ARP 9Edition. The HIC ET NUNC n.2 workshop continues the investigation into the idea of the contemporary. At the center of the meetings are the 6 winners of the residency program created with the contribution of the MAECI. The final exhibition on 7 October 2023 for the 19th GdC Amaci.

A work that reflects the contemporary to be carried with you in hand luggage. This is the challenge for 5 winning artists and a curator of the ninth edition of the ARP – PACK AND GO competition: a residency-workshop that questions and investigates the notion of the contemporary.

ARP – Art Residency Project is the artistic residency programme, conceived and created by the Luigi Di Sarro Centre, with the aim of promoting a disposition towards intercultural dialogue and the comparison of practices and methods in the world of art too. For its ninth edition it once again proposed the PACK AND GO formula, that is, the challenge of conceiving and creating a work that represents one’s idea of contemporaneity and which is easily transportable to allow maximum mobility.

We live in difficult years and even for artists, especially emerging young people, the slowdown, if not the forced blockade, of social relations created by the covid-19 pandemic, wars and the economic crisis has represented and represents an obstacle. The ARP program has always worked by promoting educational trips, but with this formula it wants to go further and attempt to cross not only geographical borders, but also emotional ones.

It was thought that a project that started from the analysis of the idea of the contemporary would offer fertile ground for returning to dialogue, confrontation, opposition and sharing.

The young artists selected Samela Balazi, Beatrice Caruso, Cheriese Dilrajh, Anna Martynenko and Mirino Mwandiambira and Azzurra Pizzi as curator come from European, Balkan and African countries.

The jury that selects the artists is made up of Alessandra Atti Di Sarro, Simone Ciglia and Carlotta Sylos Calò.

The Hic et Nunc workshop n.2 will be attended among others experts by Angelo Capasso, Simone Ciglia, Heidi Erdmann, Carlotta Sylos Calò, Matteo Piccioni and Alessandra Troncone, curated by Alessandra Atti Di Sarro.

Metamorphosis, Paola Tassetti. On show the work of the winner of the 5th edition of the Pannaggi / New Generations Prize. June 8-28, 2023.

Works that give space to a vision of the world that reconstructs the ancient powerful link between the microcosm and the macrocosm, between man and nature, art and science. Metamorphosis is the title of the exhibition of Paola Tassetti‘s works, curated by Loretta Fabrizi, that offers an artistic journey that arises from an innate fascination and an in-depth study of the theme of metamorphosis, that change in reality given by the inexorable passing of time which was also one of the reasons most intriguing and investigated literary, artistic and philosophical in every historical period. In her search for a new reality in movement, the recovery of the past, a treasure of ancient knowledge, myths and rituals that allow the artist to travel the roads of the future with more awareness. The artist therefore takes her cue from the pioneering medical studies of Andrea Vesàlio, from her extraordinary anatomical tables, created in Venice by the artists of the school of Tiziano Vecellio. Thus were born her Psychogeographies, anatomical tables and composite installations of fragments and finds that tell cross-sections of flowery metamorphoses both on the canvases and in the sculptures.

Centro Luigi di Sarro, in collaboration with CeSMa (Centro Studi Marche) and in line with its more than forty years of promotion of young talents at national and international level, welcomes again the Pannaggi Award / New Generation 2022 V edition, an initiative of the organization “Amici di Palazzo Buonaccorsi” of Macerata, in support of young artists and for the promotion of contemporary art.

The Jury composed by Paola Ballesi, Katiuscia Cassetta, Nikla Cingolani, Loretta Fabrizi, Paolo Gobbi, Marina Mentoni, Mauro Mazziero, Giuliana Pascucci, Massimo Vitangeli, awarded the prize to the young artist from Civitanova Paola Tassetti, with the following motivation: “a multidisciplinary artist with many interests who makes his art a lifestyle in the incessant search for the sources of knowledge and doing, which find the highest cultural expression in the skilful manipulation of matter and forms”.

Paola Tassetti (Civitanova Marche Alta, 1984) studied art, graduated in architecture and later specialized in the research of the Italian landscape. She continues her artistic training in Kyoto at the Tomohiro Hata Architect and Associates studio and in London at the Uncommon Studio Creative.

Her multidisciplinary activity experiences the borderlands between different sciences: biology, botany, taxonomy, anatomy, archeology, anthropology, sociology, psychology and architecture.

She reconciles her interest in landscape with research on human anatomy with which she feeds her creative expression made up of diaries, drawings, site specific installations, surreal paintings, digital collages, digital art, material painting, screen printing, taxonomic collections, serial installations and performances where the body becomes a vehicle for experimentation and a ground for exchange between interiority and reality.

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.

Corpus. The photographic research of Samantha Marenzi. Curated by Simone Azzoni and Marco Rapaccini. 11 March – 1 April 2023

Vernissage 11 Marzo 2023 ore 18,00. La mostra è organizzata dal Centro Di Sarro con Grenze Arsenali Fotografici (Verona) e Officine Fotografiche (Roma).

