ARP 7Edition at Cape Town Art Fair. 14-16 February 2020.

Alessio Barchitta, Giulia Fumagalli, Salvador Gomez, Grace Mokalapa, Zana Masombuka and Viktoria Nianiou end their journey with Arp-Art Residency Project at Investec Cape Town Art Fair, co-existence is the show of artworks made by the 6 winning artists during the six weeks of the art residency between Cape Town, Granada e Roma.

co-existence is an exploratory journey of interpersonal, geographical, and collective experiences of identity. We all exist in close proximity, but often without being aware of each other’s individual and shared experience. We move in built and organic environments that evoke emotional responses – beyond our consciousness – the scenography of our daily life.

co-existence is not the sum of individuals, but the result of this addition.

co-existence means sharing and reflecting on our identity in terms of culture, heritage, gender, and environment. One of the questions the project poses is: how we can realize a co-existence without disavowing our individual cultural heritage.  

co-existence will see three stages of travel, meetings, and research: Cape Town, Granada and Rome. (Alessandra Atti Di Sarro – ARP Director)

ARP 7Edition. co-existence the final show in Rome. Opening 14 Dec 2019.

Giulia Fumagalli and Alessio Barchitta from Italy, Viktoria Nianiou and Salvador Gomez from Spain, Zana Masombuka and Grace Mokalapa from South Africa, are the 6 young winners artists of ARP 7Edition. From the 14th of December 2019 to the 18th of January 2020 they will be on show with co-existence, the exhibition that concludes the art residency project between Cape Town, Granada e Rome.

ARP is a program of international residencies organized by Centro Luigi Di Sarro, with the collaboration of Rainbow Media NPO. ARP is aimed at engaging young artists under 30 with geographical and interpersonal exchanges. ARP 7th Edition – Talents Exchange has been made possible thanks to the contribution of the MAECI-Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation and to Media Aid Onlus and My Cape Town. The exchange project between South Africa and Italy began in 2009 and since then more than twenty-five artists have travelled and worked between the two countries. 

The present edition, took place in Cape Town, Granada, and Rome, adding a second stage in Europe. In November and December 2019 the Talent Exchange followed a new format: an itinerant route where each artist will have the opportunity to work on a research project in constant dialogue with the environment and the rest of the group. The participants have different stories and artistic background: Giulia Fumagalli and Alessio Barchitta come from Milan but Alessio was born in Sicily, Salvador Gomez comes from Barcelona whereas Viktoria Nianiou has studied in Spain but was born in Greece. Lastly, Grace Mokalapa and Zana Masombuka both live in Johannesburg.

ARP 7ED – TALENTS EXCHANGE: WINNERS LIST

Giulia Fumagalli and Alessio Barchitta from Italy, Viktoria Nianiou and Salvador Gomez from Spain, Zana Masombuka and Grace Mokalapa from South Africa. The Centro Luigi Di Sarro’s international residency programme, realized with the contribution of the MAECI, is aimed at young U30 artists. Cape Town, Granada and Rome are the Talents Exchange stages, between November and December 2019.

The 7th Edition of the ARP-Art Residency Project will start from Cape Town in November. The residency program for young artists under 30 is conceived and promoted by the Centro Luigi Di Sarro, through an innovative formula that involves several countries.

Talents exchange is an artistic adventure of experimentation and intercultural dialogue that will see a group of 6 artists traveling together first to Cape Town, then to Granada and finally to Rome, for almost 2 months.

The program will allow the group of artists, selected through a competition and by a jury of experts, to undertake a training trip between North and South of the world. The course, consisting of 3 periods of residency in South Africa, Spain and Italy, ideally combines the Mediterranean with Sub-Saharan Africa and acts as a bridge of knowledge between Europe and South Africa, a leading country on the continent for cultural and artistic growth. The winners will have the opportunity to carry out a research project and discuss with the group to set up local events on the way and a final exhibition in Rome in December.

The winning projects of ARP 7Edition range in the different fields of the figurative arts and investigate the most contemporary themes, all oriented to the bet of knowledge.

