On Wednesday, 1 October 2025, Fondazione Pastificio Cerere is presenting They sold us a dream then took away our sleep, a group exhibition featuring artists Veronica Bisesti, Danilo Correale, Jagoda Dobecka, and Marta Krześlak, curated by Vasco Forconi and Kasia Sobczak. The exhibition will be open to the public from Thursday, 2 October to Saturday, 13 December 2025.
The traveling project was developed in partnership with Goyki 3 Art Incubator in Sopot—host of the exhibition’s first chapter, Autumn 2024—the Italian Cultural Institute in Warsaw—host of the second chapter, Winter 2024–25—and the Polish Institute in Rome.
Do places, rituals, and times dedicated to rest, pleasure, and collective well-being still exist? Can their remnants be traced in past institutions to design and imagine new ones? As time dedicated to collective care is progressively eroded from our lives, different generations of artists have obsessively brought it back to the centre of their practices.
The project originated from a series of collective conversations between the artists and curators around the notions of leisure, rest, work, and pleasure. These discussions were initially inspired by the historical identity of Sopot, Poland—host of the exhibition’s first iteration—as a spa town traditionally dedicated to the care of body and mind. Building on this idea, the research focused on the parallel between two emblematic institutions from 20th-century Italian and Polish labour history: the dopolavoro—a series of public and private institutions that organised recreational and cultural activities for workers during their free time—and sanatoriums—public facilities that offered workers rest, medical treatment, and wellness therapies in the Soviet era.
