017; and organized the Fashion Program from 2014 to 2019.

At the Palais de Tokyo, Matarrese was also curator of the Héctor Zamora exhibition in 2016 and co-curator with Julien Fronsaq of the show/ cabaret Charliewood the same year. Along with the team
of curators at the Palais de Tokyo, she curated Nuit Blanche (Paris, 2016), the Biennale de Lyon (2019) and the Anticorps exhibition (2019).

Together with Emma Lavigne, she curated the exhibition Natures Mortes, a carte blanche to Anne Imhof, (2020). She recently oversaw the four-day celebration of the 20th anniversary of the Palais de Tokyo with a carte blanche to the artist Marinella Senatore. Matarrese also taught at ESSEC Paris from 2006 to 2008 and within the Master 2 Science and Exhibition Techniques program at the Sorbonne, in Paris, between 2016 and 2019.

BALLY FOUNDATION

Founded in recognition of the importance of the arts in contemporary society, the Bally Foundation was established in 2006 with the goal of supporting the development of art and culture in Switzerland. Chaired by Bally CEO Nicolas Girotto, the Bally Foundation was awarded the destination of Villa Heleneum from the city of Lugano in January 2022 to curate a program of exhibitions, talks and partnerships of national and international stature.