How do we build knowledge?

→ Magiae Naturalis

Exhibition by Josse Renda, curated by Irene Panzani

Opening: Thursday, October 23 | 5:00 – 9:00 pm

October 24 – November 7, 2025

Weekdays: 4:00 – 8:00 pm (closed Mondays)

Weekends/holidays: 10:00 am – 1:00 pm | 4:00 – 8:00 pm

For GIUNGLA Remix in October, 22 Piazza dell’Arancio transforms into a stage-chest inhabited by the works of Josse Renda. More than an exhibition, this is a narrative journey into the artist’s sensibility: fragile yet powerful, light yet profound, like a mark etched into matter or a word that sparks vision.

Renda’s research began with a discovery in the Cesare Bicchi Library of the Lucca Botanical Garden: Giovan Battista della Porta’s Magiae Naturalis. From there unfolds an ideal dialogue with the 16th-century playwright, scientist, and alchemist, whose work intertwined science, magic, and imagination, anticipating the wonders and contradictions of modernity.

Through speculative dramaturgy workshops, fieldwork across Europe, and a practice that turns fragments into living matter, Renda reworks this legacy into poetry and transformation—giving voice to materials, and returning to the world the wonder it offers.

As Milan Kundera writes, the poet belongs to the “lyrical age,” a youth that questions existence without exhausting its mysteries. Renda inhabits the world this way: with lyrical eyes, insatiable curiosity, and an artistic practice that blends painting, writing, and collaboration into a visual-poetic alphabet. His works invite us to adopt the same attitude: to see lyrically, to cross the jungle of images and things, and to be surprised by metamorphosis—entering, finally, his Magiae Naturalis: an intimate, enchanted encyclopedia where science and magic still join hands.

Josse Renda is a visual artist whose practice spans painting, writing, and collaborative research. A graduate of the Brera Academy of Fine Arts, he has presented performances and projects across Italy and Europe, including Superstudio Più (Milan), Palazzo Bronzo (Genoa), Antwerp, Centro Pecci (Prato), SOFA – Shared Office For the Arts (Lucca), Srisa Art Gallery (Florence), and Guilmi Art Project (Chieti).

→ Storta paura

Book presentation by Josse Renda in conversation with Irene Panzani

Tuesday, 4 November 2025, 6:00 PM | Ciclo Divino, via Michele Rosi 7, Lucca

Then in a dream, the vision for this gathering of words, to bring it to a close,
I dreamed of taking up again everything I had written: the squared notebooks,
the yellow sheets, the ones folded into six parts, tiny notebooks, diaries,
working pages, words wedged among drawings. I transcribed them, cut little
or nothing, set aside a bit of shame; dissolution, in the end, has its own
grace, like inconsistency sometimes does. This is it, they seem to tell me
finally, and don’t pretend otherwise. These words born there, and in these
months returned here in gestures, pauses, paintings—I had forgotten them
as at times I forget words inside myself, or silence them. They were written
on the pages, on the body, but also in the hands; they were in the paintings,
in the shards of terracotta and those of clay, and still in the wardrobe,
in the drawer—those too like diaries.

Josse Renda

PAST EVENTS

→ The Enchantment of Technology

Talk with Tommaso Guariento, researcher at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice

Saturday, October 11, 2025 | 6:00 – 7:30 pm | Piazza dell’Arancio 22, Lucca

Technology and magic, traditionally seen as opposites—the former effective and rational, the latter ineffective and superstitious—actually share common traits. Science itself advances through intuition and imaginative leaps, while technology brings not only “disenchantment” (Weber) but also “reenchantment” (Federici). An anthropological definition of magic can be framed as a transformative potential oriented toward the future, rather than deception or a real force. Applied to generative artificial intelligence, this idea shows how their incomprehensibility produces a kind of enchantment: they both fascinate and obscure the collective, social nature of the knowledge they seem to generate autonomously. Following De Martino, the “ethos of transcendence” captures the essence of this technological enchantment: a positive, futurible attitude that confronts the unknown as a possibility of transformation. In this sense, magic should not be understood as a force acting on the present, but as an opening toward what is yet to come.

Tommaso Guariento earned his PhD in European Cultural Studies at the University of Palermo in 2015, with a dissertation on Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia. He previously completed both his BA and MA in Philosophy at the University of Padua. He has also been a visiting scholar at Université Paris-1 Panthéon Sorbonne and at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris.
His academic expertise spans contemporary French philosophy and anthropology, Visual Studies, Anthropocene Studies, cultural evolution, semiotics, and political philosophy. He currently holds a postdoctoral research position within the ERC project AIMODELS, where he studies the multiple forms of collective intelligence, ranging from philosophy of mind to complex systems.

→ Project and Mediation. Experiences in Italy between Art, Architecture, and Cultural Planning (1968–1976)

Book presentation by Sara Catenacci, published by Mimesis Edizioni, in conversation with Francesca Leonardi, postdoctoral researcher at Roma Tor Vergata University

Tuesday, October 14, 2025 | 6:00 – 7:30 pm | Piazza dell’Arancio 22, Lucca

A lesser-known path connects artists, art critics, architects, and designers who, in the 1970s, sought to develop in Italy new creative and cultural management approaches outside traditional institutions, working in service of marginalized communities. These experiments found fertile ground in dialogue with the city and in long-term participatory practices.
This book travels through the outskirts of Naples, Rome, and Milan, situating each initiative within the post-1968 debates on the social role of artists and cultural institutions. Art and design intersected with sociology, anthropology, semiotics, biographical inquiry, anti-authoritarian pedagogy, and environmentalism. Keywords such as project, creativity, environment, and mediation defined these experiences—and still resonate today in discussions of cultural planning and socially engaged art.

Sara Catenacci, art historian and museum professional, is a researcher at the IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca. She has published on 20th-century exhibition history, socially engaged art, and intersections of art, architecture, and design. She has held research and curatorial roles at the Istanbul Biennial, Castello di Rivoli, and MACRO – Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome.