Artists, exhibitions and events between contemporary art and territory
In the lead-up to the Milan–Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games, the Cultural Olympiad programme takes shape as a large-scale cultural event spread across the territory, designed to complement sport with a broader reflection on place, memory and the winter imaginary. Through a network of exhibitions involving both historical and contemporary artists, contemporary art becomes a privileged tool for interpreting the Alpine landscape and its relationship with time, history and transformation.
The project unfolds between Bellano, Sondrio and Milan—three locations that differ in scale and identity, yet are connected by a shared thematic thread: mountains, snow and winter understood as cultural constructs rather than purely natural elements. The exhibitions do not merely celebrate the sporting event, but instead build a layered narrative that brings together past and present, tradition and experimentation.
Marcovinicio, Silenziosa disciplina
Bellano: Marco Cordero and the dialogue between contemporary art and landscape
In Bellano, the BAC – Bellano Arte Cultura project reflects on the Alpine environment through Elegy for a Glacier by Marco Cordero, presented between the Museo Giancarlo Vitali and the San Nicolao Arte Contemporanea space. His sculptures and installations, created using materials such as paper, stone and metal, address the mountain as a fragile body, marked by climate change and the loss of an ancestral equilibrium.
The video work that lends its title to the exhibition reinforces this elegiac dimension, suggesting a meditation on melting glaciers as a metaphor for interrupted futures. The dialogue with Danilo Vitali’s copper sculptures—evoking geological stratification—and with the intense, visionary painting of Giancarlo Vitali broadens the scope of the exhibition, transforming Bellano into a true cultural palimpsest. Here, contemporary art intertwines with local tradition, offering a complex vision of the relationship between human activity and the environment.
Marco Cordero, Elegia per un ghiacciaio, San Nicolao Arte Contemporanea, 2025
Sondrio: from Carlo Fornara to Giosetta Fioroni, snow as memory
In Sondrio, the exhibition The Snows of Yesteryear, curated by Elena Pontiggia at the MVSA, approaches winter from a historical and symbolic perspective. The exhibition brings together artists from different generations and artistic languages, constructing a narrative that spans more than a century of Italian art.
The early twentieth-century mountain landscapes of Carlo Fornara, rooted in tradition, engage in dialogue with the more lyrical and introspective interpretations of Enzo Morelli, before leading to the essential and conceptual solutions of Giosetta Fioroni. In these works, snow is never merely descriptive: it becomes a mental surface, a space of remembrance, a silent presence linked to the fragility of time.
Several snow-covered urban views shift the focus back to Milan, anticipating the city’s central role in the Olympic imaginary. What emerges is a reflection in which snow is associated with memory and transformation rather than with the spectacle of the natural landscape.
Giosetta Fioroni, Paesaggio invernale
Milan: the imagery of winter sports between graphics and communication
The Cultural Olympiad itinerary concludes in Milan with the exhibition Italy on Snow, hosted at the Castello Sforzesco. Here, the focus moves away from artistic practice toward the construction of collective imagery through media and visual culture. Posters, illustrated magazines, catalogues and ephemeral materials from the Bertarelli Collection trace the ways in which mountains and winter sports were represented and promoted between the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Snow thus becomes a key element of visual communication, closely tied to the development of Alpine tourism, economic progress and the popularisation of the Olympic Games. In this context, sport appears less as a purely athletic gesture and more as a cultural and social phenomenon shaped and disseminated through images capable of influencing collective desires and behaviours.
A cultural event anticipating the Games
Although they follow different trajectories—environmental, symbolic and historical—the three exhibitions share a common goal: to prepare the Olympic moment through a widespread and participatory cultural reflection. The Milan–Cortina 2026 Cultural Olympiad demonstrates how contemporary art and the work of artists can expand the meaning of the sporting event, transforming it into a cultural process capable of leaving a lasting imprint on both the territory and the collective imagination.
