Imagined Natures after War: Primo Levi and Pino Pascali in the Sixties

In commemoration of Giorno della Memoria—the International Holocaust Remembrance Day, observed annually on January 27—Magazzino Italian Art will host a public program organized in collaboration with the Centro Primo Levi and in coordination with the Italian Consulate General in New York, alongside other Italian cultural institutions in the city. The event proposes a dual conversation that brings literature and visual art into dialogue to reflect on the enduring legacies of war, technology, and exploitation in the postwar decades.

The program will feature Natalia Indrimi, Director of the Centro Primo Levi, who will address Primo Levi’s writings from the 1960s, drawing in particular from The Truce, Storie naturali, Vizio di forma, and La chiave a stella. Her remarks will explore Levi’s understanding of Auschwitz not as a closed historical episode, but as part of a broader continuum of technological domination and the exploitation of both human life and the natural world—dynamics Levi saw as persisting in the aftermath of the global conflict.

This perspective will be placed alongside a discussion of Pino Pascali’s work of the same years, presented by Valérie Da Costa, Professor of Contemporary Art at Université Paris 8, whose scholarship has been central to the study of Pascali. Through works such as the armi finte, the animal sculptures, and the square and cubic meters, Pascali confronted the trauma of World War II and the Vietnam War while critically exposing mechanisms of violence, simulation, and extraction. Without proposing a direct connection between Levi and Pascali, the program aims to illuminate how each, through distinct languages and mediums, grappled with shared anxieties that shaped the cultural climate of the 1960s and continue to resonate today.

Valérie Da Costa is an art historian and curator. She is a professor of contemporary art history at Paris 8 Vincennes Saint Denis University.  A specialist in Italian art from the second half of the 20th century, she has published numerous articles and books on Italian art from the 1960s and 1970s, including Pino Pascali: retour à la Méditerranée (Les presses du réel, 2016) and Fabio Mauri: le passé en actes / The Past in Acts (Les presses du réel, 2018). Her latest book is Paul Thek en Italie/Paul Thek in Italy (1962-1976) (Les presses du réel, 2022). She has also curated numerous exhibitions, including Vita Nuova: New Challenges in Italian Art 1960-1975 (MAMAC, Nice, 2022) and Paul Thek (MAMCO, Geneva, 2024).

Natalia Indrimi has been the director of Centro Primo Levi New York since 2007. Between 2000 and 2007, she was Director of Programs at the Center for Jewish History in New York. Programs she curated in this position include Hannah Arendt’s, Elias Canetti’s, and Emmanuel Levinas’ centennial conferences, the first New York tributes to Bruno Schulz and Clarice Lispector, and the series “Editing America” exploring the immigrant gaze as a form of cultural and political editing. Since 2005, she has coordinated research projects and a seminar series on nationalisms, Fascism, and the persecution of the Jews in Italy and the former Ottoman lands. She coordinated research projects on the Jews of colonial territories, including Fiume and Rhodes. She curated the exhibition on the Jews of Rhodes, Los Corassones Avlan. As director of Centro Primo Levi NY, she focuses her work on the public display of history.