Interview - Francesco Urbano
by Federica Tattoli
by Federica Tattoli
[Federica Tattoli] Tell me how you met. How did Francesco Urbano Ragazzi come into being, and what is the core of your research?
[Francesco Urbano Ragazzi] Let’s say our story has its roots in hatred. We met in Venice when we were very young—just 19—and we were sworn enemies! There was absolutely no affection between us, and of course, we followed our respective academic paths keeping a safe distance from one another. Then, at a certain point, we got to know each other better—proof that people can change their minds—and we did.
[FT] Only truly intelligent people can change their minds.
[FUR] Or truly stupid ones. Or inconsistent ones. One thing’s for sure—we’re not consistent. Inconsistency played a leading role, and it’s what brought us closer. We’ve now been together for twenty years. Our creative and professional, existential partnership reached a second level when we started working together in Paris in 2008. That’s when we began developing projects as a team, imagining exhibitions, and outlining our trajectory as authors. The name Francesco Urbano Ragazzi came about between 2011 and 2012 with an exhibition we curated (at the Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa in Venice, editor’s note), where a series of latent themes in our path began to surface. The show was called “Io, tu, lui, lei” (“I, You, He, She”). It was perhaps one of the first exhibitions in Italy to address the legacy of sexual liberation movements. In that case, we invited a group of artists to connect with elders from the LGBTQ+ community and celebrate their stories. After a year of workshops with the artists involved, we organized a series of lunches and dinners to gather the stories of these individuals, knowing that they might not have anyone to pass them on to. We started from the idea that queer experience is often left untransmitted, and that every new generation feels as though it’s starting from scratch. But there is a history, and many genealogical lines can be drawn. That’s when the idea of merging our names came up—if we had gotten married, we would have ended up with the same name: Francesco Urbano Ragazzi, because we’re both named Francesco. So from that moment on, we started calling ourselves Francesco Urbano Ragazzi, thinking of ourselves as a single entity—a sort of reverse Alighiero e Boetti.
[FT] How beautiful, what a romantic story—truly wonderful. Tell me a bit about your journey since that beginning, maybe outlining some milestones that reflect key moments in your thinking and practice.
[FUR] I have to say that many research threads we’ve developed—even independently—stemmed from that exhibition, “Io, tu, lui, lei.” The show took place in a cinema space—meaning the foundation's venue in Venice was set up as a movie theater. Cinema had come up repeatedly in the stories of the people we interviewed as a space of clandestine encounters, and in some way, we wanted one space to enter another—we wanted the museum space to become something else, to become many different spaces. After that, we began working intensively with moving images, developing a cinematic, media-informed approach to exhibitions. The idea is that an exhibition isn't just what happens in the present, in a single physical space, but rather the echoes it’s able to produce across different communication channels.
In this regard, a very important encounter for us was with Jonas Mekas, founder of the New American Cinema and soul of American independent film, with whom we worked during the last ten years of his life. Mekas taught us so much about the value of independence—about doing what you want, ignoring the obstacles life puts in your way. From there, we really started reflecting on what it means today to bring contemporary art into the space of real life—outside the separated realm of the museum—essentially reversing that process initiated with the readymade, where art consumed fragments of reality to turn them into something else. We believe that in the twenty-first century, the time has come to start the opposite process: returning art to reality. Based on this, we developed many projects—most of which did not take place in museums but in real-world spaces. We used art to interrupt consumer behaviors, to disrupt mass tourism, to cause disorientation. Yes, these are real-world spaces, they’re part of the free market—but they’re spaces we try to pervert.
They're also spaces we love, and in some way, they reflect our voyeuristic fascination with reality. But it’s not pure voyeurism—because through exhibitions, we inject what we call an “incident,” which is essential for us. Even in institutional spaces, we try to create that kind of interruption—what we enjoy is planting a fuse that causes a breakdown in the mechanisms. That disruption, in a way, allows reality to express itself again. Because when there’s no longer a fixed stage, performance can emerge more spontaneously.
[FT] Can you give a few examples to put this into context? Two or three exhibitions that reflect this way of thinking?
[FUR] The clearest example is definitely HILLARY. The Hillary Clinton Emails, an exhibition by the American artist and poet Kenneth Goldsmith, who works with the concept of uncreative writing. Kenneth proposed the idea of creating a portrait of U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton through the emails that contributed to her defeat in the 2016 presidential election against Donald Trump. His idea was to print all of the emails archived on her server—what later became known as “Emailgate.” We found a very unique venue to exhibit them: the Cinema Teatro Italia, a movie theater built in 1916—the first cinema ever constructed on the island of Venice—entirely frescoed by five painters from the Ca’ Pesaro school. Its façade looks seventeenth-century, but in reality, it conceals a modern concrete structure.
In 2016, the building was turned into a supermarket, yet somehow retained its former identity. We discovered that the balcony space was vacant and unused, so we decided to take over this free zone and install Hillary Clinton’s emails in a setting that resembled the White House interior. And then came the miracle, the performance, the incident. One day in September, Hillary Clinton herself came to the exhibition and participated in a performance where she portrayed herself—reading her own emails.
So a cinema turned into a supermarket becomes an exhibition space, but also a real-life stage where the protagonist, previously only evoked, appears like a sort of Madonna apparition. That, for us, is…
[FT] I’m not touching a word of this! It writes itself! What a marvel!
[FUR] And this, for us, is what it means to think about queer space: allowing levels of reality to coexist that normally wouldn’t.
[FT] Beautiful!
[FUR] And without denying any aspect of reality—rather, by allowing the interpenetration of different planes and publics to generate something new.