Samantha Marenzi, professor at the DAMS of the Roma 3 University, specializes in analogue photography and manual printing techniques. Corpus is a project in three stages of transition, three alchemical stages, three linguistic and material nuclei that tell the relationship between image and Butō, photography and dance, visual arts and performing arts. “I have always used only analogue photography, and with projects linked to presence and corporeity I began my experimentation with ancient printing techniques. A slow and long process of image creation, organic to the times and silences of the work on the body, a corpus”. In a never documentary relationship between scene and photography, the image is part of the creative process as a diagnosis and scan of movement, as a linguistic translation, as a rhythmic score “in” and “on” the black. The images develop the Butō of the Lios group, of La Maison du Butoh Blanc, but also what Marenzi experienced in Japan following Akira Kasai, a dancer who participated in the foundation of Butō and who then crossed the cultures and practices of ‘East and West. Fragments of projects exhibited in numerous Italian events and foyers find themselves in dialogue at the Centro Luigi Di Sarro together with unpublished works specially printed for Corpus. Also on display is the artist’s latest work with the performer Alessandra Cristiani, a trilogy of three projects for as many shows and exhibitions: one dedicated to Schiele and made in cyanotype, one to Bacon and made in Polaroid, the last to Rodin in silver salt emulsion on paper and stone. “The images constitute both the sources and the destinations of the three performances. Each solo is linked to a photographic project which investigates the variations of its corporeity stimulated by the work of the three chosen artists and experiments with the contaminations between different techniques. In all three stages we worked in collaboration with Alberto Canu, who uses digital and usually shoots the shows, in rehearsal or live”.

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.

ARP 8 Edition. Valona, Rome and Amsterdam are the cities involved in the itinerary of the new PACK AND GO formula. This year the program hosts 6 young people from Belgium, Germany, South Africa and Italy who have won the traveling residency created with the contribution of Maeci.

An artwork that declines the contemporary and to take with you in a hand luggage. This is the bet for 5 winning artists and one curator of the ARP PACK AND GO competition.
The residency program of the Centro Luigi Di Sarro is aimed at young people under 30 and is carried out with the contribution of Youth Exchanges from MAECI and other partners. A traveling workshop between Rome, Valona and Amsterdam to discuss and investigate the notion of contemporary.

What does contemporary art mean and, above all, how and how much can the definition of contemporary be adapted to the continuous change of time and history? 

The last few years have confronted us with the need to reflect on the Hic et Nunc, suddenly erasing that sense of stability that was associated with the idea of the contemporary era, our contemporary, peaceful and progressive era. 

In short, is history perhaps putting us in front of a new era? So will the future be the new contemporary? And how will art be able to respond to these mutations?

These are the issues on which the ARP program intends to dialogue. It will start in Vlore in Albania where the Consulate General of Italy will host the first meeting of the winners of the Art Residency Project for a Meet up that will take place on October 14, on the occasion of the 18th Amaci-Maeci Contemporary Day.
Artan Shabani, art historian, one of the founders of the Albanian Gallery of Art, will meet the curator Veronica Budini and the artists Mpumelelo Buthelezi, Florinda Ciucio, Amelia Kuhlmann, Svenia Jarisch and Giampaolo Parrilla, accompanied by Alessandra Atti Di Sarro, vice president of the Centro Luigi Di Sarro. On show the works selected for PACK AND GO that will come out of the luggage for the first time to ignite the debate.

The group will then return to Italy, to Rome, where the workshop will take place at the Luigi Di Sarro Center: 10 intense days of meetings, lessons, workshops and visits to museums and archaeological sites to continue to search for that connection that binds the ancient to the modern, the past to the future and thus to place one’s own contemporaneity in a broader reflection. To conclude the residency, the works of PACK AND GO, focused by the dialogue during the workshop, will return to the exhibition to question the public. The appointment with this second Meet up is for 25 October at the Centro Di Sarro Center, in Rome.

The conclusion will be held in Amsterdam, where the group will be hosted by the Italian Cultural Institute, to explore the city, its museums and its history. The Meet up with the public and the Dutch art scene will take place on 29 October.

ARP is an artistic residency program, conceived and implemented by the Centro Luigi Di Sarro, with the contribution of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and other partners. For its 8th edition, it has promoted the PACK AND GO formula, that is the bet to conceive and create an artwork that represents the idea of contemporary and that can be carried in a hand luggage to allow maximum mobility.
The Consulate General of Italy in Vlore, the Italian Cultural Institute in Amsterdam, Mediaaid Onlus and Rainbow Media NPO participate in supporting this 8° edition.

The jury of the ARP PACK AND GO competition, which selected the 6 young people from European, Balkan and Southern African countries, was composed of Alessandra Atti Di Sarro, Simone Ciglia University of Oregon USA and Carlotta Sylos Calo ‘University of Rome Tor Vergata.