Ongoing
Exhibitions
at Flashback
Habitat
Temporary exhibitions
IN TIME.
Ciò che è in alto è come ciò che è in basso
Alessandro Bulgini x Paolo Nespoli, astronauta
Padiglione C, il Circolino
Al Circolino di Flashback Habitat, Alessandro Bulgini trasforma lo spazio conviviale in una navicella. L’argento delle coperte termiche che rivestono le pareti evoca lo spazio e la tecnologia del viaggio orbitale, mentre le fotografie della Terra scattate da Paolo Nespoli diventano gli oblò attraverso cui guardare il mondo.
IN TIME. Ciò che è in alto è come ciò che è in basso nasce dall’incontro tra lo sguardo dell’artista e quello dell’astronauta. Quest’estate, in montagna, durante un incontro in cui arte e scienza dialogavano, Nespoli ha condiviso una riflessione poetica sulla sua esperienza nello spazio: osservare il pianeta dall’interno di una navicella, a decine di migliaia di chilometri all’ora, significa confrontarsi con una prospettiva in cui i confini appaiono irrilevanti e il tempo assume una dimensione diversa.
Da questo racconto e dalle sue immagini prende forma l’installazione pensata da Bulgini, intitolata IN TIME: cambiare punto di osservazione per riconoscere ciò che, immersi nella quotidianità, spesso non riusciamo a vedere.
Siamo in grado di riconoscere il valore del nostro tempo?
L’installazione porta questa domanda dentro il Circolino. Le immagini di Nespoli aprono lo spazio verso la Terra e invitano chi entra a osservarla come un luogo condiviso. La distanza da ciò che è familiare diventa uno strumento per comprenderlo, ridimensionare le nostre divisioni e tornare a guardare ciò a cui apparteniamo con maggiore consapevolezza.
Il titolo richiama il principio di corrispondenza della Tavola di Smeraldo: ciò che è in alto è come ciò che è in basso. Il cielo e la terra, il dentro e il fuori entrano in relazione. Anche le coperte termiche partecipano a questo passaggio: un materiale nato per proteggere il corpo nelle emergenze diventa il rivestimento di una navicella, trasformando un luogo di incontro in un punto di osservazione sul mondo.
«L’artista è un alchimista: ha la capacità di trasformare la materia inerte in materia viva, così come di trasformare sé stesso, attraverso la propria ricerca, in un uomo consapevole», afferma Alessandro Bulgini.
Per Bulgini, la Terra è il luogo d’azione e l’artista è il suo astronauta: esplora il mondo al quale appartiene, ne osserva le trasformazioni e restituisce immagini capaci di mettere in discussione le nostre certezze.
Al Circolino, lo sguardo di Bulgini e quello di Nespoli si incontrano in questo esercizio di consapevolezza: riconoscerci tutti partecipi di uno stesso spazio e ripensare il nostro rapporto con il tempo.
Opera Viva Il Manifesto, Barriera di Milano
12 ed. IN TIME
di Alessandro Bulgini
Pad. C - Area Video
Opera Viva The Billboard, Barriera di Milano is the urban art project conceived by Alessandro Bulgini and produced by Flashback. Since 2015 it has brought art into the lively, working-class fabric of Barriera di Milano in Turin. Every year billboard 56030, a municipal space for public notices in Piazza Bottesini, is transformed into an open-air work of art. The initiative is built around a clear idea of the relationship between artwork and public space, and on the conviction that art should leave institutional spaces behind, venture out into reality and become fully part of everyday life.
The 2026 edition, entitled IN TIME, continues Flashback’s exploration of time. Time is seen not as a linear succession of eras but as an open dimension, in which past, present and future coexist and shape one another. To be in time, then, means to be within one’s own time, but also to move across all times, creating unexpected connections between images, stories and experiences.
