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ARP Art Residency Project – INSTAGRAM DIARY
April 6, 2018
Author: admin3
LUCA COCLITE and KAMYAR BINESHTARIG WIN THE VAA-VIDEO ART AWARD
March 26, 2018
The award ceremony took place a few hours ago in a busy, crowded and happy Italian Art Day at the Tsoga Centre in Philippi, Cape Town.
The event is organized by the Centro Luigi Di Sarro with the contribution of the Istituto Italiano di Cultura in Pretoria and the collaboration of Rainbow Media NPO and will offer the participants the opportunity to discover the vibrant artistic scene of the township in a succession of video projections inside the community centre in Samora Machel, managed by the youth of Ubuntubethu.
On the four screens the 10 short films, selected by the jury, will run: and during the Art Day the winner of the Italian section was presented: Luca Coclite, the italian filmmaker who got the South Africa trip award and landed in Cape Town to take part in the award ceremony. Also on show are the finalists of the South African section whose winner Kamyar Bineshtarig will get the award trip to Italy to participate in September at the International Short Film Festival CortoLovere on Lake Iseo, during which the finalist 10 videos will be shown again.
Luca Coclite, winner for the Italian category, comes from Gagliano del Capo, near Lecce. His artwork, Solitary Gardens, is inspired by the work of Elaine Summers, Fantastic Gardens (1964). The video is split into three different parts, moving from ‘giardino’ (garden), a metaphor of someone who is seeking happiness and perfection, and taking us through a great variety of well-known places in New York city representing an individualistic and solitary picture of human condition. The movie is made up of ‘Human Botanical Garden’, ‘One day everything you see will be invisible’ and ‘Anti-Souvenir’, portraying an unstable reality flowing from an earthly paradise to an illusion. Here, the solitude from the Winter Garden Atrium, the artificiality from the Prospect Park in Brooklyn, the dioramas from scientific museums and, lastly, the deterioration of forgotten objects at the Dead Horse Bay lead us, in Rilke’s terminology, ‘from the visible world towards something timeless, inward and invisible’.
Kamyar Bineshtarigh, winner of the South African category, is a student at the Ruth Prowse School of Art in Cape Town. Seeing homeless people using newspaper posters to sleep on in the streets of Cape Town, Bineshtarigh found the inspiring motive to create his short film, Shelter. He found it ironic that posters depicting the government’s promises for a sustainable living for the poor, were, in fact, used by the poor for a more comfortable sleep in the streets. Chuma, the actress in the film, is a fellow student at Ruth Prowse; she was a homeless artist that started drawing by burning pieces of wood turning them into charcoal and drawing portraits of other homeless people around her. She also assisted in developing the concept so that it is closest to the reality of a homeless person in the streets of Cape Town, and introduced Bineshtarigh to other homeless artists, including the trumpet players in the film.
The screening of all finalists will take place again in Italy during the CortoLovere festival (24-29 September 2018).
Italian Section:
- 8’20” – On Time Travelling, by Ilaria Biotti
- SOLITARY GARDENS, by Luca Coclite
- MIGRATION, by Gilda Li Rosi
- MANI NOSTRE/Talking Hands, by Caterina Pecchioli
- ENTRA IN QUESTA FERITA ° il dolore da bruciare è la porta da spalancare, by Michela Tobiolo
South African Section:
- NOBODY WANA SEE US TOGETHER, by Nonkululeko Chabalala
- AQUA REGALIA, by Faith XLVII
- CONCERNING ALCHEMY, by Rory Emmett
- SALT, by Thania Petersen
- SHELTER, by Kamyar Bineshtarigh
VAA-VIDEO ART AWARD 10 Finalists on Show in PHILIPPI, Cape Town March 24th 2018. In September again in Italy during the CORTOLOVERE International Festival
March 21, 2018
The selection of the VAA-Video Art award Competition launched by the Luigi Di Sarro Center with the Italian Cultural Institute of Pretoria concluded. The jury chose the 10 finalists of the two sections: Italy and South Africa. The finalist videos will be shown on March 24th during the Italian Art Day in Philippi, Cape Town and then again in Italy in September during the CortoLovere International Festival.
FINITE / INFINITE, Elena Giustozzi and Caterina Silva, EVERARD READ/CIRCA Cape Town, South Africa, March 22-31 2018
March 21, 2018
Opening March 22th, 2018 at 6.30pm
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.
