MILAN.- Ongoing until 24 September 2023 the fourth edition of
Una Boccata d'Arte. This contemporary art project is promoted by Fondazione Elpis in collaboration with Galleria Continua and with the participation of Threes. Every year, 20 villages throughout Italy, one for each region, welcome 20 artists, Italian and international, of different ages, backgrounds, and practices. Invited to spend a short period of residence, the artists will create 20 works related to the territory and traditions of the local communities.
Throughout the summer, it will be possible to explore exhibitions, projects and site-specific installations in unexpected places, created by established and emerging artists from Italy, Brazil, Cyprus, Ivory Coast, Germany, Iran, Israel, Latvia, Palestine and the United Kingdom. Each artist, connecting with the history of the village and its residents, conveying the area’s specific features through his or her own personal research, creates an original intervention, which in some cases will comprise several diffuse works.
Una Boccata d’Arte is a project that spreads throughout Italy: a cultural itinerary that, from region to region, promotes the surprising heritage offered by small settlements, highlighting the area’s distinctive history and local traditions through contemporary art. It is an invitation to travel and discover, through the sharing of different artistic practices and languages, with a particular attention to the younger generations. Making art accessible to everyone, bringing it into public places, into the squares and streets of villages, including even the most remote locations: this is the aim of Una Boccata d’Arte, in order to activate an inclusive creative process and generate close connections among artists, inhabitants, administrations, associations, shopkeepers and local artisans, enabling contact with an increasingly broad and transversal audience.
Benjamin Jones, To Live Inside a Second, Pieve Tesino (TN), Trentino-Alto Adige. Ph Marta Tonelli. Opera realizzata con il sostegno di Fondazione Elpis nell’ambito di Una Boccata d’Arte 2023.
Una Boccata d’Arte is an opportunity to explore new places and previously unseen artistic projects. Starting from Valle d’Aosta, the site-specific intervention BODIES AND SUBWOOFERS (B.A.S.) 8. 0: PERMANENZA by Stefanie Egedy, curated by Threes, is a sound installation composed of eight subwoofers that, through low-frequency sound waves, creates a vibrational experience for both body and mind; in Vermogno – hamlet of Zubiena in Piedmont, VICTIMULA by Invernomuto, also curated by Threes, is an invitation to explore, a collective game that proposes a virtual treasure hunt, as played in the Bessa area since Roman times; Se si resta sul posto by Leonardo Meoni is a widespread intervention that investigates the relationship between Castelvecchio di Rocca Barbena in Liguria and silence, incorporating recurring elements and forms found in the village into his work; in Gardone Riviera in Lombardy, Jacopo Benassi’s SERENATA AGITATA, curated by Threes, is a set of ten flags hoisted on a single flagpole, evoking a sea in constant movement; To Live Inside a Second by Benjamin Jones is a widespread intervention in the village of Pieve Tesino in Trentino-Alto Adige that, in two different formats, tells the stories of the people who centuries ago left the Tesino area to sell - all over Europe - prints depicting the subjects of the time, and the single story of Alcide De Gasperi, Italian statesman and founding father of the European Community; in Costozza – hamlet of Longare in Veneto, Il frullamento del mare di latte by Diego Perrone is an environmental installation in the small church of San Michele, composed of a series of sculptural works and a selection of books that retrace the peculiar geological origins of the territory; in Friuli-Venezia Giulia in Aquileia, one of the main Roman archaeological sites on the peninsula, German artist Judith Hopf presents Relation Rests, an intervention composed of a sound work and two sculptures - a man and a woman caught using a smartphone - that investigates the relationship between contemporary and ancient, between the everyday and the archaeological find.
Continuing through Central Italy, the intervention La montagna è ancora in movimento by Raghad Saqfalhait in Travo, Emilia-Romagna, is inspired as much by the tales of the inhabitants of the village as by its millenary geological history, on a journey of discovery of works in the area: a series of sculptures made from materials of varying durability and a video conceived as an affective mapping of the inhabitants themselves; the video installation Rosa Mystica by Theodoulos Polyviou in collaboration with Loukis Menelaou in Fosdinovo, Tuscany, created using digital scanning and animation techniques, explores the potential of new technologies to satisfy the desire to relate to images in order to perceive the transcendent; in Toscolano – hamlet of Avigliano Umbro in Umbria – the work Pila Thinkerwiller by Mattia Pajè comprises of two engraved metal plates which, placed at the north and south ends of the village, bring together the projects of the inhabitants themselves, transforming the village into a large stack, an amplifier of ideas, the portrait of a moment, a place and a community; Eight Types of Whistles by Margherita Raso in Petritoli, Marche, is a widespread intervention consisting of a sound installation that investigates the linguistic and communicative aspects of sound-whistle and a series of eight drawings displayed in the streets of the village conceived as a textual translation of sound on the model of subtitles (or surtitles) for opera theatre; in Rocca Sinibalda in Lazio, Laetitia KY’s Follow the Braid project consists of a 1:1 scale statue of the artist’s body, complete with hair made from long braided ropes that branch out through the streets of the village, leading the public to discover a series of photographs installed in hidden places; Sagra della Lucertola by Simone Carraro in Pietracamela in Abruzzo is a symbolic itinerary, a carnivalesque staging against the backdrop of a village teeming with mosses and small reptiles, where the human presence is linked to the memory of a time when man was closely tied to the territory.