Over 50 contacts and 38 valid applications came to the selection of the jury composed of: Jake Aikman, Satellite, Cape Town; Alessandra Atti Di Sarro, Centro Luigi Di Sarro; Khanya Mashabela, Art critic, Cape Town; Marisa Mancilla, Facultad de Bellas Artes UGR, Universidad de Granada; Francesco Ozzola, Suburbia, Granada; Carlotta Sylos Calò, University of Tor Vergata, Rome.

ARP 7th Edition – Talents Exchange is realized with the contribution of MAECI – Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation and Media Aid Onlus, in partnership with Suburbia Granada, Spain, and Satellite Cape Town, South Africa, and with the collaboration of Rainbow Media NPO.


VAA 2019. The winners are Jabu Nadia Newman with “Untitled:Friends” and Niccolò Masini with “White time”. At Cinema Labia in Cape Town the ceremony, next screening will take place at cortoLovere Festival in Italy.

Screening and Awards Ceremony of the 2 winners and 8 finalists of the VAA-Video Art Awards 2nd edition took place on May 14th at the historic Labia Cinema in Cape Town. Now the VAA screening evening moves to Italy where the cortoLovere Festival will host the event on September 26th at the Tadini Art Academy.

The prize-giving event took place in the historic Cinema Labia, Tuesday 14 May 2019. All the 10 shortlisted works in the two selections (Italian and South African) have been projected.

The VAA – Video Art Awards is designed and promoted by the Centro Luigi Di Sarro with the contribution of Italian Cultural Institute of Pretoria and the International Short Film Festival cortoLovere, where the VAA Top10 will be screened again (23-28 September 2019).

Niccolò Masini CV http://www.niccolomasini.com

He studied in the classrooms of the IED in Milan, graduating in 2011 in Illustration and Animation courses. Thus began his career in the world of visual art. However, the definitive turning point accomplished by moving to the Netherlands, where he attended the prestigious Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam, from which he graduated in 2015 with a specialization in Audio Visual Arts. During his time at Rietveld, he has the opportunity to follow an international exchange program at RMIT University in Melbourne. The Dutch experience will open to him doors to several international experiences: Australia, Argentina, the United States, Kuwait and Canada. Winner of numerous international prizes, competitions and residences, from 2016 he began to devote himself entirely to his personal research, which he combined with commissioned work. Practicing in three continents, his work has been exhibited internationally in countries such as Australia, Canada, Argentina, Japan, Holland and Italy. To date, he lives and works between Genoa and Montréal.

“White Time” still

“White Time”

“There are a certain amount of ordinary moments in life that are con- sidered neither here or there, these are spaces for otherness, for some considered irrelevant, that are simultaneously physical and mental, such as the space of a phone call or the moment when you see yourself in the mirror.” Michel Foucault

These spaces of otherness are infinite, disposed on time framed dimensions that inexorably passes through, with or without our consideration. The experience of the traveler, consisting of a series of movements within space, producing a phenomenon of a new order, where geography overtakes knowledge. Our conception of spatiality shapes our perception of time, and, on an individual scale, defines our way of perceiving movement. Spaces trace an inventory of the adventure of knowledge, omitting nothing; knowl- edge traces cartography of known lands, omitting nothing. Acting as a prelude to a subjective perception of a suspension in time, White Time is a video installation where a simple figure stands in a not specific dimension. Surrounded by the surface of the black screen different elements interact with each other, mutating through the composition of an undefined spatial location. Niccolò Masini

Jabu Nadia Newman CV https://jabunew.tumblr.com/

Jabu Newman was born and raised in Plumstead, a suburb of Cape Town. She is 25 years old and studied at UCT, University of Cape Town, where she graduated in Political Science and then specialized in Visual and Media Arts, then deepening cinema and directing at the African Arts Institute. He works in film production and continues his artistic research with video art and photography works, mainly oriented to the exploration of human and social relations. He won the VAA award with the video “Untitled: Friends”.