FACING THE CAMERA 50 years of Italian portraits curated by MARCO DELOGU Istituto Italiano di Cultura New York
March 2, 2018
The Experimental self-portraits by Luigi Di Sarro on show at the Istituto Italiano di Cultura in New York. The multiple show curated by Marco Delogu will open on March 28.
This exhibition chronicles fifty years of Italian history showcasing a series of portraits, by 25 photographers, in which stories, identities and heritage are narrated by the looks of the subjects, eyes staring directly at the camera, at the authors of the shots and, ultimately, at all of us. Curated by M. Delogu.
Italy is a country rich in history whose borders have been rather fluid throughout time. A melting pot of identities, the DNA of its inhabitants is most varied (with a diversity up to thirty times greater than the European average).
This wealth is reflected and it is recognizable in the features of the Italians.
The exhibit begins with a group portrait taken at Portella della Ginestra by Fausto Giaccone twenty years after the horrible massacre, followed by Gianni Berengo Gardin’s pacifist nudes, Gastone Novelli’s portrait of Ugo Mulas (two great protagonists of the ’68), demonstrations and factories by Francesco Radino, the work on Bagheria by Ferdinando Scianna, Tano D’Amico’s work in ’77 (a very Italian experience, stemming from the ’68).
Then a photo by Emilio Tremolada (engaged alongside Franco Basaglia in the battle for the abolition of the asylums), the work of Lisetta Carmi on “transvestites “, and self-portraits by Luigi di Sarro.
In the eighties the tone becomes more intimate with photos of the “Australian from Tuscany” Stephen Roach, belonging to the famous series dedicated to his wife Fabrizia, and the portraits of the neighbors of George Tatge, in Umbria.
From the nineties the photographic portrait becomes more and more a collaboration of two: the photographer and his subject work together for the final image using symbols, backgrounds and landscapes. It is the case of Guido Guidi’s portraits, and the photos of cardinals, peasants and Romani people by Marco Delogu, where the main focus is on the gaze of the person, while the environment is just a background.
Moira Ricci is even part of her mother’s photographs, is at her side, producing very moving images. Nature is present in the portraits of Sabrina Ragucci and Alessandro Imbriaco; Jacopo Benassi increasingly eliminates every background until he gets to the white, while Antonio Biasiucci chooses the classic black for characters that come out of the shadows. The exstensive overview ends with two portraits by Paolo Ventura, where the photographic technique is blended with ancient pictorial practices.
On view until May 2nd 2018 Monday through Friday 10am to 5pm
APORIE – MARCO PIANTONI and MERI TANCREDI – curated by Francesco Santaniello
March 2, 2018
opening: March 7, 2018 from 6pm
March 7 – 30, 2018 (tuesday-saturday 16-19 pm)
Double solo show by Marco Piantoni and Meri Tancredi.
“Aporia” was originally a Greek term, which has come to mean something like an insoluble contradiction in the homonym text of the French philosopher Derrida. This was the inspiration for the Curator Francesco Santaniello and the artists Meri Tancredi and Marco Piantoni for designing this exhibition, to be considered a sort of double solo exhibition. The two artists are documenting with a selection of their most recent works, their personal inquiry about knowledge, time and its perception, identity and identities, the multi-faceted codes of languages. Therefore, their art results in a plurivocal ensemble of medium, materials and expressive techniques.
LUIGI DI SARRO WORLD DISCLOSURE curated by Paola Ballesi EDOARDO VILLA MUSEUM UNIVERSITY OF PRETORIA SOUTH AFRICA
March 2, 2018
March 2 – May 18, 2018
Inaugurated in Pretoria, South Africa, the exhibition with which the international celebrations for 40 years after the death of Luigi Di Sarro starts. The event is promoted by the Istituto Italiano di Cultura in Pretoria with the collaboration of the UP ARTS Department of the University of Pretoria. The images of the opening and the academic lecture.
SOUTH/NORTH RETURN or reproducibility and technique of the idea of cultural identity – IL CENTRO DI SARRO AT CAPE TOWN ART FAIR 2018 – ON SHOW THE ARP VI EDITION’S YOUNG ARTISTS
February 15, 2018
15-18 February 2018 Cultural Platforms – booth F6
ICTAF Convention Center, Cape town, South Africa
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.
LUIGI DI SARRO (1979-2019) CELEBRATION OF 40 YEARS AFTER DEATH WITH SHOWS IN ITALY AND ABROAD
February 4, 2018
Starting from February 24, 2018, on the occasion of the anniversary of the 40th year after the death of Luigi Di Sarro, the Centro di Documentazione della Ricerca Artistica Contemporanea Luigi Di Sarro presents a series of events in Italy and abroad, in order to make the multifaceted artistic production of Di Sarro, still considered highly topical today, known internationally.