From this perspective, the journey becomes the metaphor that guides the whole edition. It is not a route towards a fixed destination, but a crossing in which finding one’s bearings means reading the present, welcoming the unexpected and constantly adjusting one’s course. The sailing boat embodies this condition perfectly: it moves forward thanks to the wind, the currents and the ability to interpret what is happening, turning uncertainty into possibility.
Seafaring has always been part of humanity’s imagination. It is the symbol of crossing over, of knowledge, of the longing for freedom and of the search for new shores. From the ancient vessels that carried souls between different worlds to the voyages of Odysseus, and from the great marine paintings of the past to modern painting and contemporary artistic practice, the sail continues to tell the story of the human condition: our relationship with the unknown, with risk and with hope.
Today this long iconographic tradition takes on new meanings as it enters into dialogue with the urgent issues of our time. Images of sails no longer evoke only the journey, but also migration, borders, solidarity and collective responsibility. In this sense they resonate with initiatives such as the Global Sumud Flotilla, which in 2025 brought together dozens of vessels from more than forty countries to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza, turning seafaring once again into a gesture that is at once political, civic and deeply human.
This edition’s posters are therefore a compendium of works on the theme of sailing, by Italian and international artists, created in collaboration with institutions and museums. Together they form a body of images that moves through history without following a chronology, allowing correspondences, analogies and new readings to emerge.
Neverland Gaza
Curated by Alessandro Bulgini
Pav. C - Zone closed to visitors, second floor
Every Thursday - on visit again from 12 November
This exhibition/installation has been created as a space of proximity and resonance. An intimate installation built from everyday objects donated by people - carpets, chairs, lamps, a camping stove - that become instruments of relationship. The work stages an imaginary ritual inspired by the gesture of sharing tea in the ruins of Gaza during Ramadan.
In this suspended and disarmed context, art becomes habitable, real, deeply our space.
"A work of art does not describe, it does not comment, it does not communicate" - writes Christian Caliandro in the text supporting the project - "it does not deal with a subject: it goes through it, it experiences it. And this something is no longer a subject. It is reality".
Free entrance with mandatory reservation
(maximum of 30 people)
tel: +39 393 64 55 301
mail: info@flashback.to.it
Opera Viva The Billboard, Barriera di Milano
Urban art project
Curated by Alessandro Bulgini
Pav. B - stairs
A collection of images from the editions (2015 - 2025) of the local project Opera Viva The Billboard, Barriera di Milano’ curated by Alessandro Bulgini.
Unconscious Elevation
Site-specific installation
By Carl von Pfeil
Pav. B - elevator
Unconscious elevation is a versatile installation rooted in the liminal space that lies between existential ascent and descent. The title derives from the ‘recovery position’ and suggests the return of vital energy from a state of immobility. The elevator physically immerses us in the artwork, where a progressive, sonic elegy leads us towards inner thresholds, whilst a blue, transparent and changing object illuminates the artist’s paralysing thought: the desire for change and the longing to accept reality.
Carl Pfeil lives and works between Turin and Bolzano. He trained in analog photography and film (including studies as a cinematographer, both internationally and internationally), developing a poetics that straddles the boundaries between image, sound, and bodily experience. In recent years, he has created site-specific works and immersive installations based on meditative and sensorial processes, capable of activating relationships between space and memory, perception and silence.
Permanent exhibitions
Una vita migliore.
Fragments of stories from the Institute for Children of the Province of Turin
Curated by Alessandro Bulgini
In collaboration with Città Metropolitana di Torino
Supported by Fondazione CRT
Pav. B - third floor
The project presented at Flashback Habitat in Corso Giovanni Lanza 75 in Turin, is not to be considered an exhibition but rather an artwork and an act of love.
A. Bulgini
Una vita migliore aims to give voice to that multitude of worlds that have intertwined in the halls of the structure, a former orphanage in Turin, through glimpses of the stories of some of the protagonists who, firsthand, have experienced that place like the children, now adults, the nannies, the employees.
