Trick or treat, between lights and shadows

Create your own magical Halloween mask

[Tripper: Paola]

IT

If art is light for the mind, the path to capture its secrets has its dark side. Entering the artistic universe of the Albertina Academy in Turin, one of the oldest Italian institutions on the subject, means retracing the artist's journey backwards and following the path that leads him to express himself with mastery, solid in his knowledge, free in his creativity.
The door in via Accademia Albertina 6 opens exclusively, thanks to the collaboration of the Academy with Somewhere Tour and it is like opening an unexplored drawer of the mind: curiosity drives us to take advantage of it, surprise catches us.

Human Skeleton

Playing with Death

Nothing is as it seems, under the surface the plot that constitutes the fabric is full of studies that play with death, which give it life again to elevate it to an art.
In these spaces, doctor Francesco Bertinatti in the early 1800s dissected corpses for educational purposes to study every element, every movement and learn how to reproduce them faithfully.
The horror perhaps crept among the students of the Academy who attended those lessons. If we imagine the corpses that from the adjacent medical institute reached the classrooms through the basement, only to be opened little by little, perhaps the dark side reaches us too. But a path of light to eternity was already opening up, because science that dresses itself in art has the extraordinary power to go beyond life.
We can only praise this doctor-artist who has dedicated his life to the study of human and animal anatomy to put it at the service of art and has collected the fruit of his work in various volumes.
Those volumes are now jealously preserved in the Academy Library, and during the visit you can test their beauty thanks to the doctor Stabielli who delicately browse them for us.
We thus discover how difficult it is to reproduce the movement of the hands, the essential element of the artist who, with patient work, learns to reproduce itself, and again the physiognomy of the faces, from the surface to the muscular layer and even deeper to the bones of the skeleton, to capture the intimacy of a smile, anger, pain, but also to transfigure them and transform them into masks of dragons, devils, ferocious animals, the same ones that we find adorning the facades of the Turin buildings in the historic center.
On the night when all the dark spirits meet, skeletons, devils and scary figures invite us to party, mixing science, art, magic, to measure ourselves against our courage and our skill as artists.
On Halloween this year we choose a treat, to immerse ourselves in an educational workshop that teaches us the secrets of the masks of the Magic Turin and together with Gabriele Domenico Casu and Stefano Merlo , two extraordinary students of Academy, let's discover the secrets to best express our artistic skills and make the most original Halloween mask ever. For more information visit the activity page .

If you want to immerse yourself in the dark side, watch the video Midnight Tales made by students of the Academy Antony Cavallo and Luca Berardino