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ARP 11th Edition. The project, which explores the notion of contemporary, kicks off with the “Hic et Nunc n.4” workshop, dedicated this year to the analysis of the White Cube. The winning works will be exhibited in Rome on October 1, 2025, followed by the Pack&Go circuit in Zagreb and Warsaw as part of the 21st GdC promoted by Amaci in Italy and Worldwide.

September 19, 2025

What does contemporary art mean and above all how (and to what extent) does the definition of contemporary adapt to the continuous change of time and history? What relationship does the creative idea maintain with the historical, social and environmental context? With the present, past and future? The new edition of the Arp itinerant training residency will delve into the notion of White Cube, or the idea of exhibition space.

ARP-Art Residency Project is a cultural and training and exchange programme in the field of visual arts, now in its 11th edition. The programme is conceived and promoted by the Documentation Center of Contemporary Artistic Research Luigi Di Sarro, with the contribution of Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation (MAECI) and other partners, aiming to provide the beneficiaries with an opportunity for training, career development and promotion.

The winners this year are Ludovica Tata as curator, and Monika Milosewski, Xanthe Scout Lardner-Burke, Pierpaolo Perrone, Anna Tappari e Jakub Zawadzki as artists.

The ARP – Pack & GO formula challenges young artists to conceive and create a work that represents its own idea of contemporaneity and is transportable everywhere, in order to allow maximum mobility. The work submitted by each participant was evaluated and chosen by a jury composed of Alessandra Atti Di Sarro, who directs the project, and professors Simone Ciglia and Carlotta Sylos Calò. A young curator was also selected and tasked to work in dialogue with the artists to create the concept for exhibition events.

The heart of this project formula is the Hic et Nunc workshop, conducted by teachers, researchers, curators and art historians. The workshop opens with the revealing of artworks hidden in the physical and emotional luggage of the participants and pushes the group to confront and discuss the most current themes of thought on the contemporary. Over the two weeks of talk, visits and meetings the “giving back” exhibition is born, with its first location at Center Luigi Di Sarro, offering new life and sense to the artworks, according to a multidisciplinary approach and respecting the exchange of ideas, techniques and languages.

Apertura del workshop Hic et Nunc n.4: svelamento e presa di parola

The first location for the public to meet the artists and see the works is then Rome, on 1st October at the h.6 pm with the opening of the first iteration of the exhibition. The Pack & Go circuit will continue with two international events, under the umbrella of the 21st Day of the Contemporary – promoted by Amaci, Maeci and Mic, in Italy and in the world – fully welcoming the theme for the 2025 edition which is “training, understood as a broad and plural process that crosses education, research, exchange of experiences and knowledge”.

Final Exhibition of ARP 11° Edizione at Luigi Di Sarro Museum on 1st Ottobre 2025

“Giving back” exhibitions are unique events of a single evening (or a little more), where the works are presented, inviting the public to enjoy the art and offer a feedback in conversation with the artists. This suggests a path that emphasizes the need for a kind of theoretical and practical nomadism – an approch that keeps contemporary artistic research open to new ideas and opportunities. The second iteration of the exhibition will take place at Kulturno Informativni Centar (KIC) in Zagreb on the 7th of October at 5pm, made possible by the contribution of the Italian Cultural Institute of Zagreb. The final event will follow on 10th October at 7pm at the Turnus Gallery in Warsaw, thanks to the contribution of the Italian Culture Institute of Warsaw.

This year’s Hic et Nunc workshop is conducted by Giulia Bordi, Simone Ciglia, Barbara D’Ambrosio, Matteo Piccioni, Carlotta Sylos Calò and Alessandra Troncone, with the participation of Michaela Limberis in Zagreb and Ilaria Bernardi in Warsaw.

Mundus Patet. The dialogue between Nature and human beings. An installation by Gianna Parisse curated by Flavia Parisi. Opening 14 December 2024, 6pm.

December 4, 2024

The exhibition presents Gianna Parisse’s work Mundus Patet, shown for the first time in Italy, an installation composed of different photographic, audio and video elements, which invites us to enter a poetic path of research on the meaning of a place: a house and all that concerns it before and after the Amatrice earthquake of 2016.

The installation inhabits the three rooms of the Luigi Di Sarro Center, with a composition of 171 images of stones collected from the location by the artist; a table, where two display cases containing 342 photographs of glass objects and branches collected from the apple orchard of the house are arranged; a video projection (4′ 43″), whose soundtrack spreads throughout the three exhibition spaces.

The work is composed of fragments aimed at suggesting the dichotomy between the subtle dialogue of man-made elements with elements of nature, and the silent rumbling of the delicate balance between man and nature.

Gianna Parisse’s meticulous work of researching and stitching together the numerous fragments using a portable scanner, a camera and audio recordings, results in an installation that, in its simplicity and essentialism, is immersive and engaging.

The title of the work, Mundus Patet, refers to an ancient Roman festival, which took place every year on the 24th of August at the Palatine Hill and celebrated the world of the dead, but more importantly that which is hidden underground, the soil, the earth. August 24 is also the date of the Amatrice earthquake. The land which embraced the house for many years, the land inhabited by the house, shifts, changes its course, and from a place that welcomes it becomes a place that encompasses it, that reappropriates what has emerged.

The artist’s work restores the intimacy of what has been submerged and investigates the intricacies and veins uncovered by the action of nature on man, and man on nature.

Gianna Parisse artist, architect, PhD, has dedicated herself to the research of the relationship between art and architecture for many years. More recently, she graduated in painting and specialized in graphic arts, particularly in the technology of paper materials, at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome. She has exhibited in Italy and abroad: Dresden, Germany; Seoul, Korea; and New York, USA.

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

July 1, 2024

The Centro Luigi Di Sarro presents the “POZI” project by the students of the Architecture and Design Course at the University of Cape Town (UCT), which arrives in Rome thanks to the collaboration with the Embassy of South Africa.

On display are the visionary works of the artists who participated in the project, conceived and led by the South African artist Giggs Kgole.

The project, accompanied by Kgole himself, demonstrates not only the skill of these budding architects, but also stimulates their ability to engage in global contexts and artistic expressions.

The collaboration with Giggs Kgole, active internationally, “symbolizes the bridge between local talent and global opportunities”, as Professor Buhle Mathole writes “the students explored and interpreted the essence of Kgole’s artistic world, developing environments that are more than simple work spaces: they are reflections of creative synergy and cultural dialogues.”

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.

December 16, 2022

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.

November 18, 2022

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.

September 12, 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

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

May 28, 2018

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)

May 27, 2018

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.