The winners of the 10th edition of the ARP-Art Residency Project, the residency program created with the contribution of the MAECI and the Italian Cultural Institutes.

POZI: places and landscapes of tomorrow. Curated by Giggs Kgole, with a text by Buhle Mathole. From 2 to 6 July 2024.

The ephemeral memory of the man-nature relationship in the works of Anna Maria D’Addario and the Citti/Tamburrini duo. A project in collaboration with Grenze-Arsenali Fotografici and Officine Fotografiche. Vernissage 4 Maggio h.18,30

Anna Maria Antoinette D’Addario is an Italian-Australian photographic artist, writer and book maker. Her work revolves around the investigation and resurrection of memory and our emotional connection to place. She has published two artist books, Farewell Angelina (2018) and Deep in Their Roots, All Flowers Keep the Light (ceiba Editions 2019). Anna holds a MFA in Fine Art, Sydney College of the Arts, and is a current PhD candidate at Monash University in Fine Art.

This work began as a response to the sudden and violent death of my sister in 2015 and gradually became a path to live and make sense of life again. It was an act of resistance, an attempt to speak in the face of silence. With her murder, time stopped, all became fractured and fragmented. I, together with my mother and all who loved her, were drawn into an obscure world without her, a world broken and changed.

As children my sister and I spent hours in the bush, and by the ocean. After her loss I sought to regain the connection to the landscape that existed in my memory and reflected our origins, a desire to be clear again in my understanding of it. Landscape endures. It takes and hold its form. Landscape speaks in my work, in part, in its resilience, of survival in the present and for survival of the past; it holds memories; it speaks of connections, but it also speaks of violence and irretrievable loss. It represents then, continuity and also absence, it stands for what can never be lost and for all that has been lost; it embodies trauma and it embodies endu- rance, the persistence of which no violence can erase.

My sister was thirty-five when her life was taken. Her future has been lost and the past and our childhood has been altered and affected. The knowledge and weight of our history has only one side now, one gaze, and one recollection. Here I accompany my sister in story, photos of myself as a child mirror and connect with those of Daniela. We break silence together, identities entwined.

This project was conceived through the creation of an artist’s book, Farewell Angelina, and a successive photo book, Deep in Their Roots, All Flower Keep the Light. (Anna Maria Antoinette D’Addario)

What is then left of the landscape when the people who loved it, lived in it, are no longer there? Powerlessness and absence do not turn a place into a view, a space into a landscape.
Representation, which attempts to repair the trauma of loss, cannot be a layer of memory above others.

“My spaces are fragile: time will consume them, destroy them: nothing will no longer resemble what it was,” wrote Georges Perec. If memory can erase, trauma can instead hold the glimpse of what was. Memories reinvent, narrate, betray, trauma instead fixes. The fracture pierces the veil of the landscape, not repairs it. The violent tear of loss cannot but lacerate representation – even of the usual landscape – and open the Montale’s wonder. (Simone Azzoni)

Giordana Citti was born in Rome in 1993. In 2012, she began attending evening courses in photography and darkroom printing at Officine Fotografiche, training with te- acher Samantha Marenzi. After graduating in “History and conservation of the artistic and archaeological heritage”, he decided to devote himself full-time to photography by enrolling in the Biennial School of Photography at Officine Fotografiche Roma. He first became a darkroom assistant and later refined his professional training by starting an internship at Davide di Gianni’s Digid’a Art Prints workshop in Rome. He currently teaches darkroom courses at Officine Fotografiche, attends the Faculty of “Conservation and Restoration of Cultural Heritage”, concerning the restoration of book and photographic material, at the University of Rome Tor Vergata and works in the photographic archives of the National Film Library of the Experimental Centre of Cinematography in Rome.In 2021 he was among the ten artists selected to take part in the photography masterclass Contatto of the Istituto Luce Cinecittà and TWM Factory. He has taken part in many exhibitions in recent years: Of Analogica on the occasion of Fotoleggendo (2016), Female in March, a group exhibition of female photographers at Lanificio (2018), Temporary Wall, an open air exhibition at Fotoleggendo (2018), The Family of no Man for Arles cosmos (2018), In Praise of Imperfection at Fondamenta gallery (2019), GeneraHumana on the occasion of the Genera Festival (2019) in Cister- nino, Walk With Women on the occasion of the MedFilmFestival in Rome (2019), Hier, mais aussi aujourd’hui, solo exhibition at the Fusion Art Gallery in Turin (2020), The Darkroom Projet Otto, group exhibition curated by Luciano Corvaglia, at the Palazzo Doria Pamphilj in San Martino al Cimino (2020), Contatto, at WeGil (2021), MarteLive, national finalist Biennale MarteLive at Planet Roma (2021), Premio Daniela Semprebene, exhibition of the winners of the visual arts sections MarteLive Lazio 2021, at the ART G. A.P. Gallery, Rome (2022), Tevere Art Gallery/Arles 2022, collective photographic exhibition curated by Luciano Corvaglia on the occasion of Les Rencontres d’Arles, in “Arles Exposition-Off”(2022), MarteLive: Lo spettacolo totale, national finalist Biennale MarteLive, at Qube, Rome (2022), Venere Vs Medusa on the occasion of Paratissima, at Cavallerizza Torino (2023).

