Rewild: Milan kicks off an art project dedicated to climate change

From Jan. 19 to Feb. 13, 2021, at the “Il Vicolo” Art Gallery in Milan, The Curators Milan collective is presenting a social and artistic, nonprofit project dedicated to climate change: it is titled Rewild and is structured in six installations presented over the course of a year in which art, design and new technologies will dialogue. The first of these events is the one that starts on January 19: it is Prologue: Diatoms in the Multiverse, a multisensory and immersive installation that will tell the story of diatoms (single-celled organisms responsible for 50 percent of all the oxygen needed for the biochemical balance of the planet) by placing an iron sculpture by artist Ludovico Bomben in dialogue with a 3D sculpture.

This is the first of six different themes on which an artist or group of artists will be called upon each time to create their own aesthetic synthesis in a fluid and immersive exchange between figurative and plastic composition and digital art. The idea of Rewild was born through the exchange of ideas and experiences of five distinct personalities and professionalities that gave birth to the collective The Curators Milan, formed by director and photographer Frankie Caradonna, filmmaker Tomaso Cariboni, artist Lucia Emanuela Curzi, gallery owner Stefano Gagliardi and Bonsaininja founder Dario Spinelli, with the collaboration of the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan. The goal of The Curators Milan through Rewild is to make people reflect on the concept of empathy through which we can stimulate the preservation of the planet’s biodiversity and with it our very existence.

Rewild borrows its name from the concept of “rewilding,” a term that appeared in the 1990s in reference to the protection and reintroduction of predators and native plants, creation of no fishing zones, and in general to all those processes and projects aimed at conservation, restoration of original ecosystems and countering the loss of biodiversity. Headquarters of the project is the Galleria d’Arte il Vicolo in Milan, which will be transformed into a “TAAZ” (“Temporary Autonomous Artistic Zone”), in which the artists involved will be called upon to create together an experience that is both a physical installation, understood as a display of artistic artifacts, and movement, understood as collective and multisensory thinking that reflects on the concept of empathy. So the events will be accessible both live but also through a virtual platform www.thecuratorsmilan.com.

The first of the six events, as anticipated, will be an antecedent whose narrative focus is represented by the diatom. For every three breaths of the human being, one and a half are owed to diatoms: unique single-celled organisms, algae living in a house of glass and silicon, phytoplankton at the base of the food chain of marine fauna. Inhaling carbon dioxide and exhaling oxygen, diatoms are responsible for 50 percent of all the oxygen needed for the planet’s biochemical balance. Their skeletons from the desert travel on transoceanic winds to the Amazon and once there feed and fertilize it. Diatoms are destined to disappear due to ocean acidification and overheating with potentially catastrophic consequences for humans.

“Hold your breath: here is the world without diatoms. With Rewild we bring to Milan not only a new dialogue between sculptural and digital arts that reflects on the role of empathy, but a movement that breaks the anthropocentric view of the Universe,” explains Frankie Caradonna. The creative collective worked on the analogy between the blatant evocation of a ghost by a late 19th century illusionist and the evocation of the diatom ghost, using the evolution of a hologram technique in use in the 19th century.Artist Ludovico Bomben was involved, and in particular his work Dardo, an iron sculpture that represents precisely an arrow stretched in balance pointing toward the hologram of a Diatom, revealing both its fragile microscopic presence and its decisive importance. The installation thus becomes a dialogue between Bomben’s physical work and a 3-D sculpture, between real and virtual, showing the intermittent vision of an evanescence to be enjoyed not only through sight but also sounds. The technique used for the installation is itself meant to represent a point of balance, in this case not between man and nature, but between past and present. On the one hand, the creation of a hologram, an element that arises through 3D animation, speaks of modernity and digital. But the whole acquires its ethereal substance through an ancient technique, that of “Pepper’s ghost,” already used by illusionists in the 19th century. In this case, however, the reflective surface that projects the image into space is not hidden, but revealed, like a window through which a different reality can be seen.

In the photograph: an image from the installation Prologue: Diatoms in the Multiverse.

Rewild: Milan kicks off an art project dedicated to climate change

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