Rovereto kicks off Nuvolette, the illustration and comics festival

Live drawing performances, workshops, solo and group exhibitions, meetings with authors and a comics and pop culture publishing fair will transform Rovereto, May 22-26, 2024, into an open-air art gallery. Artists and musicians for five days will enliven the streets of the historic center by drawing, painting and confronting each other in 40-minute speed drawing with live music played. The theme of the fifth edition of the festival will be strangeness, understood as unusual dissimilarity from the usual, a reason for surprise and curiosity, but also as that which is mysterious, supernatural, magical, heretical. Eight, in total, solo and group exhibitions by Maicol & Mirco, Roberto Ballestracci, Gianluca Sturmann, Francesco Montesanti, Stella Bastianelli, Francesco Biagini, Becoming X Art + Sound Collective; eighteen venues involved, twenty-four events with Stella Burns, Sergio Olivotti, Flora Yin-Wong, Sara Cimarosti and a market exhibition of small independent publishing. Carta & Inchiostro in the foyer of the Melotti Auditorium on Saturday, May 25 brings together self-published and independent publishing: artists’ books, catalogs, graphic design projects, periodicals and fanzines, as well as two monotype and gelli print stations with Margherita Paoletti and Elisa Vinciguerra.

The exhibitions

Among the big names featured in this edition Maicol & Mirco, (Michael Rocchetti) author of Gli Scarabocchi, the red and black cartoons published on the web. His solo exhibition Sono vivo per motivi di salute, from May 25 to July 14 at the City Museum, consists of about 40 original plates, drawn ad hoc for the occasion, that attempt to resolve thorny issues such as the environment, anti-specism, places to live, inhumanity. It will also be an opportunity to discover “Fables For Psychotherapists,” an atypical collection of Scarabocchi stories told by Maicol & Mirco in dialogue with Denis Isaia, director of the Mart’s Collections. “Weird things I keep doing when I’m not sleeping” is Stella Bastianelli’s solo exhibition, from May 24 to July 14 at IlbardiVerso, in black and white but with lots of color. Lines and doodles end up casually but not too casually on various objects: from sheets of watercolor paper to cups, plates and fabrics. Bastianelli focuses on the chair and all non-design objects, doodling them because she feels like it, filling them with phrases or images that do not involve sweaty, desperate research. Dark Matters by Francesco Biagini, from May 25 to July 14 at Le Radici, is a journey into the meanderings of strange and fantastic imagery, from Lovecraft to Tolkien, by the author of various comic book series for a variety of publishers around the world (Le Radici bar&pub, 7 Scala della Torre Street). BOH!DY by Gianluca Sturmann, the creative “artivist” who combines the pencil with social engagement, from May 23 to June 29 at the piccoloblu Bookstore, exhibits bodies that multiply, fit together, blend with nature, technologies, space and all text.

Chronicles from Babel is the solo exhibition by Roberto Ballestracci of the Becoming X collective, from May 22 to July 1 at Laba headquarters in Rovereto, which presents twelve portraits, twelve boys, twelve stories told through drawing, the only common language of the small class of a vocational school made up of Tunisians, Egyptians, Persians, Ukrainians, Moldavians, Albanians, Bengalis, Pakistanis, Ivorians, and Ghanaians. This Sounds Weird by Francesco Montesanti of the Becoming X collective, from May 24 to July 14 at Caffetteria Bontadi, displays illustrated posters for nonexistent events born during the lockdown, when participating in a collective moment really seemed a mirage. Posters of totally invented concerts and festivals, with devised locations in which fictional artists perform. At the Civic Library, from May 23 to June 9, the Becoming X Art + Sound Collective with Stranordinario presents an illustrated journey into the strange world of Nuvolette, going from picture to picture in a different scenario of strange normality and normal weirdness. Becoming X Art + Sound Collective is an artist collective that aims to combine live performance of visual art and musical sound making using all disciplines of drawing in all conceivable and available media.

The events

Roberto Ballestracci, Stella Bastianelli, Francesco Biagini, and Francesco Montesanti, authors of the four solo exhibitions, are also the protagonists of the May 24 Forty Minutes Time-Framed Weird Art speed drawing at Bottega d’Arte Gabbana, where they will be asked to draw in forty minutes of music played live by Stella Burns on paintings framed by Bob from Bottega d’Arte Gabbana. The four works produced during the live performance will remain on display until July 14 at Bottega d’Arte Gabbana. With Frieze of the Unlikely, Sergio Olivotti is the protagonist, Friday, May 24, of a live drawing performance on the large window between the library’s newspaper library and the Mart’s cafeteria, which is followed by Impossible Universes in which he talks about his profession as an illustrator of children’s books, in dialogue with Annalisa Casagranda of the Mart’s Education and Mediation Area, at the G. Tartarotti. Other scheduled initiatives include the Mutations concert on Friday, May 24, at the Melotti Auditorium, which will feature a dialogue between London-based Flora Yin Wong, among the most original sound artists in Europe, and illustrator Sara Cimarosti of the Becoming X Collective, a visual designer with a special interest in editorial illustration and poster art. And Cloudways Art + Sound Party: three DJs (Alle Mobororè, Juan Manuel Moretti, Pea), three illustrators (Silvia Alcidi, Marco Leombruni, Roberto Ballestracci), three clubbing sessions, Saturday, May 25 at the Melotti Auditorium.

Nuvolette is a project of Impact Hub Trentino with the artistic support of Becoming X Art+Sound Collective, supported by Comune di Rovereto, Comunità della Vallagarina, Provincia Autonoma di Trento and Regione Autonoma Trentino Alto Adige, with contributions from Fondazione Caritro and Cassa Rurale Alto Garda e Rovereto. The event is organized in collaboration with: Fondazione Museo Civico Rovereto, Centro Servizi Culturali Santa Chiara, Azienda per il turismo Rovereto Vallagarina e Monte Baldo, Tavolo dei musei, Biblioteca civica “G. Tartarotti,” Mart, Museo Storico Italiano della Guerra, Laba Trentino - Libera Accademia di Belle Arti, and many realities and economic activities of the city.

For info: https: //trento.impacthub.net/nuvolette-2024-quanta-stranezza/

Rovereto kicks off Nuvolette, the illustration and comics festival

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