The condominium-museum

Turin is home to the world's first condominium-museum. An experiment in urban regeneration and collective transformation through the power of art and beauty.

viadellafucina16 is the world's first international experiment of a condominium-museum, created by Kaninchen-Haus in 2016 from an idea by the artist Brice Coniglio. At the heart of the project is an innovative artist-in-residency program in the building at via La Salle 16 (formerly "via della Fucina"), in Turin's Porta Palazzo district, home to the largest open-air market in Europe.

Through an international open call — whose first edition received over 400 applications from around the world — artists were invited to spend periods of residency in the building, creating interventions and artworks in the common spaces, in order to activate dialogue among the different communities living there and to support the regeneration of the majestic 19th-century building, today in a state of thirty years of decay and abandonment.

The winning projects were selected by the building's own inhabitants (around 200 people of every nationality across 53 apartments), with the mediation of a board of curators and experts, based on their ability to involve the community, interpret its desires, and activate new forms of sociality through co-creation and care of the spaces.

The condominium – a point of intersection between public and private domain – opens itself to artistic practice as a factor of aesthetic, social and cultural regeneration, becoming a symbolic place through which the community represents itself, just as the noble palaces of the past – decorated by artists – represented the prestige of individual families.

The condominium-museum has today become an extraordinary factory of cultural production and social innovation, hosting works and performances by young artists as well as contributions by great masters such as Giorgio Griffa and Michelangelo Pistoletto.

viadellafucina16 represents an unprecedented grafting of artistic practice into the living fabric of a defined community, which aims to demonstrate — through an experiment conducted in a small context — how art and culture can become effective tools for resolving conflicts and for collective transformation. Kaninchen-Haus is now working to develop a model that makes the project replicable in new contexts.

curated by Kaninchen-Haus · from an idea by Brice Coniglio