Opus Novum #5: Alberto Garutti

Alberto Garutti, Every step I have taken in my life has led me here, now

Permanent installation at the entrance to BolognaFiere

Every year since 2019, Arte Fiera has commissioned a well-known Italian artist to create a new work to be presented at the Fair. The series of commissions is named “Opus Novum”.

In addition to the 2024 commission, assigned to Luisa Lambri, the 47^th edition of Arte Fiera also revealed the second and final part of the 2023 commission, assigned to Alberto Garutti. Garutti died just a few months after completing the first part - What happens in rooms when the people have left?, the large installation of phosphorescent furniture in the halls of Arte Fiera - but left instructions for creating the second.

The work consists of a stone slab bearing the inscription: “tutti i passi che ho fatto nella mia vita mi hanno portato qui, ora” / “every step I have taken in my life has led me here, now,” permanently placed at the Piazza Costituzione entrance of the Bologna Fair District. It is the last version of a work which, created in a variety of stones and languages, is installed in several locations - Siena, Antwerp, Lugano, Kaunas (Lithuania), the Milan-Malpensa Airport, the Milan-Cadorna Station and piazza Santa Maria Novella in Florence – and is addressed to everyone who stops to read the brief text on the ground. The work explores the dense network of relations that every person’s life generates, suddenly revealing the complexity of their experience and emphasizing the value of the kinetic and potential energy that each of us contains.

This constellation of works aims to build a sort of map of infinite travels, infinite existences, countless relations: a metaphor of our complex, layered, ubiquitous society.

Every step I have taken in my life has led me here, now simultaneously embodies site-specificity and ubiquity.

In this way, Arte Fiera completes its homage to one of the most important Italian artists of the past 50 years.