A ten-meter Venus of Rags in the square and many other installations for Napoli Contemporanea 2023

Naples Contemporary 2023 kicks off with exhibitions and installations: programming curated by Vincenzo Trione was presented by Mayor Gaetano Manfredi. The aim of the project is to strengthen the city’s vocation for the contemporary through a series of initiatives designed specifically for public spaces and museum sites by some of the protagonists of the art of our time. In light of the ongoing renovations at the various museum sites and in anticipation of allocating new spaces to art, numerous initiatives have been conceived to inhabit the open-air venues and virtual exhibition environments. The will of the mayor and the entire municipal administration is to create a direct relationship with the citizenry. In this perspective, the season of the contemporary intends to contribute to nurture a process of urban redevelopment by involving high-profile national and international artists and personalities belonging to different generations working in the territory, inviting them to intervene in squares, streets, cloisters, neighborhoods. Each project is also born in collaboration with active entities in the city, such as the Academy of Fine Arts of Naples and the Conservatory of San Pietro a Majella, in order to encourage the training of young people and the design and professional growth of the cultural and artistic fabric of the territory.

Kicking off the programming will be a number of interventions destined for symbolic places in the historic center.

Open. Art in the center

As part of the project that brings together all the installations and exhibitions in the public spaces of the historic center, an installation by Antonio Marras, titled Questi miei fantasmi (These ghosts of mine), created at the vico di San Pietro a Majella and the Rampe del Salvatore, will be inaugurated in collaboration with the University of Naples Federico II, the Academy of Fine Arts of Naples and the Conservatory of San Pietro a Majella. The installation is accompanied by a workshop, held at the FOQUS-Fondazione Quartieri Spagnoli, by the artist with two hundred students from the Naples Academy of Fine Arts; an original, monumental-scale version of Michelangelo Pistoletto’s Venus of rags, designed specifically for Piazza Municipio; and an installation by Gaetano Pesce for the Rotonda Diaz in collaboration with the Conservatorio di San Pietro a Majella.

Among the main museum sites included in the program, PAN will become the first Museum of the Image at the international level: an exhibition center in which to explore the role of images in the contemporary art scene. Its halls will host alternating exhibitions dedicated to photography, digital art and new technologies, which will relate new media to the traditional languages of art. In addition to being an exhibition venue, thanks to workshops and spaces dedicated to study and experimentation, the Museum of the Image intends to establish itself as a true research center where to investigate the new frontiers of the visual landscape and host international art projects aimed at exploring the status of images. During PAN’s restoration period, a partnership with the Meet - Digital Culture Center in Milan will enable the creation of an experimental Project Room in Metaverso destined to become a permanent room in the museum.

PAN’s programming will be joined by that of the Casina Pompeiana, which is proposed as the new home of contemporary performativity. Already at the end of the 1990s, when the City had acquired its management, an avant-garde exhibition program had been hosted here, with a series of exhibitions aimed at conveying new content in the Neapolitan art scene. Resuming its original experimental vocation, it is proposed to transform the Casina Pompeiana into a place where one can confront, also through workshop modalities and collective practices, the latest trends in contemporary art. Inaugurating this space will be Ernesto Tatafiore, who will intervene with a sequence of works reproduced on the facades of the Casina Pompeiana.

Exhibitions and site-specific installations will be designed by Italian and international artists in the spaces of the Church of San Severo al Pendino, creating a significant union between the uniqueness of the architecture and the artistic intervention. Inaugurating the space will be a striking work by Claudio Parmiggiani inspired by the sacred memory of the place.

A number of special projects will enrich the programming, with the aim of enhancing interventions in dialogue with the architecture, seizing the opportunities offered by ministerial funding and trying to build photographic narratives capable of rereading the image of the city.

Artist Francesco Vezzoli’s original work, Crocodile Tears, winner of the Piano per l’Arte Contemporanea call for proposals, funded by the PAC of the General Directorate for Creativity, designed specifically for the spaces of the Civic Museum of Castel Nuovo, will be installed at the Maschio Angioino. The work will consist of a site-specific sculpture conceived as a unique piece, inspired by the legend told by Benedetto Croce about the crocodile by which Queen Joan II made unwelcome lovers disappear.

The lighting project for the colonnade of the Basilica of St. Francis of Paola in Piazza Plebiscito, signed by Paolo Sorrentino and Daria D’Antonio, conceived on the occasion of the making of the film, It was the Hand of God, in 2021, will be activated.

A group of young Neapolitan photographers, led by Antonio Biasiucci, will be given the task of returning a portrait of today’s Naples through a photographic campaign. BIASIUCCI LAB has as its subject the ten municipalities of Naples to which an “ideal” municipality, that of the sea, has been added. Suburbs, central areas, work, young people, customs, and culture are the themes on which, for about a year, the photographers will focus, each using his or her own language. Each place or aspect will become a mirror for the inhabitants to see themselves in and thus reinforce their belonging to the place where they live. During the months of work, a strong connection with the territory will be activated, through the involvement of the population, associations and neighborhood realities. The photographic campaign also aims to enhance the skills of young photographers and produce shots capable of representing the present and return an unprecedented artistic and historical document, free from any rhetoric. The photographs will be collected in a volume and, later, in an exhibition.

A call for financial support for art projects will be published soon. Objectives: to enhance local creativity with particular reference to emerging realities and to contribute through contemporary artistic languages to spread the culture of environmental sustainability and to encourage paths of urban regeneration. The exhibition projects will be accompanied by a series of volumes published by Electa publishing house.

Image: Michelangelo Pistoletto, Venus of rags, 2023, for Piazza Municipio, Naples

A ten-meter Venus of Rags in the square and many other installations for Napoli Contemporanea 2023

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