NEVEr Alone

Conceived as a layered exhibition journey, NEVEr Alone inhabits both the ground floor and the first floor of Casa Testori.
Two exhibitions, articulated through different exhibition designs and two project rooms, shape a fragmented yet continuous narrative, inviting visitors to move across spaces, voices, and forms of experience.

In January 1985, Milan and Italy were struck by an extraordinary snowfall that brought the city to a standstill for several days. It was an exceptional event to which Giovanni Testori (1923 – 1993) dedicated an editorial on Corriere della Sera on January 17th, titled Benedetta tu, sorella neve (Blessed are you, sister snow). For Testori, snow should not be perceived as a bothersome obstacle to the flow of urban life, but rather as a unique opportunity to stop, reconnect with oneself and with others, and rediscover the value of shared living and of time. Forty years later, as Milan once again takes center stage in winter thanks to the Milan Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games, Casa Testori presents NEVEr ALONE, a multidisciplinary project curated by Davide Dall’Ombra with scientific coordination by Vittoria Caprotti, in which snow plays the leading role. Through art, literature, cinema, photography, and science, snow is explored in all its facets: from its poetic nostalgia to its optical whiteness, to the urgency of the issues related to climate change.
The group exhibition NEVEr Alone curated by Giacomo Pigliapoco begins with a poetic and ambiguous image: snow as it falls, settles, crystallizes, and finally melts. An ephemeral presence, a silent layering, snow is an act of covering that, paradoxically, reveals. It erases the familiar contours of the world, suspends ordinary time, and compels a new way of looking. Within the spaces of Casa Testori, snow frees itself from its purely atmospheric and meteorological dimension to become a transformative presence. NEVEr alone therefore invites us to perceive snow in this dual nature: not only as an element that isolates, cools, and freezes, but also as a force that, in its very silence, brings things closer together. The interventions of the artists on display thus rise to the level of a choral voice, formulating an invitation to recognize, even in fragility and suspension, a dense web of relationships.