Jabu Nadia Newman

“UNTILED:FRIENDS”

The title Untitled:Friends alludes to the complexity of chosen relationships, specifically how deeply bound two souls who share no family relation can be: a strong connection that no title or description can truly articulate. 

Like most of Newman’s body of work, the film specifically focuses on femme binary identity and relationships. The storyline is intentionally centered around femme friendships and simultaneously challenges and celebrates them against a backdrop of a mundane heteronormative neighborhood, where these layered and complex identities are prosecuted and undervalued. 

Untitled:Friends was shot, written, directed and edited by Newman over a period of two years and reads like a personal visual diary, in which she invites us into her childhood and teenage years in Plumstead. Come per la maggior parte dei lavori di Newman, il film pone un’attenzione particolare all’identità e alle relazioni nel mondo femminile. Il racconto è volutamente centrato su una storia di amicizia fra donne in cui contemporaneamente si sfida e si festeggia, in una atmosfera mondana, quel substrato di codici di etero-normalità in cui le identità stratificate e complesse sono perseguitate e sottovalutate. Untitled:friends è stato girato, scritto, diretto e montato da Newman nel corso di due anni e si offre come un personale diario visivo, nel quale l’autrice svela i suoi anni d’infanzia e adolescenza nel quartiere di Plumstead. (Jabu Nadia Newman)

“Untitled:Friends” still
VAA Screening Programme

FINITE / INFINITE, Elena Giustozzi and Caterina Silva, EVERARD READ/CIRCA Cape Town, South Africa, March 22-31 2018

Opening March 22th, 2018 at 6.30pm

 

With FINITE / INFINITE, Elena Giustozzi and Caterina Silva show the work done during the ARP-Art Residency Project in South Africa. An exhibition that offers itself as a journey on many levels, not the simple notion of travel, but the will to observe from and with different points of view.

The slow walks in the nature of Elena Giustozzi are revealed in comparison with the gaze from the top offered by Boomslang, the suspended walkway of Kirstenbosh Gardens, but also in a sketchbook of digital sounds collected in various corners of Cape Town. Works done in Italy, in the Marche region where the artist lives, mix with the paintings painted in Cape Town. A work wich is  slow, meticulous, meditative, intimate and grandiose at the same time.

The vicissitudes of the soul of Caterina Silva, her continuous queries on the meaning of reality, and the language she would like to express it, are certainly in her large canvases, colored and wrinkled, but also in comparison with what the soul carries with its past far or near. And so, thanks to the meeting with the students of the Ruth Prowse School of Art the performance ticticfhsfhscoldcoldrainrain has come to life, and that continues a similar research just carried out by the artist in Norway.

A JOURNEY TO DISCOVER ART AND SUBURBS: the ARP art residency in Rome of SKUBALISTO and JORDAN SWEKE concluded

Public art has become in recent years not only an alternative form of expression, but also a real stage with which artists confront and dialogue. We no longer speak of a conflict between an artwork that is by definition donated to the community and an artwork that is born to be sold under the rules of the market: artists more and more often move freely between these two options, until a few years ago considered in antithesis. Rome offers several examples of public art: from the fantastic intervention by William Kentridge Triumphs & Laments on the Lungotevere banks under Ponte Sisto, to the SanBa project that designed San Basilio’s public housing according to a specific urban redevelopment project, to the spontaneous open-air gallery that is flourishing in Corviale  at the foot of the famous building called ‘Serpentone’, to arrive at interventions in the occupied realities such as the Tufello students’ house run by the Astra activists. ARP has made a journey to discover these realities together with the South African artists Skubalisto and Jordan Sweke participating in the residency in Rome in November and December 2017.

