In the spring of 1954, the Danish artist Asger Jorn relocated with his large family to Albissola Marina, in what Marinetti called “the ceramic capital of Italy” on account of its historic factories and the numerous artists, gallery owners and intellectuals who frequented it.

Poor and debilitated as a result of tuberculosis, Jorn took a gamble on Albisola as a place to recover from his illness and connect with the tradition of ceramics. Having first camped out in a tent in nearby Grana and then hosted by Lucio Fontana in his Pozzo Garitta estate, the “Viking” (as his friend, the artist Enrico Baj, called him) managed to buy two small buildings in 1957, on the lower hills of Albissola Marina.

Asger Jorn now had the chance to challenge the traditional concept of the house and take a stand against functionalism and architectural constructivism: “The house must be not a ‘machine for living’ but rather a machine for surprising and enthralling, a machine for universal human expression” (excerpt from Asger Jorn’s letter to Enrico Baj, 1953).

Here we have a new, “essentially expressive” architecture: an idea of a house that Asger Jorn created in those ruins, surrounded by vegetation, known as “the popes’ walls”. The two farmhouses on the Bruciati hill soon became his open-air workshop – “a fragment of Eden”, as Alberico Sala called it, in which flora and fauna could coexist and nurture each other. The history of this complex, with its ancient, mullioned windows and sloping roofs, dates back to the Renaissance: these estates were owned by the noble Della Rovere family of Savona, who produced two popes: Sixtus IV and Julius II. Surrounded by a labyrinthine terraced garden – accessible and cultivable – the maison passionnante of Albisola is an imperfect microcosm a stone’s throw from the sea: here Jorn’s works, anthropomorphic and apotropaic marbles, brightly colored tiles, abstract mosaics, vases and ceramic panels, in a continuous interaction between the Mediterranean and Northern Europe, found their home.

Scraps of kilns, shells, stalagmites, stalactites, tuff and sea stones and electric insulators that become pedestals for sculptures: these are the materials Jorn used to create his house, his total work of art, what Guy Debord described as “a sort of Pompeii in reverse”. As with all the Danish artist’s masterpieces, this one also bears his signature: on a fireplace decorated with the traditional Ligurian risseu technique, black and white sea or river pebbles alternate, spelling out two names: Jorn and, above, Berto (Umberto Gambetta). He was the factotum of the place, a close friend of the artist and his agent in the village when Jorn was off on long journeys. 

After Jorn’s death, in 1973, Berto and his wife Teresa were granted use of the property for life, and it was then handed over in toto to the municipality of Albissola Marina to thank the people of Albissola for their warmth and kindness. After a long period of restoration, a new chapter in history was written: in 2014, the villa was turned into a museum and reopened to the public as one of the hubs of the MuDA (Museo Diffuso Albisola), hosting carefully curated exhibitions and events and once again becoming a place of art and conviviality, just as Jorn himself had originally envisaged it.