In 2025 Bondarte will be forty years old: in the small hamlet Bonda of Mezzana Mortigliengo, from the example of Celso Tempia, Cecconello established an open-air museum of modern art, a testament to community spirit and widespread beauty.
An anniversary that still speaks to the present
Nn 2025 marks the 40th anniversary of the founding of Bondarte, the open-air museum of modern art conceived and built by Gastone Cecconello in the heart of the Biella hills.
Forty years that represent not just a date, but the sign of a vision that is still alive: that of an artist who was able to transform a small, forgotten hamlet into a workshop of art and life.
It was 1985 when Cecconello, at the height of his intense artistic season, decided to give shape to a dream that combined his aesthetic poetics with deep ties to the territory. In those years the artist was living a period of fervent activity: dozens of solo exhibitions in Italy and abroad, collaborations with galleries and museums, and the recent start of a path that would mark an epoch. Only a year earlier, in Maglione, co-supervised by director and writer Maurizio Corgnati, he had inaugurated the first cycle of frescoes destined to become the MACAM – Museo di Arte Contemporanea all’Aperto di Maglione (Museum of Contemporary Art Outdoors in Maglione), now recognized as a pioneering experience of widespread public art.
The insight: an outdoor museum in the hamlet of Bonda
In that same spirit, Cecconello decided to create Bondarte. In the small hamlet of Bonda, a hamlet of Mezzana Mortigliengo (Biella), where he had recently renovated a small house-studio, he created an initial cycle of frescoes directly on the walls of the houses, transforming the streets of the village into an open-air art trail.
He soon involved friends and fellow painters, creating a choral project that embodied a then-revolutionary idea: art as a shared experience, integrated into the landscape and accessible to all.
Bondarte was never just an exhibition: it was a way of experiencing painting, of meeting people through color and matter.
The village came alive with presences, dialogues, simple and visionary gestures. Where time and abandonment had left silence, a form of community was born. And today those works continue to vibrate with the spirit of that enterprise, as a memory of a time when art knew how to become life.
Images taken from www.bondarte.it
The tribute in the Biellese Magazine
To celebrate Bondarte’s 40th anniversary, the October issue of the Rivista Biellese, edited by DOC.BI Centro Studi Biellese, published an article signed by Gastone’s son Manuele Cecconello, an award-winning filmmaker and documentary filmmaker.
In his pages-an excerpt of which can be read here-Manuele traces the glorious and luminous stages of those years, restoring to the reader not only the chronicle, but the essence of an experience that still speaks of vision, community and hope.
“Bondarte was not just a place, but a way of looking.
A community experiment, a form of poetic resistance.”Manuele Cecconello, “Rivista Biellese,” October 2025
In his words, the image of a father who, armed with paintbrushes and lime, painted outdoors, under the changing light of the Biellese, while a small miracle took shape around him: the meeting of art and territory.
The return: a video documentary between memory and future
In the fall of 2024, Manuele Cecconello returned with his father to the Bondarte sites, making a video-documentary that accompanies the 40th anniversary celebrations. The video is not only a testimony, but a dialogue between generations: the gaze of the filmmaker son intertwines with that of the artist father, in a confrontation between past and present, between work and experience.
A legacy awaiting new custodians
Bondarte’s 40th anniversary is not just a celebration, but a call to responsibility. As Manuele Cecconello writes again in his article:
“The small village may not go back to being what it was, but it can still become something provided someone inhabits it, thinks about it, listens to it. It is time for a new alliance between art and territory, between those who remain and those who might arrive. Perhaps it will take another form of patronage (more civil than patrimonial) or simply a gesture: the act of choosing a precious and forgotten place and recognizing it as one’s own. May a new generation, with different eyes, read between the folds of this affair the possibility of a future. Because, if nothing remains, everything can begin again. Even from Bonda.”
Words that resonate like a heartfelt invitation not to let Bondarte return to oblivion.
The small village can come back to life if someone can rekindle that spark of creativity and care that animated Gastone Cecconello and his painter friends forty years ago. Bondarte is not just a chapter in contemporary art history: it is a still fertile seed, ready to germinate into new forms of participation, culture, and community. Because, as Cecconello taught us that every wall can become a canvas, we want to think that every gesture, even the smallest, can be a beginning.