Both artists chosen this year by the ARP-Art Residency Project (created by the Centro Luigi Di Sarro with the contribution of MAECI and with the collaboration of Everard Read/CIRCA and RainbowMediaNPO) have an interest in the investigation of urban reality, as well it is the gentrification of the peripheral areas or redevelopment planned by social and housing policies, or even fertile ground of public artistic commission. Their investigation of the Roman reality has therefore often turned to those areas that could offer fertile inspirations. In parallel to the study that led to the realization of the exhibition REALTA’ IMMAGINARIE/IMAGINING REALITIES that was held at the Centro Luigi Di Sarro (30th November-14th December 2017), the two artists also wanted to bet on the public art front, realizing some works in the Roman suburbs: in Corviale (where they worked thanks to the hospitality of Alessandro Fornaci and the Laborintus Association and to the Prenestino, in a center for asylum seekers, a place of high symbolic value. In these years there is much discussion about what to do and how to give meaning to interculture: Art is one of the most universal means of communication and friendship between people.

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In the middle of the walk of our life, I found myself in a dark forest … (Dante, The Divine Comedy, Hell)”,  the quote of the greatest Italian poet is not accidental and takes on meaning at the end of the long journey of meetings and crossings of routes that the two artists, guests of the ARP residence, have completed in the Capital. Jordan Sweke’s forest and the Skubalisto’s portraits tell of the past and the present. The immediate interest that both have shown for the urban socio-economic structure integrated with their artistic research has given rise to a very deep dialogue in their practice and with the inhabitants of the city. Dialogue that was realized with the final two-handed work performed in Corviale.

WATCH THE VIDEO

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IMAGINING REALITIES – SKUBALISTO and JORDAN SWEKE – 2017 November 30th/December 14th

 

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Jordan Sweke (1991) and Skumbuzo (Skubalisto) Vabaza (1987), from Cape Town to Rome thanks to ARP-Art Residency Project, will show their outlook on the City and its suburbs. People and landscapes, imagining realities: a journey that explores the present and the history of the Caput Mundi through various expressive media (painting, graphics and videos). The two South African artists produced artworks for this exhibition during the six-weeks residency period in Italy.

The ARP, a Bilateral Residency Programme for Young Artists between Italy and South Africa, is promoted by the CENTRO DI DOCUMENTAZIONE DELLA RICERCA ARTISTICA CONTEMPORANEA LUIGI DI SARRO and realized with the contribution of MAECI, Italian ministry of Foreign Affaires and International Cooperation, and with the collaboration of the Everard Read/CIRCA Gallery. In Cape Town, next February and March 2018, ARP will host italian artists Elena Giustozzi and Caterina Silva, selected to the residency programme, which will also see the collaboration of Ruth Prowse School of Art and Rainbow Media NPO.

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Skumbuzo’s narrative is multifaceted (including visual art, design, music and fashion), he often incorporates contemporary figuration, imbued traditional iconography and several urban ‘graffiti’ based languages. Skumbuzo’s work aims to break down the human experience to its very core in order to expose the man made social constructs that serve to separate. His work is a bridge illustrating commonalities of consumerism, industrialization, corruption, hope, family, heart break, race , nationality and religion. His graffiti background and street art influence become obvious with his abstract use of colours and stylistic figure painting technique.
Jordan works within notions of the landscape and the natural environment. He abstractly explores ‘nature’ – a sublime and all-encompassing force. More specifically, he explores the relationship which currently exists between humanity and nature and ways in which this relationship might be reconstituted. His main focus of production lies in large oil paintings, but a rounded conceptual framework is achieved through his creation of photographs, sculptures, video works, print media and installation.
Both these young Cape-Town-based creatives have come together in ARP Rome 2017/2018 for IMAGINING REALITIES. This presentation comprises separate artworks, as well as collaborative work resulting from merging conversations between the two artists. At the Centro Luigi Di Sarro, Skumbuzo’s portrait paintings (in various mixed media) and Jordan’s landscapes (monochrome drawings, canvas based paintings and video work) are installed alongside collaborative linocuts and paintings executed together while in Rome on the ARP Residency.
The relationship between people and their environments is one of the major themes of the exhibition. IMAGINING REALITIES aims to address the notions of each person’s ‘reality’- how they see the world, and in contrast what goes on unnoticed around us all. Skumbuzo’s and Jordan’s active conversations illustrate and imagine what is taking place for many, addressing ideas of ‘marginalized poverty and the many unseen inhabitants of Rome’. This speaks about relationships between foreigners and the Roman landscapes, and serves to address “the social impact of immigrants, and the realities that lie behind the idealised ways people frame what they see and live.”
Skumbuzo and Jordan exist within the organic creative frameworks that pulsate around them in Cape Town, and both artists have an ongoing interest in periphery spaces and working-class areas. The ARP experience in Rome has served to ignite a joint conversation about the peoples in Rome, their ‘landscapes’ and the city itself. Although both artists actively acknowledge that this is a social commentary from an outsider’s perspective, they too feel ‘there are ridges of social and cultural similarities between Rome and Cape Town, that they both had been addressing in Cape Town. By creating some mural artworks in Rome  both Skumbuzo and Jordan hope to reimagine the reality of what is present there. In addition to their social commentary, the artists have endeavoured to critique the juxtaposition between nature and urbanization: the kind of relationship the people in Rome have with their natural environments, and natural selves. The artists have observed there are ‘remnants of human artefacts in nature, nature is surviving in heavily built up spaces, nature it feels is versus the city, and humans are versus nature’. The artists explain: ‘Rome is like a big breasted mother who feeds the whole of Italy. All of Italy is in Rome, not just Romans. One can almost feel Rome struggling under the pressure’. IMAGINING REALITIES, investigates this reality too and gives scope to see the world re-examined and envisioned through Skumbuzo’s and Jordan’s synergistic discourse.

