Rinegoziare le identità: Video Art a Sole Luna
/ Renegotiating Identities: Video Art at Sole Luna
a cura di Sofia Gotti / curated by Sofia Gotti
Migration, (trans-)nationalism and exile have been central features to identity politics in the Anthropocene: the contemporary geological age in which the homo sapiens are able to impact the planet’s biological balance. While previously humans mobilised according to natural phenomena, today we move and adapt in response to war, persecution, the creation and destruction of nation states, and most notably profit: an ensemble of factors that philosopher Walter Benjamin defined as the “barbarism” of civilization. Within Sole Luna Festival’s mission, this Video Art section seeks to shed light on how artists have reconciled their own subjectivity within a constantly shifting environment. The selected works consider how artificial social constructs – from the very idea of nationhood to that of gender – inform patterns of inclusion/ marginalization and provide inadequate guidelines for establishing and defining our own identity. Marina Gržinić & Aina Šmid project us into a whirlwind of confusing imagery that capture the identity crises catalysed by the collapse of Yugoslavia and conflicts that ensued. Donna Haraway invites us to imagine social structures free of binary definitions and hierarchies. Juan Downey chronicles his travels across the Southern Cone, while in search for a continental identity among Amazonian tribes. Regina Jose Galindo reflects on territories and belonging by asking migrants to literally ground themselves by digging into the soil of Palermo’s Botanical Garden. Finally, Zineb Sedira, foregrounds the shared experience of travel to reveal the uncanny effects of migration. Spotlighted in this section is young artist Martina Melilli, whose work examines the obscure history of Italians born in Libya and expelled from the country by the Gaddafi regime from 1969, on account of belonging to a group of colonialist invaders. Looking at how this group was considered foreign both in its birthplace and its alleged homeland helps us to problematize what claiming a singular identity may entail.
Crossfade spazio sonoro / sonic environment
di / by Davide Cairo & Francesco Novara
Crossfade Spazio Sonoro is a sonic environment designed for the spaces within the festival and realized by the musicians Davide Cairo and Francesco Novara of Crossfade Studio. Guests of the Festival as artists in residence, they will present a sound installation dedicated to the theme of the Mediterranean, the journey and the connection between East and West. Giovanni Verga wrote: «The sea has no country, […] it is of all those who listen to him, here and there where the sun borns and dies». From the sea we often contemplate beauty and immensity but the words of Verga speaks about listening. Listening to the sea means letting yourself be carried away by the sound of peoples and lands lapping, exploring them with your eyes closed, forgetting the boundaries. This sound space is like a story, a journey without a precise route. It is a collage of suggestions, stories and lives, collected to tell a story that is lost in the mists of time and draws an intricate, and at the same time, familiar story because it speaks about us.
Il sacro degli altri. Culti e pratiche rituali dei migranti in Sicilia
/ The sacred of the others. Cults and ritual practices of migrants in Sicily mostra fotografica
/ photography exhibition di / by Attilio Russo & Giuseppe Muccio
in collaborazione con la Fondazione Ignazio Buttitta e l’Associazione per la conservazione delle tradizioni popolari – Museo Internazionale delle Marionette Antonio Pasqualino / in partnership with the Ignazio Buttitta Foundation and the Association for the Conservation of Folk Traditions Antonio Pasqualino International Puppet Museum
a cura di / set up by Gabriella D’agostino
The exhibition presents a series of extraordinary images that show the diversified phenomenology of the cults belonging to the migrant communities, who, for various reasons and at different times, have settled in Sicily enriching its demographic and cultural background. The photographers are Attilio Russo from Messina and Giuseppe Muccio from Syracuse, who have been engaged for decades in documenting Sicilian religious feasts and cultural practices. Through this original portfolio, they give us a concrete demonstration of how our territory has become a place of sacred practices and interlocutory actions with the Divinity, which are very different, in form and content, from “our” faiths and “our religious traditions”. They do it through an anthropological gaze that underlies a human participation, a lucid understanding of all cultures, whose marvellous variety is never perceived as a problem but rather as enrichment. These images ask for a subdued reflection on the human and cultural diversity: there is such diversity because the history of those who are different from us has taken different paths than ours. But all these different stories make our planet beautiful, assorted and rich. Barbarism doesn’t exist. A barbarous person is someone who believes in the barbarism of others before even having met and “experienced” them. Therefore, the only barbarous people are those who still look with suspicion, fear, aversion to anyone who doesn’t have their own skin, their habits, their cults. Even if each faith can legitimately claim for itself, and just for itself, the exclusive detention of Truth, we must be aware that this position inevitably leads to that integralism that has bloodied and continues to bleed our time. This does not mean abdicating one’s faith by embracing an aseptic relativism, but rather striving to read the seeds of truth present in every religious tradition, which however to be credible must distance itself from any fundamentalist temptation. This attitude – actually – it is always nothing more than an exploitation of the sacred for the purpose of power or money (the eternal “devil’s dung”).(Sergio Todesco)
Auto da fé
mostra e performance di disegno
/ drawing exhibition and performance
di / by Gianluca Costantini
a cura di / curated by Elettra Stamboulis
Carceri dell’Inquisizione, Steri / Prisons of the Inquisition at Steri
For three days, during the opening hours to the public, the artist will settle inside the cells of the Inquisition at Palazzo Steri for a live drawing action. The project is inspired by Auto da fé, the only novel by Elias Canetti, Nobel Prize winner in 1981. This will be a drawing live performance by the artist who will also interact with the public. Palazzo Chiaramonte will become a visual speaker for three days. The stories and words of those who are unjustly detained will resound through the Artist’s Twitter profile, followed by 60,000 people, but they will also take shape in visible objects presented in a live exhibition. A solitary drawer, voluntarily detained in the space which is transformed today and which gathers as an antenna the voices of those whose voice was cut, and translates it into a drawing, giving it back to everyone and allowing its diffusion. The drawings will be exhibited in the corridors of the prisons that will be divided into three chapters: “Head without world” / “World without head” / “The world in the head”. Next to each image, a quote from the novel will decontextualize the image itself, creating a stand-alone narrative. The complete work will then be collected in a virtual or paper catalogue.
Gianluca Costantini
Gianluca Costantini (Ravenna, 1971) has exhibited in a number of museums and galleries abroad: the Lazarides Gallery, London (2009), the Salon du dessin contemporain, Carrousel du Louvre, Paris (2010), the Dox Centre for Contemporary Art, Prague, the Museum of Graphic Humor Diogenes Taborda, Buenos Aires (2014). In Italy, his drawings were exhibited alongside Alighiero Boetti’s works at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Lissone (2013), or made up large installations and themed projects, such as the D406 gallery in Modena and the Centro Arti Opificio Siri in Terni. As a graphic journalist, he gave a lecture at the Ars Electronic Center in Linz (2009) and took part in the Festival Human Rights in Lugano (2015). With him, drawing can become a performative act, in a magical dialogue with different stories ad languages: it happened with Hanif Kureishi at the Teatro Alighieri in Ravenna (2011), and with Emidio Clementi, the singer and bass player with Massimo Volume in Modena.