In the Aventine gardens open-air contemporary art installations

From Dec. 19, 2020 to Feb. 28, 2021, the Aventine Gardens will be enriched with contemporary artworks, on the occasion of the free admission exhibition OPEN BOX: installations by Paolo Buggiani, Tommaso Cascella, Publia Cruciani, Marco Fioramanti, Riccardo Monachesi, Giulia Ripandelli, Ninì Santoro, and Mara van Wees will be placed here.

The initiative is curated by Francesca Perti, conceived by AdA (Associazione Amici dell’Aventino) and promoted in collaboration with the Municipio Roma I centro. The opening will be held from 11 a.m. on December 19 in the gardens of Sant’Alessio, Piazza Albina and Piero Piccioni, introduced by Daniela Gallavotti Cavallero.

The exhibition project aims to enhance the places of the Aventine and focuses on the dialogue between contemporary sculpture and the green spaces adopted by AdA, in active collaboration with the Garden Office. The green spaces will transmute into outdoor art galleries.

In the future, there are plans to gather new exhibition proposals, give a voice to “under 35s,” and create a dynamic gallery with rotating display of works.

“This cultural initiative,” stresses Sorgente Group Foundation Vice President Paola Mainetti, “is an important opportunity that, through the enhancement of the works of interesting contemporary art artists, reminds us to have respect for common green areas, too often forgotten, whose maintenance requires commitment for institutions and respect from citizens.”

This first edition features eight artists: in the garden of Sant’Alessio, Buggiani, Cascella, Monachesi and Santoro express themselves with durable materials such as iron, steel and ceramics, while Cruciani, Fioramanti, Ripandelli and van Wees have chosen the open spaces of the Piero Piccioni Gardens and Albina Square for their site-specific installations and landart.

Paolo Buggiani presents his ESCALATION (2000-2020), a large man climbing a ladder next to a snake that look like something out of a child’s imaginative game or The Wizard of Oz, alluding to a humanity that seeks its fulfillment in wealth and consumption.

By Tommaso Cascella is the work CIELO, a sculpture that traces its volume with iron and draws space to suggest the idea of the cosmos. Two elements inspired the artist: the domes of Rome, which are like celestial vaults, hence skies, and the bell tower of Borromini’s Oratorio dei Filippini, where architecture is only drawn with iron.

In BLUE FLUXUS, Riccardo Monachesi fuses two suggestions: the last fifteen years of Sant’Alessio’s life spent under a staircase of the ancestral palace and the concept of water, which the artist realizes through glazed ceramic tiles. He creates his own vision of the garden through the ceramic art of tradition, raising it to the level of the sculptural achievements of Renaissance fountains.

With BOUCLIER, THE SHIELD AND THE LANCE OF ACHILLE (1971), in iron and steel, Ninì Santoro reaffirms the artist’s lifelong interest in historical and literary cues and emphasizes his original strength, his mental image projected onto the sculpture that only by name becomes reality.

Mara Van Wees created the installation THE WATER THAT IS NOT THERE (2020): the artist fills a void in the center of the garden in Albina Square, imagining a fountain adorned with a modern cosmatesque mosaic. She reuses contemporary building materials, sheathing and iron, the materials discarded from construction.

In NASADIYA SUKTA (2017-2018) Giulia Ripandelli is inspired by the Vedic hymn, known as the Hymn of Creation, which tells how the origin of the universe is incomprehensible and mysterious. The artist brings back the words of the hymn, hanging from the branches of the tree, fluid and light, willing to spend and transform, and throw their cosmic message to the wind.

Publia Cruciani, with PRESENZE RIBELLI, which can be defined as an Edenic cosmogony, creates a world apart, where characters of antiquity return to populate the Aventine Hill: Romulus, Messalina, Poppea, Brutus, Hadrian seem to reappear at home, perfectly at ease in a post-postmodern Rome.

Marco Fioramanti created C.R. 42 “FALCO.”“The airplane wreckage is a relic of memory that exists in the cemetery of memories,” at the same time it is an act of love toward the father who flew the plane during the campaign in Greece and Albania and a love story because, in the turmoil of war, eyes of a woman from the enemy faction met those of the young pilot.

Pictured: Giulia Ripandelli, Nasadiya Sukta

In the Aventine gardens open-air contemporary art installations

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