Emma Vandermerwe – Senior Curator Everard Read/CIRCA Cape Town

LEARNING CAPE TOWN – VALENTINA COLELLA – ARP 2017

ARP-Art Residency Project 2015-2017  is concluded.  The project, ideated by Centro Luigi Di Sarro in Rome now in collaboration with Everard Read Gallery Cape Town, began in 2009 and involved various important galleries as well as 13 artists. This fifth edition enjoys the contribution of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation; in the period 2015-2017 the project’s activities increased, witnessing many young art enthusiasts as well as art students actively contributing to the residencies in Rome and Cape Town of the two winners of the selection, Valentina Colella for Italy and Zwelethu Machepha for South Africa. Young curators, art historians, photographers, videomakers and students of various disciplines collaborated with the two leaders of this exchange, the artists, through training contributions and the participation to meetings and workshops. It is because of this activity, considered of high cultural, Educational and social value, that ARP project was invited this year to take part to Cape Town Art Fair in the Cultural Platforms section, next to the most important South African non-profit organisations.
The final actions af the ARP project, which enjoyed the enthusiastic support of the Italian Consulate of Cape Town since the beginning, saw two conclusive events:
The exhibition at Everard Read Gallery Cape Town, “Learning Cape Town by Valentina Colella the italian artist, who was selected for a residency in the framework of ARP Project V Edition. Paintings, sculpures, photographs and video installation to celebrate the monthly artistic residency in the Mother City for the 32 years old italian artist from Introdacqua, a small village settled on the Appennino Mountains in central Italy.

16-31 March Valentina Colella Solo Show LEARNING CAPE TOWN Everard Read/CIRCA Gallery

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Saturday 25th March in Philippi the “INKCUBEKO YETHU ART EVENT” concluded the 2015-2017 edition of ARP Project.

This event, introduced for the first time in this 5th edition of ARP, will be held at TSOGA CENTRE in Samora Machel, Philippi. It was an ART DAY focussing on young and emerging artists, with music, art workshops for children, and theatrical drama. Special guests of the event – set up by RAINBOWMEDIA NPO and by the UBUNTUBETHU youth collective, which is also the force behind IQFM community radio – were the two ARP artists, Valentina Colella and Zwelethu Machepha (who created a site specific artwork interacting with the audience); during the day was also displayed, in the spaces of the Tsoga Centre, an exhibition of artworks selected among the entries for a call for U35 artists working and living in South Africa. The winner, selected by a jury of experts, received a cash prize delivered personally by the Italian Consul, Alfonso Tagliaferri.

