Die ordentliche Generalversammlung der Freunde des Centro Giacometti 2025 fand am 5. Juli 2025 um 14:00 Uhr im Salone Giacometti in Stampa statt. Neben Informationen über die Aktivitäten des vergangenen Jahres und der Genehmigung der Jahresrechnung 2024 sind die Mitglieder über die von der Fondazione Centro Giacometti für die nächsten zwei Jahre geplanten Aktivitäten informiert worden. Die Versammlung beschloss, die Vereinsgelder für künftige Projekte zu behalten. Anschliessend folgte die Eröffnung der Ausstellung der Schwedin Ulrika Sparre mit der Kuratorin Virginia Marano.
For Ulrika
Farewell by Virginia Marano, Stampa, July 5th, 2025
There are exhibitions that open, and others that split time like a fissure.
This exhibition — Ear to the Ground — does not begin today. It began speaking long ago, and it will continue to speak long after. Because Ulrika Sparre, the artist who conceived and brought it into being, created something that resists time, that vibrates within matter, that sees and hears us — even now that she is no longer with us.
It’s hard to find words.
Because today we are not just witnesses to an artwork. We are also participants in a farewell.
And yet, even in sorrow, there is a form of beauty. It is the kind Ulrika taught us through her practice: a beauty born of attention, of gentleness, of deep contact with what is alive — even when it appears silent.
Ear to the Ground is much more than a title. It is a call.
An invitation to lower ourselves — body and spirit — and press our ear to the earth, as the ancients did to hear the hoofbeats of distant horses, or the faint pulse of something moving beneath the surface.
In Ulrika’s work, stone is never an object. It is a subject.
A being that breathes in geological time, that holds memories older than any human history, and yet is willing to enter into relation — if we only have the patience to listen.
In this exhibition, the stones speak.
They whisper vibrations, invisible frequencies, stories that do not need words.
Ulrika listened to these voices, and made of her art a tool for translating between worlds: between the visible and the invisible, between earth and sky, between human time and the time of mountains.
Creating this exhibition with her was a rare privilege.
We walked the paths of the Bregaglia, observed the curves of Giacometti’s stones, listened to the silences between sounds. Ulrika never imposed. She asked, proposed, allowed space.
She carried with her a calm intelligence, a subtle sensitivity, and a radical trust in art’s capacity to heal, to connect, to remember.
Today, in this place so charged with memory, among the mountains that shaped Alberto Giacometti, Ulrika’s work naturally weaves itself into a tradition of attentiveness to the body, to material, to presence. But it does so in her own voice — clear, resonant with sound and silence, with expanded time, with internal vibration.
Yes, Ulrika is no longer with us.
But she is.
She is in the stones she gathered, in the sounds she recorded, in the landscapes she walked.
She is here, in this room, in your ears, in your listening bodies.
Every vibration is a passage. Every resonance, a form of contact. Every whisper from the ground, a way to stay.
I wish to express my deepest thanks to the Centro Giacometti, the Culture Commission of the Municipality of Bregaglia, the Friends of the Centre, and all those who made this exhibition possible.
And I wish to thank you, Ulrika — for your attentive gaze, for your quiet kindness, for teaching us that to listen is also a way of loving.
I now invite you to enter the exhibition as you would a clearing, or a cave.
Slowly, with reverence, with an open heart.
Let the stones speak.
Somewhere, Ulrika is listening with you. Thank you.
