Talent Sara Terzi – Interview by Melania Musci
Before art became part of your professional life, what did it first represent for you? And when did that initial attraction begin to turn into something more intentional?
I come from the province of Bergamo, an area of Italy where churches are everywhere, and as a child I used to visit them both with my family and through school. My attention was captured immediately, not only by their visual power, but by the possibility of uncovering the meanings behind the symbols they contained. I was fascinated from the start by those kinds of mysteries, things I could slowly reveal to myself through study. That instinct was then confirmed in high school, where I was lucky enough to meet one of those teachers who truly love what they teach, and in this case it was art history. I think that was the moment when everything really began.
How did a role like Head of Art Collection first take shape for you? Was there a moment when you realised you were drawn not just to art itself, but to the way it’s selected, placed and encountered by others?
Quite early on, I knew that I wanted to work in the arts. But in Italy you’re often told that, if you study the arts, you’ll never really find a job, so I enrolled in a course in Venice called Economics and Management of Arts and Cultural Activities, without yet knowing exactly where it’d lead. My understanding of how art is displayed and experienced really started to take shape during my first job at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, where I encountered for the first time the commercial and contemporary side of that world.
A Soho House is not a white cube, but a lived-in space shaped by sociability. How does curating for a setting like that alter your way of thinking about art, compared to a more traditional exhibition context?
Paradoxically, my experience at the Guggenheim in Venice helped me, because that too is presented as a house-museum, so the idea of living with art in a more direct way had already begun to take root in me. But the real challenges arise in practical terms, in the limitations that a space like Soho House inevitably places in front of you. In a setting like that, there’ll never be the perfect wall or the perfect light, but that also teaches you to open your mind to a different perception of space and to find possibilities in what’s already there. One example is a work I commissioned for the Rome House by the artist Edoardo Servadio. He was already working on this series of mosaic manhole covers, and I loved the idea that anyone walking through our club might suddenly come across that piece in such an unexpected place.
So would you say that, in a place like this, art should not simply be decorative, but genuinely add something to the experience of being there?
That’s certainly my aim: to give something more to the people who inhabit the spaces of the Houses. What’s beautiful is that not everything reveals itself immediately. Some works stand out at once, while others require a slower kind of attention and only emerge later, at the right moment. That gradual discovery is part of what makes the experience richer. Our members, in fact, are extremely attentive to the works that surround them, and very often they contact us even before new openings to get a preview, learn about the local artists involved, and begin building connections with people and practices in the field they may not have known before.
How do you balance a global curatorial vision with the importance of working with local artists in each House?
It’s essential to begin from the local scene if the collection has to feel truly global. For me, that global dimension doesn’t come from sameness, but from allowing each House to remain rooted in the city it inhabits. I like the idea that someone living there might encounter an artwork by an artistthey had first seen in the gallery just around the corner from their own home. At the same time, because the Houses we open are culturally very different from one another, the principle I try to keep at the centre of everything is strong artistic quality. In the end, what makes the collection global is also the way it’s experienced by the members themselves, because people from different parts of the world will inevitably read the same works differently.
How do you make sure that each location reflects the specificity of its city without turning that city into a curated stereotype of itself?
I often ask myself that question, because I do feel the weight of that responsibility. For me, the most important part of the process is entering into real contact with the local art scene and remaining genuinely open to dialogue. That also means trying to move beyond both personal taste and the assumptions one already carries about a place, because those assumptions often turn out to be superficial. From there, the challenge is to build a selection that does not reduce a city to a single image of itself. Including works that differ in materials and themes becomes essential, precisely because it allows a place to speak in more than one voice.
When it came to curating Soho House Rome, did the process feel more personal because of yourown Italian background? And do you feel that Italian artists relate to image and space in a way that’s recognisably their own?
It inevitably felt personal, but that feeling was balanced by the fact that, until then, I had never worked within the contemporary art world in Italy. So although the project touched something close to me, I didn’t feel fully grounded in that context; paradoxically, Kate Bryan, with whom I collaborated on the collection, actually knew the city better than I did, having lived there the year before. The personal dimension came more from certain linguistic and cultural nuances that I was able to perceive more directly. As for Italian artists, I didn’t encounter a single, clearly recognisable national identity. The Rome I came to know through contemporary art feels very far from the baroque, stereotypical image of the Eternal City, yet it remains fully aware of its past and capable of finding a unique language that opens onto new forms of expression.
If each House becomes a way of reading a local scene, what kind of portrait of Rome emerges through this one?
Rome emerges as a city deeply rooted in history, yet fully capable of looking towards the future, as I was saying before. Two artists come to mind as particularly clear examples of this. One is Gianni Politi, whose work in our House draws on an 18th-century portrait, and the other is Quayola, another Roman artist whose work takes inspiration from Rubens’ 17th-century masterpiece Venus and Adonis and is generated through an algorithmic analysis of that painting. In both cases, the approach begins with the past, but only in order to ask how far one can move forward without ever losing sight of it.
When you’re acquiring or placing works, what tells you that an artwork truly belongs in a space rather than simply looking good inside it?
My first response to a work is always a personal one. After that, I try to understand how it might add something that goes beyond pure aesthetic value. For that reason, the art team at Soho House often works through commissions, or on site-specific projects conceived for a particular space. David Shrigley, for example, was commissioned to create a design for the pool floor at Brighton Beach House, which was then translated into the pool’s tiled mosaic floor, because finding something already in existence that would fit that space perfectly would have been very difficult. Finally, it’s important to consider the dialogue that has to exist between the different works, which I’d always want to be perceived as continuous rather than hierarchical, both between emerging artists and those who are already established.
One last question: is there a city not yet part of the Soho House map that you’d especially love to engage with curatorially, because of the kind of dialogue it might open up between art, space and community?
There are honestly far too many (Smiles, E.D.), but if I had to choose one, it’d be Seoul, because of the attention the art world has been giving in recent years to its artists and visual languages. I’d love to engage more directly with the Korean artists I have admired from afar for so long.
Special Thanks to Beside Communication