Annalaura Tamburrini was born in Fasano in 1994. She trained as a photographer at the “Officine Fotografiche” school in Rome where, during the period from 2015 to 2019, she deepened her knowledge of darkroom practices, black and white printing and ancient printing techniques under the guidance of teacher Samantha Marenzi. During this path, she has the opportunity to exhibit and curate various photographic projects within the local independent scene. In June 2017, during the international photo- graphy festival ‘FotoLeggendo’, she participates in the group exhibition ‘Analogica 2017’. In February 2018, she presents the project “Sono una strega” at the Cinema Palazzo Occupato in Rome as part of the group exhibition “Tecne”. In May 2018, she co-curates the exhibition cycle “Analogies”, presented at the Officine Fotografiche school in Rome. In the same month, she exhibited the project ‘Sono una strega’ within the same cycle. Also in May 2018, she co-curates the exhibition ‘Nel corpo dell’immagine’, part of the international photography festival ‘FotoLeggendo’ in Rome. In February 2019, he took part in the group exhibition ‘In Praise of Imperfection’ with the project ‘Moral to Censorship’ at the Inside Art Gallery in Rome. In August 2019, she curates the international group exhibition ‘GeneraHumana’ at the Torre Civica in Cisternino. From 2020, after moving to Turin, she collaborates with the cultural association Mostro Collettivo. From 2023 she is represented by the Raw Messina gallery in Rome and collaborates actively with Gabriele Stabile. In January 2024 she exhibits in Bologna, in the context of the Arte Fiera fuoriisalone, during the Booming Art Show in an exhibition curated by Raw Messina, entitled ‘La vita sognata dagli angeli’.

The Anima Naturae project aims to portray the contrast between the fleeting es- sence of humanity and the timeless spirit of nature.
Each diptych pairs a weathered stone portrait, bearing the marks of time, mold, and the relentless forces of weathering, with an untouched photograph capturing the pristine landscape. The stone portrait serves as a tangible testament to the vulnerability of the human soul over time, narrating a story of transience conti- nually shaped by transformative elements in its natural habitat. On the flip side, earth unfolds as the epicenter of an eternal animation of nature, presenting an ideal and idyllic realm that underscores primordial soul and spirituality, untouched by human manipulation.

Through this visual reflection, viewers are invited to contemplate the duality of fragility and strength, transience and persistence, fostering a profound aware- ness of the intricate connections between humanity and the broader living world. Anima Naturae emerges as a conceptual bridge, blurring the boundaries betwe- en human finiteness and the boundless vitality of nature, illustrating how, despite human endeavors, we inevitably yield to the unstoppable power of the natural world, prompting reflection on the sustainability of our interactions with the planet. All photographs are made with black and white analog film [portraits with 135mm, landscapes with 120mm]. (Giordana Citti and Annalaura Tamburrini)

CROSSING BORDERS, a project by Karmen Corak, Fariba Karimi, Gianna Parisse and Claudia Hyunsook Son. From April 15th to May 13th 2023 the work of four female artists from Korea, Iran, Italy and Slovenia to look at today’s world and its aberrations.

Opening 15 Aprile h.18,00.

Four women with different life stories, four artists with various and stratified cultural roots, a choral work that joins the personal and interdisciplinary research of each, thus identifying a common path, in themes, poetics and in the dialogue of practices. A project that ranges between different materials and mediums, but which gives us a unitary thought on the contemporary.

CROSSING BORDERS is a creative dialogue between Karmen Corak (Slovenia), Fariba Karimi (Iran), Gianna Parisse (Italy) and Claudia Hyunsook Son (South Korea), which culminates in a large wall made up of 273 works, assembled by the four artists according to a of visual assonances.

