ARP-Art Residency Project 7th Edition is designed and promoted by Centro di Documentazione della Ricerca Artistica Contemporanea Luigi Di Sarro, Rome, Italy and aimed at young visual artists. ARP 7th Edition is realized with a contribution of MAECI – Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation and of Media Aid Onlus, with the partnership of Suburbia Satellite Granada, Spain, and Cape Town, South Africa, and with the collaboration of Rainbow Media NPO.
This call is an opportunity to encourage artistic production by emerging artists in the countries involved, Italy, Spain and South Africa .The call is open to young artists who are under 30 years old on the date of publication of the announcement. The applicants must be interested to share experience and be available to participate in all 3 different periods of residencies from November 2019 to April 2020.
The project offers:
residency in Cape Town South Africa residency in Granada Spain residency in Rome Italy (IMPORTANT: air tickets and accommodation will be provided by the organization, not food and personal expenses. Accommodation will be in multiple rooms.)
The 6 winners (2 artists from Italy, 2 from Spain and 2 from South Africa) will travel together and must be ready to interact with the group and participate to the project activities. The selected artists have to declare their intention to make a research project during the residencies and be ready to show the results as conclusion of each residency period and a final exhibition will be organized at Centro Luigi Di Sarro in Rome.
The entries will be evaluated by a jury of experts:
Jake Aikman, Satellite, Cape Town
Alessandra Atti Di Sarro, Centro Luigi Di Sarro, Rome
Khanya Mashabela, Art critic, Cape Town
Marisa Mancilla, Facultad de Bellas Artes, Universidad de Granada
Francesco Ozzola, Suburbia, Granada
Carlotta Sylos Calò, Università degli Studi di Tor Vergata, Roma
The applicants shall send their entries including the followings (please EU participants will send also english translation of their materials):
• Motivational letter and research proposal with declaration of acceptance of availability period of participation NOV 2019-April 2020 subject to penalty (in PDF); • Artist’s portfolio (in PDF);
• Artist’s curriculum vitae (in WORD) • Copy of valid passport (not expiring during 2020);
Send your entry by email before 10 August 2019, with object ARP 7ED CALL, to: progetti@centroluigidisarro.it
The project RETURN Berlin-Rome | Rome-Berlin, born from an idea by Susanne Kessler, is curated by the Centro Di Sarro in collaboration with the Verein Berliner Künstler, and under the patronage of the Istituto Italiano di Cultura in Berlin, with the intention of starting an exchange between the artistic realities of Italy and Germany through the dialogue between the two cities where the proposing associations are based. The project involves two parts: RETURN Berlin-Rome will exhibit the works of 5 German artists (Birgit Borggrebe, Jürgen Kellig, Susanne Kessler, Nele Probst, Marianne Stoll) and the works at the Centro Di Sarro, from 4 April to 4 May 2019 subsequently RETURN Rome-Berlin will see the exhibition of the works of 5 Italian artists (Andrea Aquilanti, Angelo Casciello, Veronica Montanino, Pamela Pintus, Sara Spizzichino) at the Galerie VBK-Verein Berliner Künstler, from 13 September to 6 October 2019.
Birgit Borggrebe.Born in Arnsberg, lives and works in Berlin. “The harsh and abstract character of our cities, the globalization of the modern world, are in contrast with what remains of Nature: here a tree, a herd of goats there, yet even the clouds themselves shine with suspicious colors. Borggrebe’s images are kaleidoscopes, poetic encounters with a nightmarish reality that could soon cover a large part of our planet. An aesthetic protest spreads from the paintings: that our world is not as it should be. Although it seems strange, the futuristic and apocalyptic landscapes depicted in his paintings are permeated by something that could be described as a “nostalgia for Paradise”. (Kai Michel, Zurich)
Jürgen Kellig. Born in Berlin where he lives and works. My drawings deal with rhythm and structure, in particular with the interaction between chaos and order, with the similarities between micro and macrocosm. Although reworked in a concrete way, these works can recall organic networks, as well as technological networks. (Jürgen Kellig) Jürgen Kellig draws freehand. The accuracy of its graphic elements does not follow a program, a pre-established scheme. It simulates the certainty of geometric laws, as in a free zone between micrological proximity and macrological distance: a subject already addressed by the author in previous works. Consequently, the titles of his drawings suggest conceptual clarity: “notation”, “score”, “interconnection”, “civilization”. They transform images into conceptual associations. Images that are the result of associative processes related to a graphic self-referentiality, fixing point as point, line as line and plan as plan or their arbitrary succession. (Wolfgang Siano, from the text in the catalog “Implacable, between line and line and beyond”)
Susanne Kessler. Born in Wuppertal in 1955, she lives and works in Berlin and Rome. She studied painting and graphics in Berlin at the Hochschule der Künste (UDK) and in London at the Royal College of Art (RCA). She prefers large installations, both indoors and outdoors. She has taught at California State University (CSU) and at the City University of New York (CUNY). Business trips have taken her to Ethiopia, Guatemala, Mali, Pakistan, India and Iran. All these places have left traces in her work. Her installations, sometimes ephemeral, are published in numerous catalogs and books. The former director of the Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum Raimund Stecker describes the artist’s method as follows: “Susanne Kessler constantly plays with separation and contact, closeness and distance, reality and illusion. The tangible is sometimes lost in the incomprehensible and the inconceivable becomes tangible, the chaotic becomes cosmic, the messy sometimes rational, and the certainties seem confused “.
