Christian Boltanski's 'Anime' Exhibition Conquers Bologna

Christian Boltanski's major exhibition 'Anime. Di luogo in luogo' opens at MAMbo in Bologna, featuring works across multiple venues including an ex-bunker and the museum's Sala delle Ciminiere. The show revisits Boltanski's 2015 installation 'Les Archives du Cœur' at the hangar near the Ustica DC-9 memorial, where visitors could record their heartbeats. In the city's peripheral zones, 30 billboards displayed eyes of Bolognese partisans from the Sacrario della Resistenza. At an ex-powder magazine, 500 kg of used clothes covered in gold thermal blankets form 'Réserve', dedicated to shipwreck victims. The main exhibition at MAMbo includes 'Entre temps', 'Les Régards' (2011), 'Monuments', and a 7-meter-high pile 'Volver' (2015) wrapped in thermal blankets. New work 'Animitas (blanc)' features bells in Chile's Atacama Desert, where Pinochet's victims were abandoned, and the installation reproduces the star map of Boltanski's birth date. Historical works like 'Containers' (2010), 'Aprés' (1980-90), 'Autel Chases' (1987), and 'Fantôme de Varsavie' (2002) are also on view. Curator Danilo Eccher describes the experience as an 'emotional traffic jam'. Boltanski states: 'In my works there are many people, thousands of Swiss and hundreds of Polish children. And tons of clothes, because from the beginning I thought that a photo of a human being, a used garment, a heartbeat, a dead body were all equivalent: they all show absence.'