Città Foresta Festival took place over 11 days between July and October in three roman districts: Trullo, Laurentino 38 and Corviale. From art to music, from theatre to architecture, from street art to meditative walks. Città Foresta aimed to involve a wide and large audience by focusing the attention on nature, green areas and their ability to become centres of aggregation, creativity and their relationship with urban areas. Together with associations and artists we created workshops of construction, drawing, theatre, storytelling, printmaking, music and walks in the surrounding nature which raise awareness of urban and natural spaces. The three districts chosen for the development of the activities are characterised for being densely populated areas but also for the presence of large green areas often unused. The workshops, entirely free and accessible to all, created moments of discussion, co-creation, exchange and reflection with the aim of relating the chosen districts.
The title Pachamama Concrete is a play on words, a metaphor for a place. The word Pachamama, which in archaic Incan culture means Mother Earth, is intended to emphasize the link with the original principle of creation, generous Goddess of fertility and agriculture, nourishing mother who gives life. The ancient goddess, Ceres, dear to the ancient Romans, symbol of fertility and regeneration is the pivotal element of this project, which originated in Corviale, a suburb of Rome, not far from the temple dedicated to her by the Arvali friars. Concrete, on the other hand, alludes to the residential complex, almost one kilometer long, built at the end of the 1970s by the architect Mario Fiorentino, that over the years has become a symbol of the failure of housing policies. Concrete is therefore the cement with which the building was constructed, but it also alludes to the concreteness and resilience of the women who live there.
Rodari On-Line. Evening readings is a web project that represents a collection of voices and images on the ever-changing and colorful paths of Gianni Rodari’s writings. Rodari’s stories and nursery rhymes are reinterpreted and recited by those who have magic and fantasy in their blood: artists and children. These stories will allow everyone to return to dream with words, making us discover in an original way the pleasure of the written word, told and recited.
Reflecting Women focuses on the concept of female identity. The title itself indicates a reflection on gender, a genre generally established through the stylization of the body. Reflecting expresses not only the analysis of the female figure, but also a reflection understood as a perception that each of us has through the observation of others. In fact, nobody can observe herself/ himself, except in a mirror, but a mirror can also show a distorted image, like the one that every woman receives and absorbs from the female iconography of contemporary society.
The MAGMA project, the title of which reprises one of the first women’s art exhibitions curated by Romana Loda in 1977, aims to explore the birth and origin of feminist art and feminism in Italy, in contrast with the origins under different conditions of a more-recently-born Lithuanian feminism, thus offering new and better-documented perspectives for study of one of the most original and controversial pages of our contemporary history. The exhibition aims to highlight how the use of the body and the word first came to be instruments in the struggle for political and artistic conquests. The installations, videos, performances, photographic images, collages made of newspaper and magazine clippings, posters and books displayed delineate the image of a form of total art, generating new points of view from which to observe the multi-form mélange of image, verbal sign and graphic sign.
The title of the exhibition -Lotta Poetica- is freely inspired by the renowned magazine founded by Sarenco and Paul De Vree in 1971 ,privileged place of debate and cultural dialogue outside of official channels in those years. On exhibit at Fondazione dei Monti Uniti di Foggia, were shown the artworks of those artists committed to the struggle against the rising consumer society between the Sixties and the Seventies: the artists, abandoning traditional communication tools and facing the breaking up of gender barriers, landed to a language based on words and images that found its highest definition in the Visual Poetry, Neo avant-garde which arose in the so called Gruppo 70, founded by Lamberto Pignotti ed Eugenio Miccini. Collages, drawings, documents, magazines, manifestos and artist books narrate a militant art, offering an unusual perspective between image and graphic signs.
At Ex-Elettrofonica Gallery took place the exhibition of the young Lithuanian artist Kipras Dubauskas, Take as Much as You Can Carry, curated by Benedetta Carpi De Resmini, that continues her previous project SPACES | NON SPACES created and launched in 2013. It is a site specific project which revolves around the homonymous film shot in 16mm by Kipras Dubauskas between Poland a Lithuania. Cornerstone of the exhibit is a large water pipe, linking the outside and the inside of the gallery. The artist’s choice are Suburban areas: those places along with its inhabitants preserve their own time and order, trying to bring out significant and unsolved social issues.
Seiemezza, Le periferie dell’Arte is a urban revitalization project which trough a group show, set up at the Centro Culturale Elsa Morante, Rome, aim to explore the value and the sense of Time on its subjective and relative meaning as well as the stirring impact which brings to both the landscape and the life flowing through it. Seiemezza(Half past six) is when the daily routine starts: when streets become full of people, when people jump on to the underground, and the suburban areas begin their connection with the centre. Le periferie dell’Arte has been made possible thanks to an interdisciplinary group joined by artists, inhabitants and young sector professionals. The project has been promoted by the Assessorato Cultura e Turismo di Roma in partnership with Zètema Progetto Cultura e del Centro Culturale Elsa Morante and realized with the Business School del Sole 24 Ore of Rome to encourage the synergy between young students approaching the working life and to highlight suburban areas.
Fourth venue of the exhibition series entitled Roommates/coinquilini, a project with which the MACRO Museum opens its activities to young roman artists and curators. Guendalina Salini and Marinella Senatore convert the exhibition space in a theatre of the soul and memory, reflecting on the different realities bounded to the city community. Guendalina Salini, with her artworks “You will never find the limits of the soul” realized a large Mandala composed by coloured rods, a structure similar to a disjointed city grid, a kind of playful and impermanent drawing reminding of the oriental shapes built by the use of coloured sand in order to create a symbolic circular diagram. On the other hand Marinella Senatore build a “Memory Theatre” entitled “Electric Theatre”, where she interprets histories, anecdotes and events of the social movements of the past.
