The Foundation

The Rodolfo Ferrari Foundation is an ETS (third sector organisation) that strives to honour the foresight, research work and memory of Prof. Rodolfo Ferrari, the enterprising and visionary pharmacologist. In 1947, together with the microbiologist Carlo Callerio, Rodolfo Ferrari founded SPA Società Prodotti Antibiotici. Thanks to its collaboration with the Nobel Prize winner Sir Alexander Fleming, the company produced one of the first Italian penicillins, named SUPERCILLIN.The Foundation was created by Alisée Matta – President of SPA and granddaughter of its founder – to carry forward the values and dedication of this great man of science, transforming what was once the laboratory and adjoining spaces into a museum area now used for social and community purposes. In a setting that balances past and present, the Foundation's museum is a beautifully revamped industrial space full of light where science, culture and art all coexist. Within these spaces, the Foundation works to develop projects aimed at promoting social cohesion through education, community work, art and scientific awareness, with charitable initiatives designed to improve the wellbeing of the community and to safeguard cultural and environmental heritage.

Mission

Cultivating the invisible

The Rodolfo Ferrari Foundation ETS aims to transform a place dedicated to microbiological cultures and animal experimentation into an open space. Here, the scientific method and the artistic approach can cross-pollinate to unveil a new vision, a way of thinking that drastically reduces our anthropocentric presumptions and envisions a potential reconciliation between the past and the future, between humans and non-humans. Between the visible and the invisible.

Scientific research and artistic pursuits use different methods and languages, but they share the same desire: to make the invisible visible. On the one hand we have the scientific method, which is based on rigour and on reproducible and defined experiments. On the other we have the artistic method, which works through visual associations and experiments freely, measuring itself against the indeterminate, against events that are not necessarily rational, and certainly not reproducible.But these two approaches, seemingly so distant from one another, have one thing in common: intuition.Intuition paves the way for change and stirs our perception and our consciousness. Intuition is a spark, a flicker, a nudge. It triggers the structuring of a new cognitive process. Through art, however, it can also engage a transformative and regenerative process, allowing us to handle ancient materials that have been painfully removed, thus laying the foundations for the redefinition of a society that eliminates all forms of exploitation of the other by oneself.The Foundation's ambition and desire is for these new spaces to offer the opportunity to cultivate a new environment, one in which beauty is infused with science and knowledge with beauty.