Nele Probst. Since 1995 he lives and works in Berlin. From 1989 to 1993 he studied Visual Communication, Fachhochschule für Gestaltung, Mannheim with Prof. Günter Slabon, Prof. Wolf Magin, Prof. Roland Fürst, Prof. Eckhard Neumann. From 1993 to 1995 he lived and worked in Hamburg. In the works of Nele Probst, both in painting and in sculpture and installations, the additive process, understood as collection and thickening, plays an important role. The narrative moment and its associations are reflected both in the content and in the structure of his works. Color and material are in the foreground. His playful, experimental and sensitive relationship with materials and composition creates a sense of lightness and joy that characterizes his work and involves the viewer.
Marianne Stoll. Born in Darmstadt, lives and works in Berlin. She studied art history with Prof. Uwe M. Schneede, Ludwig Maximilian Universität of Munich. Through sculptures and drawings (…) Marianne Stoll explores in a playful but always serious, lucid and surprising way the many facets of living, of the house, of the origins – and of the constant threat of loss of a dwelling, of a shelter. In her compositions, Marianne recalls the question of how one should inhabit the World-Home, how to settle into this dwelling, which has not been handed over to humanity on a turnkey basis. With daring changes of perspective, the small and the large, the solid and the fragile, the dangerous and the harmless come together in the act of drawing (…) the graphic forms satisfy and nourish each other, in a strange analogy with creating a habitat for humans. (Dorothée Bauerle-Willert, from the text in the catalog “Dream Houses”)
B. Borggrebe, Unnamed-2
N. Probst, Ganze Seit Kleiner
J. Kellig, Muster 25-059
M. Stoll, oT
S. Kessler, Tutte le frontiere del mondo
Thanks to Giorgio Benni for photographs of the exhibition in slideshow.
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.
The show aims to investigate the different possibilities, both material and immaterial, of a very complex idea: identity at the time of the Millennium. Curated by Alessandra Atti Di Sarro, ARP – Art residency Project Director. The ARP project offers at the ICTAF an exhibition by four young artists who have travelled between Italy and South Africa to find the meaning of the Identity notion. South Africans will just be back from the residency period in Rome, and Italians will start their experience in Cape Town just with the Art Fair. What we propose is a fruitful collaboration between young artists who live in ‘geographic’ South and North, but in a global mixed world. So, the question is: what identity means if you hide the geographical ratio and only base your expression on feelings? This is the real issue at the present time, we promise you, everywhere and worldwide. Elena Giustozzi will look on small and finite landscapes to find in her oil painting the essence of what we often miss in our outlook and Caterina Silva creates with her canvases open images available to the interpretation of the observer, consequence of a process of deconstruction of language. She works with colours like a performative dance like Skumbuzo Vabaza does with his spray portraits that tell about the place humans have in the environment. Landscapes which are an intriguing forest in the vision of reality of Jordan Sweke, that seems to draw the life in which we can often feel lost. The big collaborative work by Jordan and Skumbuzo finally is a summary of what they’ve done during the recent residency in Rome, observing faces and nature around them, opening up space for the interrogation of our own identities as being natural or urban creatures.
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.
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
ARP-ART RESIDENCY PROJECT, designed by Centro di documentazione della ricerca artistica contemporanea Luigi Di Sarro, aims to promote and support emerging artistic talent in Italy and abroad and is part of a wider network of actions that Centro Di Sarro does through bilateral cultural exchanges in the field of visual arts. The programme has a contribution of MAECI, Italian Foreign Affaires Ministry, and the collaboration of Everard Read/CIRCA Gallery Cape Town.
