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.
A Nicca, refers to a core doctrine of Buddhism that is the idea of impermanence, one that articulates that existence is in a constant state of change. The etymology Anicca is a negation of the root word “nicca” meaning stability and continuity. The works of Marcela Gottardo and Flavia Monteiro are less of a negation of permanence but rather explore the Buddhist concept of Anicca through the instability and transformations of materiality and being. Together they interrogate how we see through the subjective lens of our own knowledge and embrace our destined impermanence, beyond the philosophical and existential crisis of nihilism.
Gottardo employs familiar everyday materials and or themes to create fragmentations of one’s temporal existence and conception of self. These fragments are assembled and treated as unique forms that are in a stasis of decay, yet echo the memory of organic forms and negative space. Gottardo’s work presents material explorations of form, resulting in a survey of art works that evoke an archeological indexing, encouraging a visual unearthing of artifacts.
Monteiro showcases several bodies of works that include suspended cyanotypes that echo garments drying on a clothesline; and also include organic shapes of everyday objects including the shadows of desert flora. Monteiro examines her adaptation to living in a new desert environment by embracing the desert sun and its shadows in the creation of her cyanotypes. These works refute her arid environment through the deep blues inherent to cyanotypes, the liquid process developing these images, and through blockages of the desert sun’s radiation in exposing the cyanotypes. These cyanotypes are also pared with photographs that reinforce the deserts yearning for water. Monteiro contrasts the cyanotypes and photographs with her warm paintings of grids and structures that suggest a containment of not only color, but the specter of fluids enveloping the void. Monteiro’s practice examines ideas of transformation through the visual entropy of structure, documenting ones environment and the desire to contain.
FriedrichWilhelm Nietzsche was critical of Buddhist concept of Anicca, postulating it in opposition to his idea of “will to power”, where he equated the idea of impermanence with nihilism. Gottardo and Monteiro’s works challenge his accusations of the ascetic practice Buddhism (and Christianity) as a “will to nothingness”, through their affirmative exploration of the ever-changing material and environment. Their works speak to their transition of impermanent lived lives within the Brazilian diaspora. Ultimately this exhibition embraces our world’s reality of impermanence with a goal of acceptance of the instable and unknown. (Steven Y. Wong, USA)
Steven Y. Wong was born Los Angeles where he currently is the curator at Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery. Previously he was Interim Executive Director and senior staff curator at the Chinese American Museum where he developed and implemented both contemporary art and history exhibitions. Steven has lectured at UC Santa Barbara and was an adjunct professor at Ventura College and Pasadena City College in Asian American Studies, History and Art Studio Departments. Steven holds a Masters in Asian American Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles and a Master in Fine Arts from the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Marcela Gottardo was born in Brazil. She lives and works in Pistoia, Italy. Marcela’s artwork utilizes materials and processes to investigate the nature of being and becoming. She received a Master of Fine Arts in 2014, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting in 2012, at Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles, California, USA.
Flavia Monteiro was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She lives and works in the Coachella Valley desert in California (USA). She explores altered perceptions by continually reworking her artwork until preconceptions and expectations are broken and a transformation is completed. Flavia has exhibited her work in California at Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Palm Springs Art Museum, Vincent Price Museum, The Bolsky Gallery, Los Angeles International Airport, and has created public artworks for the cities of Malibu and Glendale. Her artwork has been exhibited in galleries in Rio de Janeiro and at the Ibero-American Art Salon at the Mexican Cultural Institute (Washington, DC). Flavia earned an MFA from Otis College of Art and Design in 2013, and BA degrees in Art Education and Social Communication. She completed postgraduate studies in Art Therapy. Before moving to the US in 2003, she worked as an Art Educator and developed art education programs at Colégio Pedro II, the Brazilian Federal model school in Rio.
Centro Di Sarro hosts 24H Drawing Lab as part of the Big Draw Festival 2018. Since 2000, the annual international festival of design, which unites people under the motto “drawing is a universal language / design is a universal language”, It takes place regularly in more than 25 countries, involves more than 1000 events and has brought over 4 million people to the drawing board. Big Draw Festival takes place this year from 1 to 31 October worldwide, and from mid-September to mid-October for 31 days it arrives in Italy. Beneficial institution for arts education, The Big Draw is the founder and motor of the Festival and believes that “everyone can draw”. The Big Draw promotes design as a universal language capable of changing lives and bringing people of all ages, origins and religions from all over the world together.
Centro Di Sarro and 24H Drawing Lab are happy to present “From vision to observation. Solution to perceptual problems in the design. “On October 9th 2018 at 3pm, free meeting by reservation where the artist Sara Spizzichino and the photographer Rivka Spizzichino will help to recognize the most common pitfalls that do not allow to draw well, facing the perceptive difficulties that they meet in transferring their sign on the white sheet. Understanding and overcoming these difficulties helps to free oneself from one’s internal censor, allowing even non-artists to find their own creative way. The events in Italy are supported by Fabriano.