The choral work, curated by the artist and director of Flashback Habitat Alessandro Bulgini, tells intimate and personal stories, but incredibly universal because they are linked to concepts that touch us closely such as birth, family, identity. The exhibition aims to be a complex, human, social and above all artistic fresco, which enhances everyone's lives by making them works of art, in the spirit and poetics of Flashback Habitat.
The evolution of the Work
The exhibition, presented in three distinct configurations from 2023 to the present, is spread over the rooms on the third floor of Pavilion B, where each room wants to be a microworld that consists of audio-video portraits of the "natives" who answer the question "Could you tell me about yourself?" and they do it in profile: a position that suggests turning outside, elsewhere or perhaps towards another self.
The talking portraits are accompanied by components dating back to a photographic exhibition on site set up when the orphanage closed and a map-story with stratifications of meanings thanks to photographs and documents from public and private archives.
Today's set - up
The great change that runs through the exhibition is the passage from the ephemeral to the permanent, in the hope that the work will absorb ever more deeply the history of the place that gave rise to it. The exhibition route is enriched by further resonances and testimonies in dialogue with Flashback’s vision: to bring what lies submerged back into the light and to give it new meaning within the present.
Visitors immerse themselves in the documents and archives of the city’s former Children’s Institute, yet they also encounter the figures at the heart of the exhibition as they are today. Adding to the narrative are contributions - across sculpture, painting and photography - devoted to the theme of motherhood, where the ancient, the modern and the contemporary coexist in the making.
“It is no longer merely a matter of safeguarding the memory of what once was, but of enriching it with images that speak of the present as well. Today, Una vita migliore tells of a new desire: the desire to remain.”
The IPI, inaugurated in 1958 by President Gronchi, every year hosted about three hundred boys and girls awaiting adoption, often born in corso Lanza 75, and then given up for adoption, generally before the age of three.
Today many of those children, who have become adults, frequent the place and the activities of Flashback Habitat, recognizing in Corso Lanza their origins, their first home.
mater
2023, Artist's Light, Constellation
By Alessandro Bulgini
Pav. C - roof
Within the project Luci d'Artista, Costellazioni, in 2023 Alessandro Bulgini's work mater arrived at Flashback Habitat. Installed on the roof of Pav. C and visible from corso Vittorio Emanuele II to Porta Nuova railway station, the work is dedicated to those who were born more than forty years ago in the current headquarters of Flashback Habitat, the former orphanage of the Province of Turin active until the 1980s.
The light stands out on the roof of the oldest and highest villa of the former Institute, becoming a beacon in the darkness.
“Usually works are gifts, this one is even more so”
The story of this work begins when Alessandro Bulgini (artist and current artistic director of Flashback Habitat) entered the former Institute for Children of the Province of Turin in Corso Giovanni Lanza 75, a space entrusted to the Flashback Association.
In 1953 the Province decided to open the Institute to meet the needs caused by large-scale immigration and the large number of women forced to leave their newborns in foster care. This space welcomed them for thirty years and then, to overcome this system, the space was closed.
Having learned of this story, the artist decided to take action to recognize a place of welcome for those who were born here more than forty years ago, giving them a space where they could meet again. From the first contacts he took on the role of guide inside the four buildings, taking them to every interstice of the complex and making them retrace memories and suggestions that were so dear to them.
“Retracing the spaces, some of them touch the walls in search of the pictorial stratification that saw them present at their birth. This is why, with the passage of time, the idea that the mother was present in this place through absence took shape in me.
The walls become epidermis.
It is as if the mother had left, in the short time she was here, her own imprint. For this simple but profound reason I thought of giving them a clear indication that was materially visible, a work that would bring light to a desire”.
Alessandro Bulgini
Vivarium
[der. from the Latin Vivo]
Is the permanent exhibition that inhabits the external space of Flashback Habitat. The idea of also populating the powerful green area of 9000 square meters and transforming it into a real art park in metamorphosis and constant becoming was born in 2022, as soon as we entered what has become Habitat for Contemporary Cultures.
