LIVE FROM BERGAMO: HOW THE “MUSEUM” RADIO GAMEC FACED THE STORM OF CORONAVIRUS, a talk by Leonardo Merlini

A story of the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic and the general lockdown in Italy, narrated through an extraordinary radio project. Between March and May 2020, the Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Bergamo, a city dramatically affected by the pandemic, broadcast a live Instagram show for 66 consecutive days, hosting talks and debates with guests in the various fields of culture, politics, sport and entertainment. With the aim of creating direct contact with the local population of Bergamo, Radio GAMeC spoke to the world and, above all, spoke about the world. Leonardo Merlini, together with the director of the GAMeC Lorenzo Giusti and the PR Lara Facco, the creator of the project and the host of the radio show, hosted several prominent guests, such as the former prime minister Enrico Letta, the architect Stefano Boeri, the writer Tom McCarthy, the former minister of culture Giovanna Melandri, the critic Hans Ulrich Obrist, writers such as Chiara Valerio and Michela Murgia and artists such as Chiara Bersani , Thomas Hirschhorn, Simone Fattal, Ragnar Kjartansson, to name a few. Leonardo will share his insights into this fascinating story, which started as an attempt to be a point of reference for the city of Bergamo and its citizens while combining the news from the city with debates about culture and the possibilities of moving forward in the times of social media – a very different way for a museum to enter people’s lives, to create a community that basically ignored the fact that the GAMeC was a museum.

Leonardo Merlini is a journalist, literature and culture critic, working at ASKANEWS, an Italian national news agency. He wrote two guide books on Franz Kafka and David Foster Wallace. He is a chronicler in the contemporary art sector.  He regularly writes for Minima & Moralia, collaborates with the Triennale Milano, International, Ossigeno, Il Magazine and Vanity Fair. He hosts Tralfamadore, a book show on Radio Raheem. Together with Marianna Albini he founded the Bebookers collective, which organizes literary shows, events, reading groups and more. In 2016, with the director Vittorio Bedogna, he created thirty-five short documentaries for Web TV regarding 35 personalities in the art world. He created and hosted the first cycle of the Radio GAMeC project with Lorenzo Giusti and Lara Facco. He writes and works in Milan.

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