Reconnecting from the city. Connexxion, the widespread festival of relational and participatory art

Savona is a coastal city in western Liguria, whose urban center (nineteenth-twentieth century, with an even older circumscribed historical heart) lies between a wide tourist and commercial gulf and the narrow valleys that thread through the hills to the Ligurian Alps and Langhe. A laid-back, predominantly middle-class and tertiary city today, once also massively working-class; for as long as there is historical and archaeological memory of it, devoted to commerce and craftsmanship, rich in hidden artistic wonders, mostly from ancient and modern times.

Perhaps its blazon (not exactly enviable) as the head of Italy’s oldest provinces partly explains its manifest reluctance to innovation and research in the contemporary, certainly in the artistic and cultural fields. With rare exceptions (especially in the sphere of theater and performing arts), the tradition hinged on cultural models and paradigms of the last century still appears rather entrenched and difficult to renew.

For these reasons, a festival such as Connexxion, in a city like Savona, appeared from the very press conference to be lofty, only to prove disruptive to the local cultural routine when tested. But since nothing happens by chance, it should at least be noted the coincidence of such an event with a historical cycle in which the city, through its main political, economic, social and cultural actors, is attempting a change of course, aware that it has many, too many good chips to play (above all, an enviable quality of life and a social fabric that, despite the tensions at many levels, suffered in the last three decades, seems to be holding up and reacting positively).

Here, it is in such a context-returned in a forcibly simplified summary-that Connexxion is set from November 25, 2022 to January 7, 2023. I think a conceptual map would explain well the project of curator Livia Savorelli (best known as director of Espoarte magazine but now an established presence also in the role of curator). It is urban places and human and social relations, in fact, that weave the warp of an event that has developed as a kind of itinerant primitive theater, punctuated by time, one week after another, with performances, meetings, debates, itineraries, exhibitions and moments of sharing: a strongly performative and relational festival, widespread in practice as well as in substance.

Vanni Cuoghi,

The places, it was said, represent the focal points, geographical and urban, of the “connection” referred to in the title: the performances took place in civic and public spaces, such as the Archaeological Museum, the Priamar Fortress, the Ceramics Museum, the Sistine Chapel, the Chapel of the former San Paolo Hospital, the Brandale Tower, and the Bishop’s Seminary; and then in the city’s three art galleries - Vico Spinola, Gulli, Temide - to the fashion studio Atelier a picagetta and the restaurant Bino, by Michelin-starred chef Giuse Ricchebuono (on the zero floor of the Ceramics Museum). On the push of Connexxion, the recovery of abandoned and forgotten places in the urban center also took the field, such as the Garbasso anti-aircraft pedestrian tunnel, transformed by Silvia Celeste Calcagno ’s temporary site-specific intervention entitled Milk: an immersive environment of light and sound, with engaging and psychological implications (curated by Raffaella Perna).

Even more interesting were the real psychogeographical itineraries, conducted within the city by artists and curators, always with the collaboration of associations, businesses, cultural and social cooperatives, which from the port to the historic buildings bring to life the pulsating and collective organism that is the contemporaryurbs.

From the city Livia Savorelli wanted to depart, with a hypothesis of relational public art that is also the child of the isolation of 2020-21. Those who know her and follow her work know that, in the midst of the pandemic, her art residency project, in collaboration with Caritas Savona and the Albissola Marina proximity ceramics workshop, did not stop; on the contrary, it became even more rooted and radicalized thanks to Giovanni Gaggia’s project, Heart to God, Hands to Work, which involved users of foster homes, elementary school children, social and educational workers. That project had been promoted by theArteam Association, whose art competition(Arteam Cup), inaugurated in Venice in 2015, reached its seventh edition this year. It was precisely at the time of theArteam Cup (whose final exhibition, touring from year to year, landed in 2022 precisely in Savona) that the Connexxion festival was held. During the second lockdown, in 2021, Livia Savorelli felt the need to think and act together, artistically, the everyday places, without hiding or removing the mourning experienced collectively, on the contrary, working precisely on words, memory and gestures that would help to tell and process it. Connexxion can thus be considered the project of an experienced, capable and refined curator, but also the result of our collective mourning. This is also why its strength spilled far beyond the event or the individual performance, finding in the artists’ bodies and their generosity the vectors of communication and authentic emotions. The twelve artists invited by Savorelli were Andrea Bianconi, Eleonora Chiesa, Vanni Cuoghi, Giovanni Gaggia, Loredana Galante, L’orMa, Ilaria Margutti, Camilla Marinoni, Vincenzo Marsiglia, Alice Padovani, Francesca Romana Pinzari, and Mona Lisa Tina. Each worked in a place and for a place in the city, together with the people who live those same spaces on a daily basis.

For this reason, the construction of the artistic and performative moments, as well as the definition of the situations, began months before the opening of the festival, in an accompanying journey that saw the artists arrive in turn in the city, to explore its social relations and begin the work designed for each specific context. A curatorial work as cultural and social curation in the urban territory of Savona.

It can be said that, on the one hand, the symbolic and geographical pivot of the event expanded and spread throughout the city was the final group exhibition of theArteam Cup (hosted in the Commissioner’s Palace in the Priamar Fortress), whose jury composed of Matteo Galbiati, Maria Vittoria Pinotti, Davide Sarchioni, Livia Savorelli, Antonello Tolve and Maria Chiara Wang awarded Nataly Maier and Narda Zapata (in the Painting and Photography sections) and the duo Gaggia-Dubbini (Overall Winner and Sculpture section).

On the other hand, however, the constant protagonists have been the symbolic and vital places in the urban fabric.

According to an anthropological pattern that recalls epochs in Italian and European history marked by deep unease and social conflict, Livia Savorelli generated art outside the deputed venues, in streets and squares, in chapels and workshops, in artisans’ ateliers and museums (but barefoot among archaeological remains, like Camilla Marinoni and Alice Padovani). Since it was not a matter of replicating, recalling, aping the 1960s or 1970s, nothing that happened had the tone or sense of protest or provocation; on the contrary, the interconnection between sacred temples of art and centrifugal places was organic. Poetry, speech, I would like to say even kindness and respect, pervaded and reigned in the event, whether addressing the topicality of Ukrainian female refugees (Giovanni Gaggia), or agreeing to confess one’s secret history (Loredana Galante) or sharing hope with the little ones (Eleonora Chiesa).

On balance, one result above all arouses surprise and confirms the success of the festival: Savorelli managed, I believe unique among those who had attempted or tried before, to involve in a choral event of contemporary art truly so many and so diverse social actors of the city. Associations and businesses that had never collaborated with each other, along with public, ecclesiastical and private entities, museums: all were united by this invisible but tangible thread of presences and actions floating around the city, because they all answered the call, activating themselves with their own tools and humanity.

My personal conclusion is that, most likely, all these realities, these people and entities, were absolutely ready and eager to be involved. This was not a motion generated only by the pandemic, but a maturation that lasted perhaps years, which the pandemic and a changed political environment in the city (this has to be credited to the city administration, which welcomed, promoted and facilitated dialogue and participation in every way) abruptly accelerated. If so, it would mean that Savorelli truly acted as an opportune and timely social activator, demonstrating the real and tangible value of curatorial work in the service of the community.

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