Contemporary art comes to twenty villages in Italy with A Breath of Art

From June 24 to September 24, 2023, Una Boccata d’Arte, thecontemporary 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 related to the territory and traditions of the local communities. The openings will be held on Saturday, June 24 and Sunday, June 25 in all villages.

Each artist, entering in connection with the village, its history and its inhabitants, relates his or her personal research to the peculiarities of the place, creating an unprecedented intervention sometimes composed of several diffuse works.

Una Boccata d’Arte is a project spread throughout Italy: a cultural itinerary that from region to region promotes the heritage constituted by small towns, to highlight local history and traditions through contemporary art. 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 that allows it to address an increasingly wide and transversal audience, also thanks to the involvement of communities and the relationships that are generated between artist, inhabitants, administrations, associations, merchants and local artisans.

“It is a very intense moment, of great ferment, for Fondazione Elpis: last fall we inaugurated our office in Milan, 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 over the years,” explains Marina Nissim, President of Fondazione Elpis. “A valuable network, human and professional that continues to grow through processes of exchange and sharing in Italy and abroad. Further enriching it is the departing edition of Una Boccata d’Arte, the fourth, which also this year renews its international vocation and confirms the desire to give space to young people, to their ability to propose themselves in an always original way, working with different media and activating a surprising artistic and human dialogue capable of intriguing and involving local communities, between performances and workshops for children. Special thanks go to the mayors and local administrations that in some cases spontaneously apply to participate and thus enhance their territory through the unprecedented gaze of the artists.”

"Since the first edition, the search 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. This is how, already in its fourth edition, A Breath of Art has become a much-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 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.”

Starting in the village of Fénis in the Aosta Valley, the site-specific intervention BODIES AND SUBWOOFERS (B.A.S.) 8. 0: PERMANENCE by Stefanie Egedy, curated by Threes, is a sound installation composed of eight subwoofers that, through low-frequency sound waves, create a vibrational experience for the body and mind; in Vermogno-a hamlet of Zubiena in Piedmont, VICTIMULA by Invernomuto, curated by Threes, is an invitation to exploration, a collective game that re-proposes in virtual form the gold hunt, practiced in the Bessa territory since Roman times; Se si resta sul posto by Leonardo Meoni is a diffuse intervention that investigates the relationship between Castelvecchio di Rocca Barbena in Liguria and silence, translating recurring elements and forms in the village into the work; in Gardone Riviera in Lombardy SERENATA AGITATA by Jacopo Benassi, curated by Threes, is a set of ten flags that, hoisted on a single flagpole, evoke a sea in constant movement; To Live Inside a Second by Benjamin Jones is a diffuse intervention in the hamlet of Pieve Tesino in Trentino-Alto Adige that, in two different formats, tells the stories of the people who, starting from Tesino, took prints depicting the subjects of the time and the single story of Alcide De Gasperi, Italian statesman and founding father of the European Community, all over Europe; in Costozza-a hamlet of Longare in Veneto, Diego Perrone ’s Il frullamento del mare di latte is an environmental installation in the small church of San Michele, composed of a series of sculptural works and a selection of books tracing the peculiar geological origins of the area; in Friuli-Venezia Giulia in Aquileia, one of the main Roman archaeological sites of the peninsula, German artist Judith Hopf presents Relation Rests, an intervention composed of a sound work and two sculptures - a man and a woman caught using a smartphone - that investigates the relationship between contemporary and archaeological find, between everyday and ancient.

Continuing in central Italy, Raghad Saqfalhait ’s intervention La montagna è ancora in movimento in Travo, Emilia-Romagna, is inspired by the tales of the village’s inhabitants and its thousand-year geological history in an Artist’s Path composed of a series of sculptures made of materials of different durability and a video conceived as an affective mapping of the inhabitants; the video installation Rosa Mystica by Theodoulos Polyviou in collaboration with Loukis Menelaou in Fosdinovo, Tuscany, made with digital scanning and animation techniques, explores the potential of new technologies to satisfy the desire to relate to images in order to perceive the transcendent; in Toscolano - a hamlet of Avigliano Umbro in Umbria, Mattia Pajè ’s work Pila Thinkerwiller is composed of two engraved metal plates that, placed at the north and south ends of the village, collect the projects of the inhabitants themselves, transforming the village into a large stack, an amplifier of ideas, a portrait of a time, a place and a community; Margherita Raso ’s Eight Types of Whistles in Petritoli in the Marche region is a diffuse intervention composed of a sound installation that investigates the linguistic and communicative aspects of sound-whistles and a series of eight drawings posted in the streets of the village conceived as a visual translation of sound; in Rocca Sinibalda in Lazio, Laetitia KY ’s Follow the Braid project consists of a 1:1 of the artist’s body, equipped with hair made from long braided ropes that branch out through the village streets leading the public to a series of photographs installed in hidden places; Simone Carraro ’s Sagra della Lucertola in Pietracamela in Abruzzo is a symbolic journey, a carnivalesque staging against the backdrop of a village teeming with mosses and small reptiles, where human presence is linked to the memory of a time when man was closely tied to the land.

In Molise, in the village of Agnone, Diego Miguel Mirabella has created a bronze sculpture entitled The Jester: a melancholy storyteller, a tree covered with decorations from the Pontificia Fonderia Marinelli, which has been making bells for the popes since 1040; in Cetara in Campania, Serena Vestrucci ’s Abbronzatissimi Pallidissimi diffuse project triggers an ’atmospheric disturbance’ that brings snow to the sea: the snowmen protagonists of the intervention are extraneous to the context and their presence invites reflection on the value of welcome and hospitality; with Barely Invisible Cities in Maruggio in Puglia, Evita Vasiļjeva reflects on the preclusive function of fences and gates through three bench-sculptures that appropriate the aesthetics of rusty gratings and represent an invitation to pause, encounter and exchange; Me ne ne andrei nella roccia della Lieta by Arianna Pace, in Rivello in Basilicata, is a diffuse intervention in the village that takes its starting point from a reflection on the local landscape and the monumental domestic pine, the largest in Basilicata, a participatory inhabitant in the life of the village for almost two centuries; in Santa Severina, Calabria, artist Mohsen Baghernejad Moghanjooghi creates the intervention d’io, bio composed of three works in which the written word becomes matter and bends to the artist’s expressive needs; in Sicily Axis Mundi by Ella Littwitz is an obelisk placed at the highest point high point of Pollina, a marble sculpture that becomes the instrument to return stories and legends related to the territory; SERPENTINA Per un mÅ«sÄ?um senza tempo by Raffaela Naldi Rossano in Belvì, Sardinia, was born from the observation of the collection of the future Natural Science Museum of the village and tells about a museum that exists in the imagination of the community, in a timeless condition.

For info: www.unaboccatadarte.it

Image: Pieve Tesino (Trento). Photo by Jose Alberto Biason. Courtesy of Municipality of Pieve Tesino.

Contemporary art comes to twenty villages in Italy with A Breath of Art

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