Luca Bochicchio waits for me at Jorn’s House Museum, on the hills of Albissola Marina, looking over bright reflections of the Ligurian Sea. Today the house is part of MuDA, the “Widespread Museum” run by the municipality of Albissola Marina and managed by the Fondazione Museo della Ceramica di Savona Onlus, of which Luca Bochicchio is scientific director. For many years the house was home to Asger Jorn (1914-1973), one of the most important artists of the 20th century, painter and sculptor, but also theorist and founder of avant-garde groups including CoBrA and Bauhaus Immaginista. Jorn came to Albissola in 1954; three years later, he decided to purchase two old buildings and the surrounding land, and with the help of his assistant Umberto Gambetta (Berto), turned the place into a sort of world-house, in which imagination can run wild.
Here we had our conversation, talking of borders as well as the crossings into nations, practices and definitions.
Jorn’s House is a unique place, also marked by the history and journey of its founder and by the topography of the town where it stands. A place of continuous hospitality and exchanges between international artists who made it their home. How have borders (between countries and practices) been crossed time and time again in the history of the place?
Albissola was and is one of those places where energy pools, bringing people from all over to meet here. There are many – hypothetical and documented – reasons for this, but the sincerest must be sought in the dozens and dozens of craftsmen who work unceasingly and obsessively with clay. Women (many more than the history books mention) and men from all corners of the globe have met around this fire: from the Far East and the Caribbean, from Northern and Southern Europe. Jorn’s House is a concentration of Albissola, it is the hortus conclusus of joyful, hard-working and profoundly experimental humanity. Above all, with no national or political borders, only natural borders that we call crossing, due to instinctive curiosity and the need of the other. Here, in Jorn’s time, very many languages were spoken, as many as the guests who stayed here. Wifredo Lam from Cuba lived just a few yards from here, and the Argentine Lucio Fontana a little further on. Carlos Carlé was also from Argentina, and was the first to bring the neo-primitive language of stoneware to Albissola. From Sweden the anarchist and terribly poetic Ansgar Elde, from Poland Maria Papa Rostkowska, from Denmark, like Jorn, Eva Sørensen, from Chile Roberto Sebastián Matta and from France poets like Édouard Jaguer and radical thinkers like Guy Debord. Everyone came to Albissola, everyone to Jorn’s House, with their own legacies: simply, the world in a house. With the Biennials of Contemporary Art Ceramics in the early 2000s, Jorn’s House was once a destination for artists from all over the world. I remember the installation of ceramic ‘potatoes’ by the Dutch Jacqueline de Jong, a friend and close partners of Jorn’s for many years. Then it was our turn: after the renovations and opening to the public as a house-museum in the year celebrating the centenary of Jorn’s birth (2014), we had to stand our ground and continue on this path. Today, the museum, which we like to manage professionally but without forgetting that it is in any case a home and a welcoming place by nature, hosts little over five thousand visitors a year, from across Europe and the world, but especially artists, families, children and students of all levels. The artists and curators who come to see us are often travelling, and they come to Jorn’s House on their journey through Europe.
Over the years Jorn’s House has hosted works by numerous contemporary artists: how did these meetings take place?
Each one has its own story, and yet remains interconnected with the others. Cesare Viel and Arianna Carossa were two pioneers who, after the house was re-opened to the public in 2014, accepted the risk and the idea of pure experimentation in a virgin place. Their closeness (they are based in Genoa) and their poetic charge brought them here like wind does with sails. Anders Herwald Ruhwald was incredible: from the same town as Jorn, Vejrum, he came here while he was living in Detroit. A painstaking work of study, surveys and sculptures created to comment every room in the house, while working on the other side of the world. Salvatore Arancio was both powerful and romantic. While his work received its just acclaim at the 57th Biennale in Venice, he was already here with us in Jorn’s garden. He had a vision just a few minutes after arriving. With him, we took a step further: he created his works directly in the garden, he spent the whole day there. Loredana Longo modestly asked for a space for her first ceramic work: she built a wall with bricks and mortar, leaving just gold and a crowbar on the top. Then she destroyed everything: that was her true work. Alessandro Roma had already been attending ceramics workshops in Albissola for years, we didn’t know what he was doing until the day of the inauguration. He hung silk from the ceiling in Jorn’s studio, while imposing ceramic blooms rose from below. A girl read Emily Dickinson’s verses, and bunches of rosemary purified the space. These were the first, then we involved many others; we didn’t have much to offer at the time, aside from tons of work, professionalism, ambition and passion. Apparently, it worked. I will always be thankful to them.
In September you will be launching a new format, also based on border crossings, as well as the classic idea of residence as an opportunity for artistic production. Can I ask what guides your choice, and what the programme is?
With the residencies of two groups of artists in 2021 (Ballard in Albissola, with MAMCO from Geneva, with twelve artists, curators and poets) and in 2023 (A Casa,with the legendary David Adamo, Giacomo Porfiri and Wolfgang Staehle) we finally achieved the first full residencies, understood as living and working in the house and garden. Exhausting, but real. Now, with the opening of the Jorn’s House Study Centre, we are offering artists, curators and scholars the chance to stay here for study and research purposes. We want to offer a unique and totally independent space for driving thought and actions. For the time being, we are working through partnerships in international projects, such as those with two Danish institutions, the Museum Jorn in Silkeborg and the Museum Ovartaci in Aarhus, but we are already working on other proposals to offer space to curators and artists in training, also from Italy.