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FOOTPRINTS by VALENTINA COLELLA – Everard Read/CIRCA Johannesburg

Exhibition/Event curated by the Centro Luigi Di Sarro and presented by the Istituto Italiano di Cultura in Pretoria in collaboration with Rainbow Media. Sponsor: HIP Hellenic Italian Portuguese Alliance – Italian Section e Associazione Abruzzo Sudafrica.
Thursday March 9, Circa/Everard Read Gallery, 6 Jellicoe Ave, Rosebank, Johannesburg.

A visionary, hyperconnetted, contemporary dream. The Istituto Italiano di Cultura di Pretoria supports young italian artist in Sud Africa and present the exhibition/event titled FOOTPRINTS by VALENTINA COLELLA a collateral event of the bigger project ‘ARP – Art Residency Project 2015-2017’, by Centro Luigi Di Sarro in Rome, that has planned the residency of the artist in Cape Town for February and March 2017.

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The show is made up of three parts: the first one is focused on Abruzzo, Valentina Coltella’s homeland, and presents a video shot in Campo Imperatore; the second displays a multimedia piece in which a route is traced starting form her town, Introdacqua near Sulmona, up to the mountains till a shelter overlooking the Peligna Valley. Then the route is transferred on the map of the same town indicating some topical points, corresponding to some places which are fundamental for the local residents. Each of this points is accompanied by pictures with latitude and longitude coordinates so allow the visitors to locate the places on GPS. The third and last part is the pictorial one, composed by 9 works on paper with studies on essential forms of the earth, the sky and the flight between the two spaces.

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Valentina Colella is a concettual artist who expresses herself with different media, as paintings, drawings, installations, video and photos. After completing her studies, she started an in-depht analysis of scenarios referring to the concept of opposition intensified by the various tranfers from the reality to digital. She draws her inspiration from nature and the landscape surrounding her. That landscape is that of Abruzzo, so beautiful and wild, but deeply devastated by telluric episodes and unusual meteorological happenings in recent times. Colella exhibited her work in London, Cologne, Rome, Argentina, Taiwan. With her project “Learning”, Valentina has been selected for the ARP-Art Residency Project to a 6 week residency in Cape Town.

ARP-ART RESIDENCY PROJECT SHOWS AT CAPE TOWN ART FAIR

We are delighted to announce the arrival in Cape Town of Italian artist Valentina Colella, who was selected for a residency in the framework of ARP-Art Residency Project V Edition. The project, ideated by Centro Luigi Di Sarro of Rome in collaboration this year with Everard Read Gallery Cape Town, began in 2009 and involved various important galleries as well as 13 artists. This fifth edition enjoys the support of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Co-operation; in the period 2015-2017 the project’s activities increased, witnessing many young art enthusiasts as well as art students actively contributing to the residencies in Rome and Cape Town of the two winners of the selection, Valentina Colella for Italy and Zwelethu Machepha for South Africa. Young curators, art historians, photographers, videomakers and students of various disciplines collaborated with the two leaders of this exchange, the artists, through training contributions and the participation to meetings and workshops. It is because of this activity, considered of high cultural, educational and social value, that ARP project was invited this year to take part to Cape Town Art Fair in the Cultural Platforms section, next to the most important South African non-profit organisations.

We invite you to visit stand F13, where the artworks of all Italian and South African artists who took part until today to ARP project will be exhibited, and where it will be possible to find out more about all the events organized by ARP between now and the end of March.
Saturday 18th February from 11 until 3, artists Colella e Machepha will be at ARP’s stand to introduce themselves to CTAF visitors. At 2 pm, the Italian Consul in Cape Town, Antonio Tagliaferri, and the Director of the Italian Insitute of Culture of Pretoria, Anna Amendolagine, will be in conversation with the Project Director, Alessandra Atti Di Sarro, of Centro Luigi Di Sarro, about ARP project and its history. All artists and gallerists who took part to ARP exchanges in the last eight years have been invited to join and share their experiences.