The workshop in Rome took place on 9th October in the Centro Di Sarro spaces in Via Paolo Emilio 28, from 3 to 6 pm. The Centro is also home to the Luigi Di Sarro Historical Archive which preserves the legacy of the artist’s works, including a fund of over 10 thousand drawings.
For more information about the Festival and the event “From vision to observation. Solutions to the perceptual problem in the design” please visit: https://thebigdraw.org/event/24H_Drawing_Lab__Dalla_vision_allosservation/8118
or watch the video (by Benedetto Sanfilippo):
In the fortieth anniversary of the death of Luigi Di Sarro, the exhibition organized by the MLAC with Centro Di Sarro offers a glimpse of the production of Luigi Di Sarro between the 1960s and the 1970s, highlighting the transversal nature of his approach to techniques and materials and his characteristic conception of the “sign” as a generative element of shapes and spaces, without a real caesura between abstraction and figuration, evident both in graphic and pictorial work, and in photography and sculpture.
Di Sarro, avid experimenter in his artistic activity, has practiced drawing, painting, engraving, sculpture, photography and performance, focusing in particular on themes related to the body, movement, light and abstraction capacity of the sign and the geometric figures. Di Sarro died only thirty-seven years old, killed for a fatal misunderstanding in the tense climate of the years of lead in Rome, on February 24, 1979; he left a vast artistic production (paintings, drawings, photographs, sculptures, graphics, projects, notes, aphorisms). Works by Luigi Di Sarro are in several Italian and foreign public collections (including GNAM, MACRO, Palazzo Braschi and the National Institute for Graphic Design in Rome, Pompidou Center in Paris).</p>
Active since 1987, the Museo Laboratorio di Arte Contemporanea-MLAC, directed by Prof. Claudio Zambianchi, has been proposed since the beginning as a meeting place between the university and the contemporary cultural world, distinguishing itself for its vocation to research and training. Among the initiatives that have animated the program for thirty years, there are exhibitions, conferences, round tables, book presentations, festivals, video reviews and musical proposals, which aim at first hand to put in contact the most lively artistic and cultural realities of the moment with the students and scholars of the University, often coming to involve them actively. In the same way, the will to open up to the city is strong, involving all citizens through the proposal of a very varied program.
Exhibitions and events promoted and organized by the MLAC take place in the spaces set aside in 1985 by the La Sapienza University of Rome, at the Rettorato Building, in the heart of the University City.
www.museolaboratorioartecontemporanea.it
On the occasion of organizing and carrying out the exhibition the MLAC offers a possibility of internship to students who have an interest in deepening in the field the craft of the historian and art critic in all facets. The internship foresees, in fact, an active commitment both during the preparation stage, with the possibility of working in close contact with the curators, and during the opening period of the exhibition, managing the guided tours, the reception of visitors and, last but not least , all the work related to the promotion of the exhibition, learning to manage the various online communication channels, from the blog to the main social networks.
opening: March 7, 2018 from 6pm
March 7 – 30, 2018 (tuesday-saturday 16-19 pm)
Double solo show by Marco Piantoni and Meri Tancredi.
“Aporia” was originally a Greek term, which has come to mean something like an insoluble contradiction in the homonym text of the French philosopher Derrida. This was the inspiration for the Curator Francesco Santaniello and the artists Meri Tancredi and Marco Piantoni for designing this exhibition, to be considered a sort of double solo exhibition. The two artists are documenting with a selection of their most recent works, their personal inquiry about knowledge, time and its perception, identity and identities, the multi-faceted codes of languages. Therefore, their art results in a plurivocal ensemble of medium, materials and expressive techniques.
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.
“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.
It’s called “Daily Life” and is a self-presentation project. The picture of Africa seen with the eyes of Africa itself. Lindeka Qampi‘s photographs will feature, from June 22, 2010, at Fifa Fan Fest, in the magnificent location of Piazza di Siena. The event, organized by the Centro Luigi Di Sarro and Erdmann Contemporary together with the Embassy of the Republic of South Africa in Rome, proposes the work of the South African photographer, known beyond the boundaries of his nation, just for the talent and heart that puts in every shot. Qampi lives in Cape Town, in Khayellitsha township, a huge suburb where more than a million people live.
In the Lindeka Qampi’s pictures formal areas and slums, but also gestures and glances in which misery, joy of life and great dignity are mixed: everything is enclosed in her shots that capture the most salient features of daily life, in a still poor context, but with deeply rooted habits and traditions. The selection chosen for the occasion portrays the passion of the black community for football.
The Daily Life project promoters will sell Qampi’s photos and will send the full proceeds to the artist to allow she to continue her work. With these funds, in fact, her self-presentation project will be able to go on. As the same said: “After graduation, I sold my clothes all my life, just like my mother did. I started taking photos only a few years ago. I started photographing my family. Then I went to weddings, though I was not invited, and sometimes the people were surprised, seeing that I was taking pictures and not knowing who I was. I did this to learn. ”
