On Saturday 4 October 2025, the 21st edition of the Giornata del Contemporaneo took place — the major annual event promoted by AMACI with the support of the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture, in collaboration with the Directorate-General for Public and Cultural Diplomacy of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation.
For the 21st consecutive year, AMACI’s 26 museums, together with more than 900 public and private institutions across Italy, opened their doors free of charge, offering a special programme of exhibitions, events, workshops and initiatives — both in person and online — designed to bring contemporary art closer to an ever wider and more diverse public.
As in recent editions, this year’s Giornata del Contemporaneo once again crossed national borders, extending internationally until 10 October 2025 through Giornata del Contemporaneo | Italian Contemporary Art, carried out in synergy with the diplomatic and consular network of the MAECI — Embassies, Consulates and Italian Cultural Institutes — to promote and showcase Italian contemporary art around the world.
The theme of the 2025 edition was education, understood as a broad and plural process encompassing training, research, the exchange of experience and knowledge. This theme is shared by the directors of the AMACI museums, in line with the study day organised by the association in March of this year.
The tradition established in 2006 continued, whereby a leading artist is entrusted with creating the event’s official image: following Michelangelo Pistoletto (2006), Maurizio Cattelan (2007), Paola Pivi (2008), Luigi Ontani (2009), Stefano Arienti (2010), Giulio Paolini (2011), Francesco Vezzoli (2012), Marzia Migliora (2013), Adrian Paci (2014), Alfredo Pirri (2015), Emilio Isgrò (2016), Liliana Moro (2017), Marcello Maloberti (2018), Eva Marisaldi (2019), various artists (2020), Armin Linke (2021), Giorgio Andreotta Calò (2022), Binta Diaw (2023) and Tomaso Binga (2024), the 2025 edition featured the collective Atelier dell’Errore (AdE).
Founded in 2015 by Luca Santiago Mora, the Atelier dell’Errore is currently a collective of twelve young neurodivergent artists based at the Collezione Maramotti in Reggio Emilia. Their artistic practice, born within a workshop of Reggio Emilia’s child neuropsychiatry unit, has developed over the years into an extraordinary experience of creative cooperation and inclusion, now recognised nationally and internationally for the quality and originality of its visual and performative research. AdE’s shared practice is at once a moment of creation and a space for life education: a context in which social complexities, relational challenges and the isolation often experienced by neurodivergent people are addressed, including through art. In recent years, one theme in particular has emerged in the collective’s work, generating dialogue and shared research: emotional education.
The work created to represent the 2025 edition is Unknown Pleasures – The Shelter (2025), a piece that poetically reinterprets the large sail of the Ade Vela Rapido, made from 50 emergency blankets, belonging to the boat once owned by Pier Paolo Pasolini, star of the play Oedipus Rex. During a restoration phase of the sail, two artists from the collective transformed it into a temporary shelter space: a fragile, intense emotional architecture where one can imagine — even just in play or in dreams — one’s own affective freedom. An intimate, protected space that gives visibility to often-denied desires.
As in every edition, the Giornata del Contemporaneo offered several blocks of activities, all free of charge: a special programme from the AMACI museums, initiatives in collaboration with MAECI’s international network, events from the Luoghi del Contemporaneo promoted by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity, and proposals from the hundreds of voluntary organisations taking part across Italy.
The event was supported by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture, in collaboration with the Directorate-General for Public and Cultural Diplomacy of the MAECI, and was held under the patronage of the Representation in Italy of the European Commission, the Chamber of Deputies, the Ministry of Culture, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, the Conference of Regions and Autonomous Provinces, UPI – Union of Italian Provinces, ANCI – National Association of Italian Municipalities, and ICOM Italia.
In 2025, it was also possible to register and explore the full offering of the event via the website www.amaci.org, thanks to the long-standing technical partnership with Artshell.
Atelier dell’Errore
The Atelier dell’Errore (AdE) is an artistic collective focused on visual arts and performance. The project was founded in 2002 as a visual arts workshop by the artist Luca Santiago Mora, dedicated to neurodivergent children cared for by the local health services of Reggio Emilia and Bergamo. In 2015, after taking part in the workshops for 8–10 years, some of the young participants, by then adults, expressed the wish to pursue a professional artistic practice. This strong desire led to the creation of the Atelier dell’Errore, a collective independent of the public health service. Since its founding, the collective has been permanently based at the Collezione Maramotti in Reggio Emilia. In 2018, the collective established a cooperative studio with the young artists and their parents as founding members. The 10 young artists and their artistic director became worker-members of the cooperative, turning the Atelier dell’Errore into a social enterprise that self-finances itself through the sale of its works and professional collaborations. Luca Santiago Mora often compares AdE’s creative process to the functioning of an “organism”, in which each member plays a vital and essential role, just like the organs of a body. In this context, the artworks are not merely a creative endeavour but also part of a broader relational process. The operating rules of AdE’s artistic process are few and clear: Animals and Errors. Animal creatures are the sole subject of all their works, and throughout the entire artistic process nothing is ever erased, thereby preserving and activating the transformative and metamorphic potential inherent in every so-called “error”. AdE takes on projects that are highly complex from an executive standpoint, functioning as a contemporary Renaissance workshop in which each of the young artists specialises in a particular phase of the project. The works and performances of the Atelier dell’Errore have been exhibited in galleries and institutions internationally. In February 2025, Kaufmann Repetto (New York) will host AdE’s first solo exhibition in the United States. In autumn 2025, the collective will present a retrospective exhibition at GAMeC (Bergamo). Recent exhibitions include: Italics Panorama – Monferrato (2024), Nottilucente, Duomo + Galleria Continua, San Gimignano (2024), Laboratorio degli Angeli, Bologna (2024), Richard Saltoun Gallery, Rome (2024), and others.
Press conference
The press conference dedicated to the event was held on Tuesday 16 September in the Sala Spadolini of the Ministry of Culture. Speakers included: Lorenzo Balbi, President of AMACI; Marta Ragozzino, Head of Service II of the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture (MiC); and the Atelier dell’Errore, an artistic collective.