You know, artworks exist in many forms. But what’s interesting is their migration, their relocation into ever-shifting narrative contexts. Think of how a fair display—or often even a museum display—can be reduced to a single page or photograph. They're extremely reducible. What becomes truly fascinating is when an irreducible explosion of events emerges from a single work. That’s the real aura of an artwork. That tension is what follows us everywhere: from a fast food joint (The Internet Saga, Jonas Mekas, Palazzo Foscari Contarini, Venice 2015), to a prison (Adoration, Pauline Curnier Jardin, at the Giudecca Women’s Penitentiary, Venice 2022), and to all those other places—the CERN in Geneva, the Milan Stock Exchange, schools, shops, the Internet—that have helped us think about artworks. They’ve shown us that it’s not so much about displaying the artwork within a space, but about creating an auratic context for the work—one that engages with all the gazes and the narratives those gazes can activate. All of this, if you like, is very much about both lowering and elevating the expectations of the viewer. Paradoxically, by lowering the viewer’s expectation—by making them feel like what they’re seeing isn’t particularly grand, or that art isn’t something separate from or above reality—you bring them into a state of unexpectation. And that’s when the world can be discovered, when things can finally happen freely.
[FT] selvàtico is a magazine that explores wild events, so it’s definitely aligned with your work—because in a way, all your exhibitions are wild. Each issue of selvàtico has a theme. This one is about margins and borders. What does a boundary mean to you, and have you ever addressed it in your work?
[FFUR] The theme of marginality, of the margin, is always very important in art. Art often stages margins, sometimes bringing them to the center of critical and theoretical elaboration. At times, this dynamic turns into a form of exoticism, in which art tends to absorb margins. There’s a fairly classic mechanism where a minority is put on display only to be defused. We think about this dynamic a lot. We’re interested in ensuring that one way or another, we don’t end up trapped in a cage at the center of a museum. We prefer to think of the art space as a place of negotiation, not as a site for identity clearance sales.
In this sense, perhaps the project we’re currently developing represents a reflection on marginality. We’re taking a foundational format in identity-based narratives—the national exhibition—as a starting point. This twentieth-century premise gave rise to institutions like the Venice Biennale with its pavilions, and many similar events worldwide. How are we revisiting it? Through a project that responds directly to "Identité Italienne," a show curated by Germano Celant at the Centre Pompidou in 1981. That exhibition attempted to represent Italian art from the ’60s and ’70s with works by eighteen male artists, with the sole exception of Marisa Merz. These were the Arte Povera artists, gathered to celebrate a movement Celant himself had initiated. Our response is a show titled "Altérité Italienne." It explores the other side of the discourse and begins with the need to reestablish a creative alliance between artist and curator. We’ve invited around ten artists who are involved both in the selection process and in developing the exhibition formats that will shape the show. We’re designing multiple exhibition models, and the artists involved are part of a network of connections—not tied to a movement or a coherent line, but rather forming kinds of affinities: sometimes deep and well-trodden, sometimes unexpected or completely arbitrary. To the star system that consumes everything, we’ve preferred a constellation system. This dialogic approach brings back into focus a key figure from "Identité Italienne," albeit one who was pushed to the margins: Carla Lonzi. The feminist art critic and philosopher was invited by Celant to contribute a catalog essay. Her text was essentially a refusal to participate in that discourse. That text, consistent with her departure from art criticism in 1970, also happens to be the last page she published during her lifetime. It has a testamentary value we didn’t want to ignore. It speaks to us of feminism as a choice and existential position, a form of activist practice distinct from critique, which perpetuates certain power dynamics. This reference to Lonzi is crucial, as it brings us back to self-awareness, dialogical methods, and forms of resistance to power. Through this project, we’re questioning what national identity really is. It’s a critical issue in the current historical moment. So, the artists we’ve invited to work with us reflect a wide range of Italian identities. Our aim is to challenge the notion of Italian-ness as a fixed concept tied to territory, history, or tradition. We’ve involved Italian artists who have lived abroad for years, like Tomaso De Luca and Ludovica Carbotta, or whose work has resonated more outside national borders, like Michele Gabriele; second- and third-generation Italian artists like Monia Ben Hamouda and Muna Mussie; and those recently arrived in Italy, like Liryc Dela Cruz. There are also artists, like Invernomuto, who reflect on Italy’s colonial past, and others who, from abroad—arriving, for instance, from London to Sicily—have settled here: like Beatrice Gibson and Natália Trejbalová. With this group and the relationships that will emerge from it, we want to tell the story of Italy and Italian art from different viewpoints, enriching our understanding and challenging traditional narratives.
[FT] I’d say this is absolutely a story about boundaries, about margins—perfectly on theme. Can we know when it will happen? Any details? Or would you rather keep it under wraps? This interview will be published on the summer solstice.
[FFUR] Perfect. We can tell you that the research is currently underway at the American Academy in Rome, and the first result of this research—which has actually been ongoing for about a year—will be presented in New York in the fall. Alongside that season, we’ll present some of the research strands in a kind of festival in New York, between October and November 2025.
[FT] Great, I’d say it’s time for the final question. When are you getting married? Answer first, and then we’ll see if we keep it in or not—only if you’re up for it.
[FFUR] Well, when are we getting married... I’d say: never and always. Let’s put it that way.
[FT] So we’ll have rings made that say “never and always” inside?
[FFUR] Never and always. I’d say that’s settled, isn’t it?
[FT] I’ll take care of the rings.
[FFUR] Absolutely. I’m already waiting for them.
[FT] And I accept that answer. I can’t not accept that answer. Shall I wrap it up?
[FFUR] Go ahead!