| Tests. Homage to F.T. MarinettiJune 7, 2009- November 22, 2009The Ministry for Cultural Affairs, PARC - General directorate for the quality and safeguarding of the landscape, contemporary architecture and art and the Venice Biennale Foundation announce the opening of the new Italian Pavilion at the Tese delle Vergini in the Arsenale for the 53rd International Art Exhibition (Venice, 7th June - 22nd November 2009). The Pavilion will host "COLLAUDI. Omaggio a F. T. Marinetti" (Tests. Homage to F.T. Marinetti), curated by Beatrice Buscaroli and Luca Beatrice.
The artists invited to participate with works made specially for the show are: Matteo Basilé, Manfredi Beninati, Valerio Berruti, Bertozzi&Casoni, Nicola Bolla, Sandro Chia, Marco Cingolani, Giacomo Costa, Aron Demetz, Roberto Floreani, Daniele Galliano, Marco Lodola, MASBEDO, Gian Marco Montesano, Davide Nido, Luca Pignatelli, Elisa Sighicelli, Sissi, Nicola Verlato and Silvio Wolf.
The Italian Pavilion in the Arsenale, which will be enlarged to include the spaces of the former Italian Pavilion and so increase the current 800 square metres to 1,800 square metres, will overlook the adjacent Giardino delle Vergini and will be one of the main innovations of the 53rd International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale.
In announcing the list of artists selected, curators Beatrice Buscaroli and Luca Beatrice have sought to stress some of the elements underlying their choice, starting with the reasoning upon which the selection itself was based: “Not a simple selection of artists but a true exhibition responding to a specific theme, to a concept. The starting point”, continue the curators, “was the homage to Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, who is the tutelary numen of COLLAUDI. It is the vitality in the present that interests us about Futurism, the first and only Italian avant-garde movement of the 20th century. A movement open to the co-existence of all the languages, from the historic ones, such as painting and sculpture, to the experimentation of art films, photography, performance and unusual materials. This vision without pre-constituted barriers is exactly what we have sought to adopt, paying close attention to the works – designed and produced for the occasion – and not to the simulacrum of the work or the artist’s name. Our survey”, conclude Beatrice e Buscaroli, “has concentrated above all on the 40-45-year-olds, adding some younger artists and other masters representing visual and cultural points of reference”.
“I applaud the return of the Italian Pavilion”, declared the Minister for Cultural Affairs, Sandro Bondi, “which now has double the space thanks to the fruitful collaboration with La Biennale di Venezia. Italian creativity thus returns to centre stage at the International Art Exhibition, recovering a crucial role in one of the greatest events in the world dedicated to contemporary art. I wish to thank Luca Beatrice and Beatrice Buscaroli for their fine work so far and wish them every success in continuing their project”.
COLLAUDI
Omaggio a F. T. Marinetti
COLLAUDI (”Tests”), the title of a fundamental literary text constituting an aesthetic meditation by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, is the suggestion made to a group of Italian artists, mainly between the age of 30 and 50, one hundred years after the birth of the Futurist movement.
The underlying idea is to return to Futurism its central role in the history of Italian contemporary art, and to pay homage to its founder and one of its main exponents. “It is the vitality in the present that interests us about Futurism”, explain the curators, Luca Beatrice and Beatrice Buscaroli, “the first and only Italian avant-garde movement of the 20th century. A movement open to the co-existence of all the languages, from the historic ones, such as painting and sculpture, to the experimentation of art films, photography, performance and unusual materials. This vision without pre-constituted barriers is exactly what we have sought to adopt, paying close attention to the works – designed and produced for the occasion – and not to the simulacrum of the work or the artist’s name”.
All the languages of contemporary art – painting, sculpture, new technologies, video, installations, performance – have their origin in Futurism: an origin both in terms of theory and of practice. The artists are invited to meditate upon and develop the suggestions that still emerge from a movement whose potential, vitality, possibilities, were not exhausted in the past century.
The idea that Umberto Boccioni took on and developed from Marinetti’s concept of art-life, of “putting the spectator at the centre of the picture”, the poetic of the “moods” (that is: “reality is not the object but the transfiguration it submits to in identifying with the subject”), the appeal of an art in which spectator and artist can share the same experience to the point of no longer recognising the limits, the tireless and continuous experimental approach itself, the use of varieties of materials, the inclusion of sounds and noises: all these aspects that are today languages of art find their common roots within the movement.
“A time will come when the picture will no longer be sufficient. (…) Other values will rise, other evaluations, other sensitivities the boldness of which we cannot imagine…
The human eye will perceive colour as an emotion in itself. The colours multiplied will have no need of form to be understood and the forms will live for themselves outside the objects they express. Paintings will perhaps be swirling sound or scented architectures of enormous coloured gases, which on the stage of a free horizon will energise the complex soul of new beings that we cannot today conceive”. So wrote the greatest theoretician of Futurist art, the painter and sculptor, Umberto Boccioni.
The challenge expressed by the Futurists is total: it would be accepted and implemented, but it was addressed especially to the future generations.
“The oldest among us are thirty years old!”, wrote Marinetti in his founding Manifesto of 1909. “Others will come after us”.
| Location | Italian Pavilion | | Website | Website | | Address | Arsenale, Tese delle Vergini
Venezia
Italy | | Local time | 5:28 am | | Phone | | | | |
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