28/05 — 31/10/2026
PEANUT FIELDS NEAR FRIENDSHIP
25/11/2026, 05.00 PM
Peanut Fields near Friendship #4
Lina Pallotta, Michele Bertolino
25/11/2026, 05.00 PM
Talk
The fourth Peanut Fields Near Friendship brings together Lina Pallotta, a photographer of and from the margins, able to piece together tiny fragments of truth, and Michele Bertolino, a curator and researcher of stories and people whose lives unfolded between the 1980s and today, to share the story of their friendship with one another. A friendship that began by chance, through other friendships, and grew through books, archives and exhibitions conceived as responses to shared questions. A friendship that transformed both their lives, shifting the ways they see and read the world. A friendship that has often been, above all, an infrastructure of meaning and support.
Lina and Michele retrace shared geographies: New York in the 1980s and 1990s, poetry performed in clubs, political struggles, and their relationship with Porpora Marcasciano and the Italian trans and queer movement. It will be a chance to question the role of art and photography in disrupting dominant culture, to consider what images hold on to, and to look for what is raw, rough and alive.
MICHELE BERTOLINO (Savigliano, 1992) is Associate Curator at Centro Pecci, Prato. Since 2024, he has been a tutor at CAMPO, the curatorial studies and practices programme of Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo (Turin). He has collaborated with several Italian and international institutions, including MAMbo (Bologna), Last Tango (Zurich), Modern Art Institute (Glasgow), HEAD (Geneva), and Palazzo Gucci (Florence), among others. In 2025, he curated Vivono. Arte e affetti, HIV-AIDS in Italia 1982–1996, the first institutional exhibition to attempt to reconstruct the forgotten history of Italian artists affected by the HIV-AIDS crisis. Between 2018 and 2021, he was Assistant Curator of FUORI – Quadriennale d’arte 2020. He edited Tongue on Flames and Porpora, photographic books by Lina Pallotta. In 2016, together with Bernardo Follini, Giulia Gregnanin and Seraphine Pala, he founded Il Colorificio, an exhibition and project space where he has worked on solo presentations by Daria Blum, Giulia Crispiani, Caterina De Nicola, Marco Giordano, Vasilis Papageorgiou, Michele Rizzo and Giovanni Testori, among others. His writing has appeared in NERO Magazine, Flash Art and Mousse Magazine, and his essays have been published in several monographic volumes. In 2022, together with Il Colorificio, he published L’Ano Solare. A Year-Long Programme on Sex and Self-display (Axis Axis), and, with Giulia Crispiani, Albe e tramonti a Praiano (Oreri).
LINA PALLOTTA (Benevento, 1955) is a photographer and lecturer. She trained at the International Center of Photography in New York (ICP) and over the years has published for various national and international magazines, worked for Impact Visuals Agency in New York and the Grazia Neri Agency in Milan.
A selection of her numerous exhibitions in Europe and America includes: solo shows at Centro per l'Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci (Prato, 2023), French Cultural Institute (Naples, 2014), L'Atelier de Visu in Marseille (2001); double solo shows at Baleno International (Rome, 2024) and Last Tango (Zurich, 2022); and numerous group shows including MAMBo (Bologna, 2022), Palazzo delle Esposizioni (Rome, 2018), Triennale (Milan, 2016), Queens Museum of Art in New York (2007). She received The Catalogue Project 1998 award from the New York Foundation for the Arts. More recently, she won the First Paul Thorel Prize (Naples, 2024), she also received several grants from the Ministero della Cultura: the Italian Council (2021), PACTA (2023) and Strategia Fotografia (2024). Her works are part of private and public collections like Centro per l’arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci (Prato, IT) and Collezione Farnesina (Rome, IT).
