131 If foolhardiness was needed at the beginning, an unbreakable dose of tenacity was required for growth. If Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics made it possible to frame sharing as art, Continua has been able to articulate sharing as system. Sharing decisions, responsibilities, risks, failures, successes. And sharing a vision, over decades. Making continuity – a word that already contains an ethic, as resistance – an operational destiny, taking on an enormous risk, beyond the very real spaces at the St. Regis in Rome or in the Marais: that of decentring art until it lives in the peripheral parts of the world, as an act of trust that it can speak not only one language but rather each and every dialect, where it is not expected, far from easy consensus. «If you think peripheric, you make peripheries,» Mario says, implicitly confirming the absolute beauty of lateral thinking as a counterweight to the cannibalistic speed of an historical moment the likes of ours, absorbing and thinning you out, electing yourself to attune instead to «another time, outside colonialism.» Bringing contemporary art into peripheral contexts is indeed a gesture that they, outside colonialism, have always enacted with profound attention and respect for every single territory, through site-specific work, far from the smug posture of those who arrive and drop things from above. Their gesture has never demanded an audience; rather, it has known how to build one with what seems to me in every sense an act of love towards the future, also through sharing their own story: «What I would love to happen – Mario confesses in The Ability to Dream, the documentary that tells their route and whose title comes from Anish Kapoor’s definition of them – is that someone says: “If these guys started with no money and somehow moved around the world, why shouldn’t someone else do it too?” If we have set up a cultural association that has left twenty million euros’ worth of artworks without having that money ourselves, why shouldn’t someone else do it? I like the idea of creating a model that can be repeated by other scarcagnati (transl. ragged ones) like us.» Continua, then, is the imperative, not the adjective. To continue despite, to continue inside but above all elsewhere, to continue beyond: «As you underline, to continue is a verb that transcends simple action, becoming a philosophy and a practice. It is a trajectory that does not stop, but it expands, it multiplies, somehow it manages to renew itself despite difficulties. We have tried to bring our vision and our work into different places, overcoming obstacles each time, cultivating a kind of creative resistance that opposes the culture of quick success. In an era in which everything seems to have to be fast, we did not give ourselves a time, but goals. We think that continuing is indeed a political act: if the world tends to reduce complexity, art becomes a space in which to stay, and to act nonetheless. To continue means not adapting to vacuity but, in the meantime, seeking to give meaning, to create a context, to insist on the possibility of generating a value that goes beyond the mere moment of the event. Art, in its most authentic and lasting form, is always an act of resistance, an affirmation of the value of process over immediate result. This is what fuels our work and our desire to continue.» Words that weigh like a sacred revolt against the tyranny of presentism: to continue as a manifesto of counterculture, which has always been capable of generating revolutions. It means working without the guarantee of immediate return, it means that art becomes a place to live, where action is not only appearance, but persistence. Sharing as resistance because it implies fidelity – to oneself, to the vision and to friendship, to artists, to contexts. Fidelity as an active practice of what Donna Haraway called staying with the trouble: remaining into the fault, into the imperfect, but into the living, because a promise has been made to it. And if sharing means exposing oneself to the risk of the other, to their gaze (more or less sound) bearer of judgment, to a possible conflict, the tenacity of Mario Lorenzo and Maurizio manages to overturn even the risk of sharing into opportunity: «The real risk is the act of remaining authentic and not being absorbed by the system.» Mario Cristiani, Lorenzo Fiaschi and Maurizio Rigillo @Galleria Continua: Sharing = Vision + Resistance + Complementarity Mario Cristiani, Lorenzo Fiaschi and Maurizio Rigillo founded Galleria Continua in 1990, a project that revolutionised the ways in which contemporary art is experienced and disseminated through a profound idea of accessibility and cultural exchange, which has led them to become one of the most influential galleries in the world. Starting from the medieval village of San Gimignano, Continua brought art into territories at the margins of the international circuit: from Les Moulins in France to the favelas of Rio, from Cuba to rural Beijing. The very existence of Galleria Continua is a form of sharing, a rhizome that connects artists and territories, communities and narratives. Through eight galleries, a foundation and an association, Arte Continua – born alongside the Gallery – charity initiatives and proximity-based projects such as Italics or Una boccata d’arte (transl. A breath of art), where each artist works with the local community of small Italian towns, Continua never ceases to demonstrate that sharing means self-decentring, self-questioning, opening margins. The Ability to Dream, a documentary produced by Sky in 2024, recounts over thirty years of the three founders’ visionary drive. I won’t deny it, art springs from an individual, solitary, often obsessive gesture. An intuition, an urgency. Yet it is at the moment when that gesture accepts that it is not enough for itself, that it won’t get constrained in a presumption of self-sufficiency, that something happens. Sharing then intervenes as an amplifier, as an expansion of the possible. It does not dilute meaning: it puts it into circulation. And it does not erase authorship: it extends it into a relational, more tenacious, collective dimension. This is where Continua takes root, here where sharing, beyond thought and content, permeates the infrastructure through which work is practiced and transmitted. Three friends, Mario, Lorenzo and Maurizio, who remind me so much of the unruly boys of the Nouvelle Vague, if I may, and who, starting from an affinity and aided by the affordable rent of an abandoned garage, decide to give it a try in a Tuscan village completely off-axis, with respect to the cartography of cultural power – a deviation, not a center – and in doing so, step by step, leave the world open-mouthed: «For us, gallery means passion, not profession. Everything began in order to do something together. Culture was what united us, a culture with values connected to the places we came from, places that lived off a glorious past but had no present. So we said to ourselves: “We could do something, instead of criticising.” And we did it, precisely where we started from.» The market analysis lasted very little, as Lorenzo recalls: «Let’s open a crêperie» «But what do crêpes have to do with San Gimignano» «All right so let’s open a galerie.» The first exhibition at Galleria Continua was a solo show by an alleged American artist, socalled Myl Sey, who only years later we will discover to be none other than themselves, with their respective girlfriends. This is not necessarily recklessness but rather, in their own words, generative foolhardiness: «So many times people ask why we made it. In my opinion, because we were foolhardy. We never made a business plan. When artists proposed projects to us, they were so beautiful that we couldn’t say no, having no clue at all where we’d end up. Without doing calculations. Unsellable works. And then, in the end, Gormley ended up in Mexico, in a park – who would have ever figured it? And Kapoor, at Versailles4. So you need foolhardiness, and the business plan should be left at home. And if you have to smash yourself, better to fall from a skyscraper after having seen the whole panorama than to fall off a chair, almost like a bischero (transl. a fool),» Lorenzo smiles. «The formula is to have no formula – Maurizio continues – to have the possibility of backing one another up, to have this base of friendship, to share this being united, and to have had the possibility of meeting people who took part in this growth.» 130 4The artwork by Antony Gormley to which Lorenzo is referring is Vessel (2012), an anthropomorphic figure weighing twenty tonnes of steel and stretching twenty-five metres in length, while Anish Kapoor’s artwork is Descension (2015), a crater carved by a vortex of leaden water, for which it was necessary to excavate five metres into the ground.
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