In Molise, Southern Italy, in the village of Agnone, Diego Miguel Mirabella presents a bronze sculpture entitled Il buffone: a melancholic storyteller, a tree covered with the decorations of the Pontificia Fonderia Marinelli, which has been making papal bells since 1040; in Cetara in Campania, Serena Vestrucci’s widespread project Abbronzatissimi Pallidissimi triggers an ‘atmospheric disturbance’ that brings snow to the seaside: with Barely Invisible Cities in Maruggio, Puglia, Evita Vasiļjeva reflects on the preclusive function of fences and gates through three bench-sculptures that appropriate the aesthetics of rusty gratings and represent an invitation to stop, meet and exchange; Me ne ne andrei nella roccia della Lieta by Arianna Pace at Rivello in Basilicata is a widespread intervention in the village that takes its cue from a reflection on the local landscape and on the monumental domestic pine, the largest in Basilicata, a participant in the life of the village for almost two centuries; at Santa Severina in Calabria, the artist Mohsen Baghernejad Moghanjooghi presents the intervention d’io, bio composed of three works in which the written word becomes matter, bending to the artist’s expressive needs; in Sicily, Axis Mundi by Ella Littwitz is an obelisk placed at the highest point in Pollina, a marble sculpture that becomes the instrument with which to re-evoke stories and legends linked to the territory; SERPENTINA Per un mūsēum senza tempo by Raffaela Naldi Rossano in Belvì, Sardinia was created from the observation of the collection of the future Natural Science Museum in the village and tells of a museum that exists in the imagination of the community, in a timeless state.
Una Boccata d’Arte is the project launched in 2020 by Marina Nissim, President of Fondazione Elpis, as a reaction to the pandemic, to give a signal of encouragement to local communities and at the same time create opportunities for emerging and established artists. Today, Una Boccata d’Arte is a consolidated event that every year involves 20 villages with less than 5,000 inhabitants, located in different areas in order to rediscover the entire regional territory, with the aim of enhancing the historical and landscape heritage of settlements far from the traditional circuits of art and tourism. By virtue of their relatively small size, these places become the ideal context for artistic experimentation and the creation of new imagery.
The project has given rise to a widespread network of relations and participation, which gets wider every year; to date, 80 municipalities and 80 artists have been involved, together with technical sponsors, local associations and people who in various ways make the projects possible. With every edition, more and more villages apply to take part to Una Boccata d'Arte and, thanks to acquisitions by administrations or donations by the artists, over the course of three years, 20 installations have become permanent.
Villages participating in the fourth edition
Vermogno - hamlet of Zubiena (BI); Castelvecchio di Rocca Barbena (SV); Gardone Riviera (BS); Pieve Tesino (TN); Costozza - hamlet of Longare (VI); Aquileia (UD); Travo (PC); Fosdinovo (MS); Toscolano - hamlet of Avigliano Umbro (TR); Petritoli (FM); Rocca Sinibalda (RI); Pietracamela (TE); Agnone (IS); Cetara (SA); Maruggio (TA); Rivello (PZ); Santa Severina (KR); Pollina (PA); Belvì (NU).
Artists participating in the fourth edition
Jacopo Benassi (La Spezia, Italy, 1970); Mohsen Baghernejad Moghanjooghi (Tehran, Iran, 1988); Simone Carraro (Treviso, Italy, 1995); Stefanie Egedy (São Paulo, Brazil, 1996); Judith Hopf (Karlsruhe, Germany, 1969); Invernomuto (Simone Bertuzzi and Simone Trabucchi, Piacenza, Italy, 1983 and 1982); Benjamin Jones (Reading, UK, 1994); Laetitia KY (Abidjan, Ivory Coast, 1996); Ella Littwitz (Haifa, Israel, 1982); Leonardo Meoni (Florence, Italy, 1994); Diego Miguel Mirabella (Enna, Italy, 1988); Raffaela Naldi Rossano (Naples, Italy, 1990); Arianna Pace (Pesaro, Italy, 1995); Mattia Pajè (Melzo, Italy, 1991); Diego Perrone (Asti, Italy, 1970); Theodoulos Polyviou (Nicosia, Ciprus, 1989); Margherita Raso (Lecco, Italy, 1991); Raghad Saqfalhait (Ramallah, Palestine, 1996); Evita Vasiļjeva (Riga, Latvia, 1985); Serena Vestrucci (Milan, Italy, 1986).
