Diligent cleaners at an Italian art gallery have accidentally destroyed a modern-art installation, after mistaking it for the mess left behind at the exhibition’s launch party.
The piece, Sara Goldschmied and Eleonora Chiari’s Where shall we go dancing tonight?, is a mixture of empty champagne bottles, cigarette butts, shoes, and confetti, and is suppose to be a satirical look at the hedonism and political corruption of 1980s Italy. But after the opening event was over, the cleaners in the Museion Museum in Bolzano thought it was genuine rubbish left behind by some overindulgent party attendees.
A picture of the finished installation [GoldieChiari]
"Of course we tell staff not to clean away art...On Friday night there was an event at the museum. We told the staff just to clean up the foyer and to leave everything else alone" said Letizia Ragaglia, the museum's curator, when speaking to Alto Adige, a local newspaper.
"Evidently they thought that this area was part of the foyer… We'll put everything back as it was, using photos to help us," Ragaglia added.
The exhibition after the cleaners had tidied it all away [GoldieChiari]
The museum’s curators will now work to restore the exhibition to its former glory, and their task has been made easier by the fact that the cleaners truly were fastidious in their work – as they conscientiously divided the items up into the appropriate recycling bins.