Gianna Parisse writes on behalf of the group: “The project stems from the desire to work together, to formulate a collective project by four female artists of different nationalities, at a time when separations, walls, wars and violence annihilate the our daily life and everything seems to fall into the abyss.

This common work, in the feminine, is expressed with a collective artifact that is made up of small works on paper, an emotional manifesto of combinations and synergies and in the presentation of single works that in a dimension closer to reality, align with the need to defend what is most fragile. Starting from the links between the dominion over nature and its exploitation and the oppression of the fragile and of women with their submission”.

The project is carried out under the patronage of the Slovenian Embassy in Rome and the Korean Culture Center.

  Karmen Corak

Murska Sobota, Slovenia, is an Italian artist living between Venice, Rome and Marseille. She studied Graphic Arts in Croatia and Paper Conservation in Italy, Japan and Austria. Photography became very soon her expressive medium, she attended workshops with Rinko Kawauchi and Hans-Christian Schink. She was invited to group and solo exhibitions in Croatia, France, Germany, Japan, Italy, Russia, Slovenia, Spain, Hungary and the USA, receiving international awards in Fine Art Photography in Paris, Malaga and Berlin. Her works are in public collections in Italy, Slovenia and Japan. She developed contemporary art exhibition projects for public and private institutions. Her photography records the constant flow of things and gives them another order of existence. The particular choice of the paper support elevates its aesthetic qualities and its ability to evoke an exile from reality and dislocate it in other sphere of perception. 

Gianna Parisse

Rome Italy. Architect, artist with PhD in Architectural Design. She founded the Roman section of Studio Archea, conceiving architectural research from theoretical and design point of view as a relationship between art and architecture. More recently she graduated at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome in Painting, with a specialization in Technology of paper materials. She participates to exhibitions in Italy and abroad. Reflections on the terrestrial and celestial landscape, on the cartographies, on the perceptive and physical phenomena in which we are immersed, are accompanied by transformations, dissolutions, disappearances of things and nature, or rather circular thoughts between life and death, time and memory. The medium could be different from time to time, from paper and self-produced natural colors, digitally processed images, photography, to shooting with a scanner. Although the paper support, a living, sensitive, impressionable material, is always present.

Fariba Karimi

Tabriz, Iran. Since 2009 she lives and works in Rome. She was trained at the High School of Art in Tehran and graduated in Painting at the University of Art in Tehran, in 2006. Later in 2014 she graduated in Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome. Since 2003 she has participated to numerous group and solo exhibitions and various artistic events in Iran, Italy and abroad. Her abstract painting comes from the depths, from a mysterious and hidden world, whose contents she draws on through the mediation of the sign. Fast and incisive. A poetic tale derives from it, a lyrical language that takes shape in new forms and new writings. More recently, the incisive graphic and pictorial signs furrow the photographic images of fragments of her body, as if to recall the cancellations that are inflicted daily on Iranian rights and women.

          Claudia Hyunsook Son

Graduated in the Pedagogy of Art in Seoul, she went on to complete a specialization in Art Education and degree in Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, as well as a masters in the Cultural patrimony of the Church at the Pontifical Gregorian University. She has taken part in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Europe, Asia and the United States of America. She lives and works in Rome and Seoul. Her art creates images in the space where the cultures of the East and West meet. As she works, she experiments with different technique sand methods to add to the physical images the motives that are her inner inspiration. Her images renew them-selves through time, transparency and emptiness, so that through movement the journey of consciousness become endless.

VAA 3rd Edition. The 10 finalists screened at the UJ Arts Centre. Journey to discover the Johannesburg art scene for the Italian winner Giulia Savorani who presented her work together with Liza Grobler who won the selection for South Africa.

The second event to promote the works selected for the third edition of the VIDEO ART AWARDS took place on 9 December 2022. Second opportunity for the two winners Liza Grobler and Giulia Savorani to meet and promote the other 8 finalists of the award dedicated to video art created by the Di Sarro Center with the support of the Italian Cultural Institute of Pretoria and the Consulate General of Italy in Johannesburg, South Africa and the Grenze Festival in Verona, Italy.

For Giulia Savorani it was an opportunity to discover Johannesburg’s lively art scene, for a week after the screening event she was in fact, thanks to the award, able to visit museums, research centres, artists’ studios and galleries as well as historical and traditions of the country of Nelson Mandela thus discovering its history and current events.

The folds of the void, is the exhibition that concludes the CL/PA – the travel project created thanks to the support of the Italian Council (X Edition 2021). Giulia Fumagalli + Aran Ndimurwanko. Opening 19 November 2022 h.17-20.

