Contemporary art arrives in twenty villages of Italy: Una Boccata d'Arte returns

From June 24 to September 24, 2023, Una Boccata d’Arte, the contemporary art project promoted by Fondazione Elpis in collaboration with Galleria Continua and with the participation of Threes, returns. Each year twenty villages throughout Italy, one for each region, welcome twenty Italian and international artists of different ages, backgrounds and practices. Invited to spend a short residency period, the artists create twenty interventions that relate to the history and traditions of the place and its inhabitants. The openings will be held on Saturday, June 24 and Sunday, June 25 in all the villages.

For the entire summer, it will then be possible to discover exhibitions, projects and site-specific installations in the twenty selected villages. Each artist, entering into a relationship with the history of the village and its inhabitants, channeling the peculiarities of the place and his or her own personal research, will create an unprecedented intervention, sometimes composed of several diffuse works.

For the fourth edition, the invited artists are: Stefanie Egedy in Fénis (AO) in Valle d’Aosta, curated by Threes; Invernomuto in Vermogno - hamlet of Zubiena (BI) in Piedmont, curated by Threes; Leonardo Meoni in Castelvecchio di Rocca Barbena (SV) in Liguria; Jacopo Benassi in Gardone Riviera (BS) in Lombardy, curated by Threes; Benjamin Jones at Pieve Tesino (TN) in Trentino-Alto Adige; Diego Perrone at Costozza-a hamlet of Longare (VI) in Veneto; Judith Hopf at Aquileia in Friuli-Venezia Giulia; Raghad Saqfalhait at Travo (PC) in Emilia-Romagna; Theodoulos Polyviou at Fosdinovo (MS) in Tuscany; Mattia Pajè in Toscolano - hamlet of Avigliano Umbro (TR) in Umbria; Margherita Raso in Petritoli (FM) in Marche; Laetitia KY in Rocca Sinibalda (RI) in Lazio; Simone Carraro in Pietracamela (TE) in Abruzzo; Diego Miguel Mirabella in Agnone (IS) in Molise; Serena Vestrucci in Cetara (SA) in Campania; Evita Vasiļjeva in Maruggio (TA) in Apulia; Arianna Pace in Rivello (PZ) in Basilicata; Mohsen Baghernejad Moghanjooghi in Santa Severina (KR) in Calabria; Ella Littwitz in Pollina (PA) in Sicily; Raffaela Naldi Rossano in Belvì (NU) in Sardinia.

Una Boccata d’Arte is a project spread throughout Italy: a cultural itinerary that from region to region aims to promote the heritage constituted by small towns, to highlight the characteristics of the territory, history and local traditions through contemporary art. It is an invitation to travel and discovery through the sharing of different artistic practices and languages, with a special focus on the latest generations. The objective of Una Boccata d’Arte is to make art accessible to everyone, to bring it to public places, squares and streets of villages, starting with the most remote ones, to activate an inclusive creative process and create a close connection between artist, inhabitants, administrations, associations, merchants and local artisans, which allows it to address an increasingly wide and transversal audience.

“It is a very intense moment, of great ferment, for Fondazione Elpis: in these months the fourth edition of Una Boccata d’Arte is getting underway, and since last fall we have inaugurated our office in Milan,” explains Marina Nissim, President of Fondazione Elpis. “An important step born from the desire to create a stable point of reference and connection between all the places, artists, and people we have met in these years. A precious network, human and professional, that we want to continue to feed through processes of exchange and sharing in Italy and abroad, starting with the extraordinary experience of Una Boccata d’Arte, together with the projects of exhibitions and residencies that we promote. It will certainly be exciting to discover this year’s edition, the works and the connections on the ground from which they have sprung, and to be surprised by new places. Special thanks go to the mayors and local governments who in some cases spontaneously apply to participate in Una Boccata d’Arte and enhance their territory through the artists’ unprecedented gaze.”

“Since the first edition, the search for and selection of participating artists has been guided by the desire to provide a valuable opportunity for expression mainly to young artists, confident that they were capable of hitting one of the great goals of Una Boccata d’Arte: to spread art with high quality research in those villages - pearls of our landscape - often far from the circuits of contemporary art exhibitions,” says Maurizio Rigillo, Director of Galleria Continua. “We therefore always pay great attention to the village-artist combinations, trying to look at both the specificity of the places and the research conducted by each artist. Edition after edition, the result has been a mosaic of excellent works, which have been able to draw inspiration from local realities, involve the inhabitants, and create wonder and amazement in visitors, confirming how peculiar in the creation of the work is the physical context and the relationship with people. That’s how, already in its fourth edition, A Breath of Art has become an eagerly awaited annual event for contemporary art across the country, and we are thrilled to continue to collaborate on this project.”

“Once again this year we are delighted to take part in Una Boccata d’Arte, a project with which we have shared visions and methodologies since the first edition,” explains the Threes curatorial team. “The field of investigation of the projects we curate relates the sound component to the theme of ecology, in confrontation with the territory of each village. We will develop three site-specific interventions in Lombardy in Gardone Riviera (BS), in Piedmont in Vermogno - hamlet of Zubiena (BI) and in Aosta Valley in Fénis (AO), involving artists who integrate a strong sound component within their practice. Respectively: Jacopo Benassi, an established artist who has always been a point of reference in underground culture, is also known for his extremely intense performances; Simone Bertuzzi and Simone Trabucchi, together as Invernomuto, carry out highly experimental visual and sonic research both as individuals and as a duo; Stefanie Egedy, an artist born in São Paulo, Brazil, living in Berlin, explores the interaction between the body, low frequencies and subwoofers.”

The Una Boccata d’Arte project was conceived in 2020 by Marina Nissim, President of Elpis Foundation, in reaction to the pandemic, to give a signal of encouragement to local communities while creating opportunities for expression for emerging and established artists. Today Una Boccata d’Arte is a well-established event that each year involves twenty villages with less than 5 thousand inhabitants, located in different areas to rediscover the entire regional territory, with the aim of enhancing the historical and landscape heritage of small towns, far from the traditional circuits of art and tourism. By virtue of their collected dimension, these places become the ideal context for artistic experimentation and the creation of new imagery.

The initiative nurtures a widespread network of relationships and participation that becomes wider each year: to date eighty municipalities and eighty artists have been involved, along with technical sponsors, local associations and people who in various capacities make it possible to carry out the interventions. With each edition of Una Boccata d’Arte, more and more villages apply to participate in the project, and in the last three years, thanks to the administrations’ acquisitions and artists’ donations, as many as twenty installations have become permanent.

Image: Pollina (Palermo), Sicily. Photo by VisitPollina. Courtesy of Municipality of Pollina

Contemporary art arrives in twenty villages of Italy: Una Boccata d'Arte returns

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