The works of art are inserted into the space, to stay and "put down roots", giving life to a harmonious fusion where everything that is uniform comes from the dialogue between the artist and the habitat. In the natural environment composed of history and people, Flashback adopts the works that the artists leave in trust to the ecosystem.
Walking through the park of Flashback Habitat one encounters Chairs in Space (1995) by Fabio Cascardi, an installation in steel and anti-rumble paint inaugurated in April 2023 and recently moved to the highest point in front of Pavilion B.
From 2023 is Mushroom Forest by Michel Vecchi, who, using wood and logs salvaged from the park, creates colourful mushrooms of surprise, magic and curiosity. On the occasion of Flashback Art Fair 2024, the work is enriched with sounds that the artist himself recorded in the park, transforming them into a natural soundtrack. Michel Vecchi is an artist from Valle d'Aosta who lives and works in Ibiza.
Also from 2023 is the work Tout se tient by Luisa Raffaelli, also created by enlivening elements already present in the park. The artist transforms a structure that acts as a sling and the protection, also metaphorical, is composed of innocent pipes that give a sense of care, protection and safety, coloured gold to emphasise the protective function.
Carl Von Pfeil has created four site-specific anthropomorphic sculptures in 2024, with materials found in the park, that dialogue with the natural ecosystem: Woman with Open Arms, Wandering Man, Chick with Goldilocks and One-Eyed Painter.
After the large light installation mater, on the occasion of Flashback Art Fair 2024, Flashback Habitat's artistic director Alessandro Bulgini also enriches Vivarium with Light of the Apocalypse, a work that weaves personal memory, history and universal reflection through powerful symbolism and intense colours. A large beech tree - dead, but present not only as memory - painted bright red and made extraordinary by lights and luminous spheres is the symbol of a historical and present time in which we are constantly immersed.
Light of the Apocalypse embodies the tension between the sacred and the profane, between rebirth and destruction, inviting the viewer to reflect on the search for Equilibrium through contrasting worlds.
As of May 2025, a new work by artist Maurizio Taioli, titled Reality Fiction, is on display. The artist’s distinctive mode of expression such as his sculptural silhouettes, invites the viewer to engage with a pressing contemporary issue: human violence, examined from both a social and an ontological perspective. The subject of this reflection is explicitly revealed by the title, which points to the clash between reality and imagination, a highly relevant theme in our globalized world, where the boundaries between the real, imagery, and the models imposed by fiction - particularly American cinema - have become increasingly blurred, making it difficult to definitively distinguish between what is “real” and what is “imaginary.”
For the 2026 edition of the Flashback Art Fair, Vivarium has been enhanced by a site-specific installation by Franco Menicagli titled Primo Inverno (2026), conceived as a sculptural body born from the space itself. By repurposing fragments and discarded materials found on-site, the artist reimagines the building as a living organism - a maternal entity that does not merely contain history, but actively nurtures it. Within the Flashback Habitat space, these concepts resonate deeply with the room’s original historical function: it once served as a greenhouse and incubator for young plants at the former foundling hospital. In this protective microclimate, originally designed to help plant life sprout and shield it from the frost, the work draws a parallel to the institution’s primary mission: once a sanctuary and refuge for hundreds of infants. Completing this symbolic cycle is the orientation of the room, which faces directly toward the complex’s former nursery. Through glass panes, the botanical care of the past and a gaze directed toward childhood mirror one another. The installation thus becomes the threshold of a most delicate transition: the passage from the protected womb of an incubator to the initial encounter with growth and the cold of the outside world. It is a moment of absolute vulnerability - a true first winter of existence - in which material released by the building reconfigures itself to preserve the memory of the earliest sprouts, both human and botanical, that once emerged within those walls.