How to tell two distant places after having had an intense experience of them?
What shapes can they take? What in them can be considered full?
What, instead, empty? And how these entities so different can dialogue?

These are some of the questions that revolve around The folds of the void, the exhibition by Giulia Fumagalli (Carate Brianza – MI, 1990) with Aran Ndimurwanko (Trento, 1991) which take place at the Centro Luigi Di Sarro in Rome, from 19 November to 23 December 2022. Critical text by Alice Evangelisti.

It is a heterogeneous selection of works resulting from the double residency that the two artists experienced during the spring 2022, first in Chile and then in Panama.
The result is thus their personal and artistic vision of these two places, geographically close, but completely at the antipodes. On the one hand, the Chilean landscape, visually open due to the immense desert expanse, which, although empty, is capable of triggering continuous connections. On the other hand, the Panamanian one, visually closed due to the presence of the impenetrable jungle, which fills the eyes and the mind, overpopulating them with images.

Two completely opposite experiences, which mutually activate sensations of fullness and
of emptiness, opposing them but at the same time making them also become the consequence of the other. Thus, focusing on the extrinsic and intrinsic characteristics of these two places, Fumagalli and Ndimurwanko give their interpretation. If Fumagalli investigates two natural elements water and air – which materialize in light and poetic installations able to evoke their presence, Ndimurwanko shapes the earth, giving life to works full of daily rituals.

The exhibition is part of the project CL/PA – the travel by Giulia Fumagalli, created thanks to the support of the Italian Council (X edition, 2021), a program for the international promotion of Italian art of the General Directorate for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture.

Luigi Di Sarro. Theater in the form of photography, curated by Lorenzo Mango. Italian Cultural Institute Belgrade for the 15th Contemporary Art Day Amaci-Maeci. 3-22 October 2019.

The Italian Cultural Institute of Belgrade presents Luigi Di Sarro. Theater in the form of photography, an exhibition dedicated to Luigi Di Sarro, an artist active in the Sixties and Seventies, a period that today is being brought to the attention of critics for the innovative thrusts brought to contemporary art. The exhibition, organized on the occasion of the forty-year anniversary of the artist’s death in collaboration with the Documentation Center of Contemporary Artistic Research Luigi Di Sarro, is curated by Prof. Lorenzo Mango of the University of Naples “L’Orientale” and will be opened at the Italian Cultural Institute of Belgrade on October 3rd 2019 at 6.30 pm, where it will remain on show until October 22nd.

IIC Belgrade participates with this event in the Day of the Contemporary, promoted by AMACI that in the last editions, with the collaboration started by the Mibac with Maeci, also involves Embassies, Consulates and Italian Cultural Institutes abroad in organizing events for the enhancement of contemporary Italian art and culture.

The inauguration will be preceded by the presentation of the book by Carla Cucchiarelli That night in Rome, a biography of the artist who died prematurely, only thirty-seven in 1979, killed for a fatal misunderstanding in the tense climate of the Seventies in Italy.

The international promotion project linked to the forty years from the death, is inspired by an intuition of the same Di Sarro – who in a pen drawing had indicated places on the terrestrial globe “Rome, New York, Tokyo and … who knows where” -, was promoted and realized in numerous locations abroad and after the Belgrade stop will continue for other exhibitions in the world.

https://iicbelgrado.esteri.it/iic_belgrado/it/gli_eventi/calendario/2019/10/mostra-luigi-di-sarro-teatro-in.html

SEGNI. Photographs, drawings and sculptures by Luigi Di Sarro, curated by Carlotta Sylos Calò. 11 October- 14 November 2018 MLAC – Museo Laboratorio di Arte Contemporanea, Rome

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.

 

LUIGI DI SARRO.The living body of painting, curated by Paola Ballesi. June 7th-September 7th, 2018. Istituto Italiano di Cultura in Cologne

Following the stage on Stuttgart, the exhibition LUIGI DI SARRO.The living body of painting, curated by Paola Ballesi, opens in the spaces of the Istituto Italiano di Cultura in Cologne. The exhibition continues the celebrations of the 40th anniversary of the death of Luigi Di Sarro.

