From 29 May to 1 August 2021, the MA * GA Museum in Gallarate (VA) hosts the exhibition by Francesco Bertocco (1983), entitled Historia, created thanks to the support of the Italian Council (7th Edition, 2019) promotion program of contemporary art in the world of the General Direction of Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry for Culture, a project produced by Viafarini with the curatorial collaboration of Mariagrazia Muscatello.

The artist's solo show, curated by Alessandro Castiglioni, senior curator of MA * GA, sees the collaboration of the MAC / Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in Santiago de Chile and the Museo de la Quimica and de la Farmacia in Santiago.

Historia is an investigation into the history of Chilean medicine through the most significant historical events that occurred in the South American country in the second half of the twentieth century.

Bertocco reflects on what the practice of treatment in Chile is, comparing “official” and traditional medicine, how they live and coexist within the same society. The work questions the relationships between hospitalization and social control, science and the broader idea of care.

The exhibition puts this new production of the artist into dialogue, characterized by a series of photographs and an unprecedented video work, with the main works created by Bertocco in over ten years of research and activity. In this regard, the artist writes “The work is conceived through a form in progress, which will be built during the whole period of the exhibition, reaching, towards the end, its final form. This way of presenting the work, aims to stage the process of making Historia and the transformations that have affected him in these last two years of research, between a suddenly changed socio-political context and the pandemic emergency that has gone through it and modeled ".