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°° C’est une collection de brefs épisodes pour découvrir l’art contemporain avec curiosité et légèreté.
°° C’est un rendez-vous avec une œuvre d’art contemporain suisse, regardée, expertisée et questionnée par des jeunes, auxquels répondent à leur façon les artistes qui ont réalisé les œuvres.
°° C’est des invitations à des rencontres, parfois inattendues, entre des œuvres exposées en Suisse… et vous!
ART'S COOL presents “Happy Views”, a journey into the heart of a private art collection. Join us today as we explore the Nestlé Collection! This art collection is one of the region’s key heritage assets, featuring works by renowned artists from the 16th to the 21st century.
Today Clélie and Lei resume and conclude their exploration in the hidden storage of the Nestlé Art Collection, where they encounter a painting that is both strikingly expressive and geopolitically charged.
RENÉ CIOCCA: Now we need to cross the old building and head to what we call the E Building, two floors below ground level. That’s where we store the Nestlé Art Collection. Not many people have seen this place, so it’s a bit of a privilege. It’s like going behind the scenes.
LEI: I can’t wait. Let’s go!
RENÉ CIOCCA: Welcome to Level Minus Two. As you can see, it doesn’t look like the rest of the building: no carpets or paintings here. It’s a very technical space. You’ll hear a beeping noise because the area is under alarm; it’ll last about a minute. So let’s wait for it to stop.
Okay. This is the second artwork I want to show you.
CLÉLIE: I remember seeing this one in a corridor somewhere in the building. It’s definitely not my favorite. For me, it’s somewhere between art and geography: it reminds me of school, and not in a good way! It brings back memories of memorizing countries, flags, that kind of thing…
LEI: I’ve never seen this piece in the building before. This is my first time seeing it in person. I had only seen a photo of it before, but it looks completely different up close. It’s not really a painting: it feels more like a carpet or a tapestry. What’s interesting is that there are so many flags and countries represented on this global map, but not exactly like how we see the world today. Some flags are national, others maybe not. It definitely feels very strong, like it has some political meaning behind it.
And it’s striking that some of the landmasses don’t really match their actual shape or size.
CLÉLIE: There’s a lot of red; it really catches your eye. Big areas of solid color. Then there’s a whole continent with lots of other colors. Around the edges, there are written messages; you can read names like “Afghanistan,” but others are hard to decipher or understand.
RENÉ CIOCCA: To give you a bit more context: this is one of the most valuable pieces in our collection. If we talk about artworks that belong in a museum, this is definitely one of them. It’s part of the Arte Povera movement, which started in the 1960s in Northern Italy. It emerged as a reaction to consumer society, at the same time that Pop Art was rising in the U.S.
There’s a lot to say about this tapestry by Alighiero Boetti, but here’s something interesting: the artist never actually touched it. He commissioned it, but he may have never even seen it when it was finished. What does that make you think?
LEI: Wait, he finished it and never saw it?
RENÉ CIOCCA: Yes. He gave instructions to artisans in Afghanistan, but he didn’t make or even finalize the piece himself. He would give them a briefing and let them interpret it. They made several tapestries like this. For him, it was always a surprise. That’s what he liked about this series.
CLÉLIE: Can you tell me more? I feel like I need a bit of help understanding it.
THE ARTWORK (Narration): Hello, my name is “Mappa” (it means map in Italian). I was born in 1983, crafted by the hands of my maker, the Italian artist Alighiero Boetti. I am a tapestry, 115 cm wide and 170 cm tall.
RENÉ CIOCCA: All the pieces in the “Mappa” series are different. The world is always evolving, countries and flags change. So when you’re in front of one, you have to imagine there are “Mappas” all over the world that look similar—but none are exactly the same.
CLÉLIE: What René just said really strikes me. It captures what art should do; it has a vision, it communicates a strong message, and it makes people reflect. But there’s also this artistic dimension. It's beautiful, crafted by hand. I imagine Boetti searching for the best artisans to carry out his vision. Even the contrast between Italy and Afghanistan is powerful, political, even. It’s very coherent. The fact that the work is made somewhere else is part of the message.
THE ART EXPERT: Everything that you can see in this work is really interesting!
For each of his Mappe, Alighiero Boetti presents the outline of a world map on a canvas before adding colours to the map based on the national flag of each country and, finally, delegating the production of these world maps. Once again, we see the notion of reproduction, of repetition, emerge. This is known as “appropriation” in art history, with Boetti appropriating the Mercator-drawn map of the world.
To sum up, the artist delegates the creation of a motif, having borrowed that motif from an existing image. At this point, we might ask ourselves what exactly the artist is doing, other than taking care of the menial tasks. Is that all there is to it? We’ll deal with this question in more detail very shortly.
In 1971, during his second trip to Afghanistan, Alighiero Boetti commissioned Afghan craftswomen for the first time to produce a tapestry based on one of his canvases. You did hear it right: the artist commissioned craftswomen to carry out the work. Boetti was not fond of sophisticated artistic techniques. As part of the arte povera movement, he wanted a return to a form of simplicity akin to artisanship. And weaving, which was not regarded as a high art form, was in line with this quest.
We need to think of the maps within the context of their time. Back then, there was no GPS and no Google Maps—only the Mercator or Peters maps that hung on classroom walls.
Boetti tackles the most popular representation of the world, the one that everyone recognises. Yet his approach does include a subtle twist in that Boetti changes around the colours every time. In doing so, the artist shows us that the world is constantly evolving. And he’s right: many of the areas on the Mappa, such as the enormous block covering the USSR, have disappeared.
By turning these maps into museum pieces, Boetti highlights how the West represents the world. He demonstrates that every representation of the world is a fictional construct of reality.
Lastly, let’s take a closer look at the work’s edges. Here, we have Italian-language phrases written by Boetti—often referencing the date and place of production— juxtaposed with Persian texts, which Boetti increasingly left to the craftswomen. Alighiero Boetti loved playing with words, language and poetry.
CLÉLIE: It’s been so enriching to dive into these two pieces. I had once done a short tour and told René we should treat this place like a real museum; there’s so much to discover. I couldn’t be happier to have spent this time and learned so much more. Thank you, René, for making this possible!
LEI: I walk past these artworks every day. Today was really special! Getting to explore them more deeply with René guiding us. I hope we can continue this journey. So René, when’s our next visit to the Nestlé Museum?
RENÉ CIOCCA: You’re welcome anytime! It’s such a pleasure to see these artworks through someone else’s eyes. That’s what art is for: sharing perspectives. I always learn something new when someone starts describing what they see. So thank you both for your insights into these two artworks.
ART’S COOL, aka "art is cool"! An informal get-together around contemporary art, where curious minds meet unique artworks. Simple, right?
From time to time, ART’S COOL takes you on a “HAPPY VIEWS” experience. And that was the case today with Clélie and Lei, who conversed about the artwork “Mappa” by Alighiero Boetti.
These artworks form part of the Nestlé Art Collection.
Commentary on them came from René Ciocca, Head of Corporate Identity & Design at Nestlé, and Julie Enckell Julliard, Head of Cultural Development at HEAD.
With the voices of René Ciocca, Nicolas Julliard, Ellen Ichters, and Andrew Nimmo.
You can see photos of the artworks as well as portraits of the contributors from this episode at www.artscool.ch.
Concept and production by Patrick Comte, Florence Grivel, and Nadja Imhof.
English translation and narration by Andrew Nimmo.
Music and sound design by Christophe Gonet.
This episode has been produced and broadcast thanks to the generous support of Nestlé.
It’s a Young Pods production.