“Di Sarro’s creativity investigates various artistic and scientific fields, such as painting, philosophy, poetry, mathematics, technology, which involved the aspects of the process more than those related to representativeness. His approach is rather analytical. We note that this diversity of interests is the result of his great curiosity and desire to deepen the issues he was dealing with. In the cycle of the gouaches of 1964 he repeated the motif of the square, and in the pictures partially realized with the “dripping” process, in which he sprays the canvas with color, he shows two different procedures, two opposite principles: repetitiveness and expressiveness. In his oil and acrylic paintings instead he experiments and plays with the three-dimensionality on the surface. Today his works offer a richness and a stratified meaning, which in the course of time have lost nothing of their artistic potential”, writes Maria Mazza, Director of IIC Cologne in the Prologue of the catalogue which offers a curatorial note and a large critical anthology.

On show 38 painting realized by Di Sarro between the Sixties and the Seventies with various techniques from gouache to oil, acrylic and mixed media that “decline the phenomenology of the sign born from the gesture of the body” – as Paola Ballesi explains – “With the ‘spelling’ of the body, understood in its variations, ranging from the physical presence of the painter on the canvas through the unique and continuous sign, to the ‘figuration’ of the body felt as a map of energy, Di Sarro subtracts the creation at each formal stylization. Perhaps he would have preferred, as an artist-physician, to make the language of art become a living body that acts and reacts in contact with new and different stimuli each time”.

SEGNI disegni e fotografie di Luigi Di Sarro, curated by Carlotta Sylos Calò – Istituto Italiano di Cultura in Warsaw (2018, May 30th-June 28th) and Krakow (2018, July 6th-September 6th)

The celebrations on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the death of Luigi Di Sarro go on with a series of events in Italy and abroad and the aim of spreading and deepening a multifaceted artistic production that is still considered highly topical today.

The tribute to Luigi Di Sarro, an artist active in the Sixties and Seventies – a period that is now being brought to the attention of the critics for the innovative pushes into contemporary art – wants to highlight his strong experimental vocation. An attitude and a need on the part of the artist who proceeded experimenting in all the fields and in all the expressive techniques with which he worked (besides photography, painting, drawing, sculpture and graphics). Italo Zannier writes in an essay on Di Sarro’s photographic research: […] but what is experimentation if not the result initiated by an idea? They are also the imprecise ‘photodynamics’ of Bragaglia as the ‘strobophotographies’, the ‘luminographies’, the ‘chronophotographies’, the “corporal” sequences of Luigi Di Sarro. These images are first of all results, not “trials”, as the “experiments” would be like. Experimentation is in fact implicit in doing and we do not know where it leads and when it will complete, if it will end; and woe, however, if we were to conclude, because every phase of it is already a result. […] Luigi Di Sarro – photographer, has realized his visual rite with an extraordinary expressive happiness, even lucid and dense but of irony, dramatic also, disturbing […]. (in I. Zannier, Luigi Di Sarro) Discovering Photography, 2001.)

In addition to the material kept in the Historical Archive dedicated to the artist, two substantial collections of photographic works are kept at the National Gallery of Modern Art and the National Institute for Graphics in Rome. Moreover, in 2009, some of the artist’s photographic works were acquired in the collection, and consequently also exhibited, in Paris by the Pompidou Center. The acquisition was curated by Quentin Bajac.

The ongoing archiving of the amount of work that the artist has left allows today to deepen and connect many issues, in the immediate not obvious. Numerous so far are the scholars who wrote about Di Sarro, who have studied a large part of his production, and many more are still under study. The occasion of the anniversary is to be a new and prolific opportunity to analyze a work that is increasingly revealed as a broad theorem argued in many directions, as if it were an encyclopedic atlas.

The exhibition SEGNI disegni e fotografie di Luigi Di Sarro curated by Carlotta Sylos Calò for the spaces of the Italian Institute of Culture in Warsaw and Krakow, in Poland,  is one of the many possible research about the links that Di Sarro studied and experimented. In the premises of IIC Warsaw are exposed some series of experimental photographs, a group of drawings and some etchings produced at the turn of the ’60s and’ 70s. 

Di Sarro’s research, writes the curator in the catalog published by the italian Institute of Culture: “became radicalized in terms of his experimental approach – dictated in part by his dual profession, given that Di Sarro is not only an artist but also a physician – and matured in terms of his irreverent use of materials (netting, bitumen, iron rods, brushes, pencils, photography) that could bring out particular evocations in the forms he created. In this context, the sign in particular took on an extraordinary power to generate forms and spaces, still (but now more consciously) without any real caesura between abstraction and figuration, thanks to the enduringly transversal nature of his approach to techniques”.

Following  the show and opening at IIC CRACOVIA (July 6th-September 6th 2018) pictures.

Following the Opening at IIC Warsaw (30 May-28 June 2018) pictures.