| In a place where art institutions are huge bureaucratic dinosaurs that ever change or do anything related to contemporary art that has any sort of vitality, one needs to look elsewhere to find exciting creativity in Italy. Too little effort is spent to restore and take care of ancient monuments, yet even less is devoted to the contemporary. Stefano Pasquini and Adriana Torregrossa searched north to south to find little spots of vitality. In the north of Italy, by the mountains of Livigno, artist and creative director Luca Rendina created a project to involve local artists in a festival of contemporary art with a traditional flavor: the smell of hay. . |  |
And Then There’s Italy – Stefano Pasquini and Adriana Torregrossa
In a place where art institutions are huge bureaucratic dinosaurs that never change or do anything related to contemporary art that has any sort of vitality, one needs to look elsewhere to find exciting creativity in Italy. Too little effort is spent to restore and take care of ancient monuments, yet even less is devoted to the contemporary. Stefano Pasquini and Adriana Torregrossa searched north to south to find little spots of vitality.
Piles of Hay
Stefano Pasquini
In the north of Italy, by the mountains of Livigno, artist and creative director Luca Rendina created a project to involve local artists in a festival of contemporary art with a traditional flavor: the smell of hay. Hay fills the air with its incisive scent during the summer in this region as it’s cut and picked and rolled into massive architectural shapes and, from this year on, into massive sculptures. The event saw the participation artists of varied disciplines, who, together with two assistants each, worked around the clock to build up large sculptures and installations exclusively using the valley’s hay as material.
Locals and tourists assisted assiduously in the performance, which ended in six land artworks that, in a matter of weeks, dispersed in the wind of the valley.
While most sculptors opted for traditional geometric interventions, Belgian artist Kim De Ruysscher outstood them all with a massive carpet that made use of the different shades of green found in the material. On this magic carpet that visitors could lay on, cocooned by the strong scent, they could also enjoy the dramatic scenery of the valley. Liborio Piccichè constructed a weird looking maze that resembled the crop circles made by UFOs, while Stefania Tussi made a huge covone (pile of hay) that you could visit from the inside: a rural sight that becomes new age architecture.
Other artists involved in the 2006 edition of this unusual festival were Alfonso Fortuna, Anke Kuipers and Patrizia Roussel.
Semionauts Crossing the Border
Stefano Pasquini
Some years ago, artists Gulsen Bal (Turkey), Elena Cologni (Italy) and Karl Ingar Roys (Norway) met and decided to work together on a project that they later titled “Border Crossing.” Working towards the goal of opening up and widening a discussion beyond boundaries, the project tried to analyze the concepts of barrier, limit and line, which enclose a physical territory as well as our personal experience of it, whether psychological, tactile or temporal. The project started with the base cities of the three artists back in 2003, beginning in Gallery X in Istanbul, through to the Oslo Kunstforening Museum in 2004, and now on to the spaces of CareOf in Milan and Neon>campobase in Bologna, Italy. At each venue, an invited local artist joins in the debate and exhibition: Sylvia Erden in Turkey, Hjordis Kuras in Oslo and Annalisa Cattani in Italy. While the physical exhibition might have lacked a precise focal point, with interesting works that were kind of dislocated within the space, what made the event click into place were the debates that opened and closed each exhibition. Semiotics and economy professors, artists, curators and critics were asked to intervene on the theme of liminality and subjectivity, on the pros and cons of continuity in collaboration, methodology and content of work. Many interesting discussions came out, and often the ball turned towards the Italian art system, which is far too close to the Mafioso political system that surrounds the country—the friend of a friend method, which, lately, turned out to involve major football league teams. Going back to art, it was very refreshing to experience a creative multidisciplinary dialogue among the fields and between local and global contemporary art communities.
Beauty Hotel
Adriana Torregrossa
Antonio Presti is a special person. He doesn’t run a hotel, but a museum. And, if we really wish it, the museum can become a hotel. A place where it’s nice to be. To live. Tusa. Tusa is a small town. On the beach. Tusa is New York, you can lose yourself there. Tusa is the Orient and the West. Antonio Presti gives us the keys.
Tusa was born out of love for beauty. Walking towards the sea you meet, half lit, the sign “Hotel,” and you know you’re in a special place. The Hotel is the key to understanding the place. Presti invested his soul in this project. Not money, he doesn’t like to talk about money, he likes to talk about beauty. “Devotion to beauty” is the welcoming sign in the hall. Every square inch of this place has been designed to generate beauty.
You can happen to wake up in the morning, and the corridor walls that you thought were blue have become orange. Presti is like that. Beauty, he says, is constantly changing.
Nothing is equal to anything. There is something he would like to change. That rail bridge, he hates that. “Via,” he says. It really makes him feel sick. It inhibits beauty. “Pigs,” he says, and continues: “They make me feel sick. All of them.” There’s no respect for beauty. Presti has to fight constantly with a system that inhibits beauty. He doesn’t care. He goes on his path. The path of beauty. And I like to describe him as such, as he shows himself. With a big heart. Without forbiddings. No banality. We’re over it.
At the moment, there are 16 artist’s rooms. There’s no hurry. When an artist sparkles, the proposal begins, but he or she has to be convincing. There are no signatures, no limits. The ultimate goal is always the same. Devotion to beauty.
He picks the artists, he wants to know them well. Then the project starts. And if the project works it becomes artwork. An artwork to live in. Every room has its peculiarity, a special, intimate relationship between the artist and the guest. Only the place where you sleep can become your room. Whether it’s for one night or forever, it’s your room.
Presti is restless, he wants to do things, even in a place like this, where it seems like everyone is resting. Because, when you deal with beauty the story becomes a never-ending one. Whether it’s the keys, the sheets or the ladies in the kitchen, beauty is everywhere here.
Presti didn’t leave anything to chance in order to make us experience what too often we forget, what all art should be. What we see in Tusa is synthesis, syntax and grammar of art. And, what he wants to tell us is what we always wanted to hear.