The tribute to Luigi Di Sarro, an italian artist active in the Sixties and Seventies – a period that is now being brought to the attention of the critics for the innovative pushes brought into contemporary art – wants to highlight his strong experimental vocation. In the 2008 text (Edizioni Peccolo), Flaminio Gualdoni writes: “By learning, by working actively in several fields simultaneously, Di Sarro imagines being able to force clichés and conventional protocols, and to open up to art – that art is, however, his predominant, and in some ways absorbing passion – perspectives that, in times like these, seemed not only possible but necessary. Not worried about giving himself a recognizable expressive figure, well convinced that it is no longer a question of style or fashion, he immediately interprets his role as that of the pure experimenter, in debt only with the intensity of the work and the his intellectual sharpness, at the cost of expiating, in addition to the suspicion that the avant-garde professionalism reserved to an author as he atypical for training, also the no less tenacious suspicion reserved by the artistic system to spirits that are brilliant but not prone to the rules and regulations of the new , no less inflexible, we now know, of the old academics.
`Di Sarro shows that he does not care too much, embodying in the Roman scene of the sixties and seventies the role of the experimenter whose work in progress is assumed not rhetoric, but practice of life”.
The project – ideally launched by Di Sarro himself, who in a pen drawing had indicated the destinations on the terrestrial globe “Rome, New York, Tokyo and … who knows where” (at the extreme south of the world, perhaps, where it was never gone) – was enthusiastically received by the Director of the IIC of Pretoria, Anna Amendolagine, and therefore will begin its process, on 1st March 2018, just from Pretoria in South Africa, at the Museum of the University of Pretoria, which will host an exhibition of sculptures and giants drawings.
Other stages have already been defined: an exhibition of Di Sarro’s pictorial work in Stuttgart in Germany, with the collaboration of the Istituto Italiano di Cultura and the City of Stuttgart (in May 2018) and with the IIC of Colonia (autumn 2018); an exhibition of experimental photography of the ’70es will be at the IIC in Warsaw and Krakow in Poland in May-June 2018, and at the IIC of Rabat in Morocco, early 2019. More destinations are under construction.
NOT PROVISIONAL ISABELLA NAZZARRI – VIVIANA VALLA double solo curated by Ivan Quaroni in collaboration with ABC-ARTE di Genova 8/2-2/3 2018
February 2, 2018
Opening 2018 March 8th, 6pm
The double solo exhibition of Isabella Nazzarri (Livorno, 1987) and Viviana Valla (Voghera, 1986) focuses on the direct comparison between the different methodological and stylistic approaches that the two artists used to build their own original pictorial language.
Focused on an essentially gestural and erratic process, Isabella Nazzarri’s painting coagulates in a series of surprising shapes, characterized by vivid and brilliant colors that stand out on monochromatic backgrounds in the papers as in the canvases. The light precipitated in the pigments becomes the material also of her sculptures, made of colored resins enclosed in glass ampoules (Monadi) or expanded polyurethane molded to evoke the rock formations and calcareous deposits present in nature.
Based on the stratigraphy of paper materials is the research of Viviana Valla, who through the reworking of post-it, clippings of magazines, pre-printed sheets, shreds of silver papers and much more builds an intimate and diaristic painting that paradoxically assumes the appearance of a geometric composition. The theme of her investigation is the conflict between emotionality and censorship, which is expressed in a continuous balance between the accumulative method, of an intuitive nature, and the rigid control exercised on the often orthogonal forms of his compositions.
Both Isabella Nazzarri’s erratic method, based on gestural trust and freedom and on chromatic and signic lightness, as well as the critical and conflictual one by Viviana Valla, articulated in a dynamic contrast between emotionality and rationality, prefigure the assumption of responsibility towards the pictorial language, used as an interpretative filter for the construction of a Weltanschauung, a vision of the world.
The title Not Provisional alludes to the committed and “non-temporary” character of the pictorial approaches of Nazzarri and Valla. The two Italian artists, in fact, differently from provisional painters who avoid the overload of expectations linked to a secular medium such as painting, accept to elaborate grammars capable of expressing the dubious, enigmatic and uncertain character that is on the origin of the visual art training.
The exhibition Not Provisional presents about thirty works – including paintings, papers and sculptures – of the recent production of the two artists.