ARP aims to promote mobility and knowledge of new cultural realities through the experimentation of materials, techniques and languages in contemporary art. The 6-weeks residency offers the opportunity for new creative experiences and technical and professional training, a human and artistic comparison, the study of the social, political and cultural history of the hosting country.
from left: Caterina Silva, Jordan Sweke, Skumbuzo Vabaza, Elena Giustozzi
Who are the 6th Edition between Italy and South Africa 2017/18 four winners:
ELENA GIUSTOZZI was born in Civitanova Marche (MC, Italy) in 1983. After the diploma at Science high school, she enrolled at the Academy of fine arts in Macerata, Italy, where in 2008/2009 she obtained a Bachelor degree in decoration. In 2011/2012 she ends the Master degree in painting. Since 2013 is teaching assistant at the Academy of Fine Arts in Macerata: Painting Techniques (three years), Techniques and Technologies of Contemporary Visual Arts, Painting Techniques and Technologies Lab (Master degree course). Her selected project is Little Finite Landscapes. Different perspectives of landscape. “The perspective discloses to our eyes, not strained to the horizon like a parallel look to the ground, but cut and collected in a finite space. What do we look at? What are we listening to? The road that opens in front of us, the noise of our footsteps. My walks in the garden tell the story of the time that passes by, the seasons that follow one another, new but always the same, the earth that changes, transforms and deforms to then return to resemble every variation“. www.elenagiustozzi.com
CATERINA SILVA (Rome, 1983) explores the links between power and language from often silent or pre-linguistic places in order to elude canonical structures of production of meaning. She studied sculpture in London (Camberwell College of Arts), philosophy and Scenography in Rome (La Sapienza, Ied). Her work ranges from painting to performance. “I see my painting practice as a struggle with language and its classification’s systems. I use painting to probe at the obscure spaces of the mind, that which is impossible to explain in words but which exists and materializes into matter and then object. I create open images available to the interpretation of the observer, consequence of a process of deconstruction of my own internal superstructure carried out through the matter of painting itself and its translation into choreographic experiments and performances”. www.caterinasilva.com
JORDAN SWEKE (born 1991, Johannesburg. Lives and works in Cape Town) nel 2014 Bachelor and Honours in Fine Art, Specialising in Painting. Michaelis School of Fine Art. University of Cape Town, South Africa. Exploring and reflecting upon spatial perceptions within the natural world, Jordan Sweke aims to create “a marriage between the mathematical and the abstract, the geometric and the organic.” Working in a wide array of visual media including video, land art and urban installations, photography and oil paint on canvas, Sweke identifies each for its tactile emphasis of the material elements of his natural surroundings.The perceptions that result in his artworks transgress the usual prescribed concepts of the environment, and serve to challenge them. Fresh and uncompromising, his rendering ‘manages to reflect a Romantic beauty, a synthesis of life, death and the sublime’ and all serve to illustrate and redefine his audiences engagement and understanding of conceptual natural space. www.jordansweke.com
SKUMBUZO VABAZA, popularly known as “Skubalisto” is a visual artist from Cape Town, South Africa. Skubalisto was born in Harare, Zimbabwe, (1987) where his parents had spent their twenties in exile. His mother was studying medicine and his father as an active member of the ANC. Who primarily creates portraits in a contemporary expressionist style, channeled through muralism, wood boards and canvas. His mediums range from spray paint, acrylic, oil pastel, charcoal and ink. Since his return to South Africa he has been touring on a quest to rediscover the landscape and a connection with his country through an artist’s eyes. “I am not a writer, painting is my weapon of choice. The makings of a true artist lie in the fact that an individual can create no matter what medium they use”. skubalisto.tumblr.com
Opening 19 September 2017, h.16.30 – Chiesa di Santa Chiara, Lovere (BG) Italy.
A conversation about art, a two-voices comparison, sometimes intimate and sometimes ironic: this is the ARP DOC, which tells about the V Edition of the exchange art residencies promoted by Centro Di Sarro with the contribution of MAECI-Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation and the collaboration of Everard Read/CIRCA Gallery in Cape Town, Ruth Prowse School of Art and Rainbow Media NPO. In the activities of ARP Italy / South Africa 2015-2017, 6 young people were involved: the two artists selected to participate in the residencies, two assistant curators who assisted them and two filmmakers who made the documentary: Angelica Farinelli, who filmed and organized the material, and Giorgio Cristiano, who edited the 25 minutes movie with tells, through the voices of Valentina Colella and Zwelethu Machepha, what is ARP.
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At the 20th edition of the short film International Festival of “shortLovere” (Lovere, BG), there is the Doc, but also THE POSSIBILITIES OF A FLIGHT, a site specific that tests, as an extra step of the path, Valentina Colella and Emanuele Meschini, who as assistant curator has followed the work of Machepa in Rome, concluding in the best way the dialogue between the participants in the project. “ARP is not just a travel and training program, we have the ambition that it is an opportunity for human and professional growth, made up of the ability to compare and relate, to discover and consolidate one’s own creativity”, explains Alessandra Atti Di Sarro, ARP’s artistic director and vice-president of the Centro Di Sarro, who conceived it.
The exhibition will remain open throughout the duration of the Festival, from September 19 until September 23 at the following times: 4.30 – 8.30 pm at the Church of Santa Chiara, via S. Maria, Lovere, Bergamo. School visits by reservation only.
from left: Caterina Silva, Jordan Sweke, Skumbuzo Vabaza, Elena Giustozzi
