«Why Vidìmu? Because the vision of these eight video art works ultimately leads you to an unexpected outcome». With these words, curator Claudio Libero Pisano introduces “Vidìmu“, the video art exhibition that opened at the Monumental Complex of San Giovanni in Catanzaro, the event that will mark the Catanzaro July under the sign of contemporary art expressed through video art. «I didn’t choose eight female artists, but I chose eight works of art», Pisano convincingly responds when the writer points out the evidence of an entirely female exhibition. His introduction too, both in the catalog and live at the official presentation of Catanzaro Contemporanea, leaves no doubt about the curator’s sincerity.
Marzia Migliora, “Forever Overhead”, 2010, courtesy artist e Galleria Lia Rumma Milano-Napoli
In the dialects of my region, Calabria, the word vidìmu indicates not only the act of ‘we see’, but also and above all a sense of postponement, of procrastination of choices, of slowing down the decision-making pace and therefore of potential openness to a different ending than the one imagined. And so, the exhibition of the eight videos intends to involve us in this shift, between an idea that forms in our mind when we see and another idea that materializes at the end of the vision. The exhibition is accompanied by a beautiful catalog curated by Claudio Libero Pisano and published by Rubbettino, which also showcases the pair of organizing entities of Catanzaro Contemporanea, namely the Municipal Administration of Catanzaro and the Visionaria ETS Association and, naturally, the extensive network of partnerships implemented by the organizers with numerous other entities (some of which, functional to the story, will be revealed in the next lines of this contribution).
Elisabetta Benassi, “Mirage#3”, 2005, courtesy artist e Magazzino, Roma
A diver is on the springboard of a rationalist swimming pool with other divers frescoed on the walls (we are in the sports complex of Stadio dei Marmi in Rome). The scene recalls the Tomb of the Diver of Paestum (and, vaguely, Il tuffatore by Nino Migliori – the reader should not be surprised if there will be a continuous rebound and constant contamination between different spheres of artistic expression: Catanzaro Contemporanea was also conceived for this). But we are in front of Forever Overhead, a video work by Marzia Migliora, in which the time of the dive and real time are asynchronous, very effectively signifying the passage between two different phases of life (inspired by the homonymous story by David Foster Wallace). What is a mirage if not a false promise? Elisabetta Benassi seems to promise us a dawn almost like Monet’s, with an extremely high rate of romanticism. In full compliance with curator Pisano’s words, the observer’s expectation is overturned and in Mirage #1 (2005) we finally understand that what wedges between two ships is not a real dawn. A camera wanders inside a destroyed building. It fixes its gaze on a face that seems to have the same mummified expression as the fire victims found in Pompeii, on a brain that recalls a Lombrosian scientific belief, it soars from detail shots at the level of an alembic to reach broad shots of enormous halls blackened desolately by a destructive fire: this is the narrative thread of Still in Life (2014), a resilient title for the painful tribute by Raffaella Mariniello to the City of Science in Naples, destroyed by arson in 2013. Poetic and magnetic is L’infinito by Leopardi in Italian sign language, a 2018 work by Bruna Esposito that gives us back «with simple but powerful hand movements, the same infinite beauty» (from the curator’s introduction to the catalog).
Bruna Esposito, “L’infito di Leopardi nella lingua dei segni”, 2018, courtesy artist
Ricochet is a French word that means rebound. It is the theme of a grotesque condominium polyptych in which the boundary between reality and imagination becomes confused and intertwined under the disturbing gaze of a monitor, perhaps the only deus ex machina of the scene (work by the artist of Bangladeshi origin and Canadian adoption Myriam Laplante). A gate can represent a sort of barcode and can signify the boundary between freedom and confinement and therefore, inevitably, inspire the temptation to climb over it or walk along it in precarious but successful balance. BARCODE is a gesture of freedom, rendered in video in 2020 by Sonia Andresano. Intimate and revealing is the passionate video constructed on a series of photographs by Fiamma Montezemolo. The photo albums are those of her father, a photographer who documented all his travels and a large part of family moments with an impressive amount of photographs. Structured in three chapters, the game, the machine (automobile), the environments, the work (from 2023) has a very poetic title, Between a Tremor and Another, revealing from a medical point of view the creative moments that a man, the father, suffering from Parkinson’s disease, can have. A tailing worthy of Italian neorealism, or in the manner of the Dardenne brothers, features a child walking towards a destination that is unknown. He wears a T-shirt many sizes too large, sandals for adults and proceeds on a dirt road, turning his back to Romanian director Iulia Ghiță who, with MAL/Shore (2023), gives us enigmatic moments of wonder and childlike discovery.
Sonia Andresano, “BARCODE”, 2020, courtesy artist
It must be said very clearly that contemporary art has been at home in Catanzaro for decades and the undersigned can testify to this. The contamination between different contemporary languages and the intersection between contemporary art and historical contexts has also been at the center of so much cultural offerings in Catanzaro in past decades. Catanzaro Contemporanea therefore grafts onto, and reprooses some significant aspects of, an established tradition, also thanks to the events collateral to the Vidìmu video art exhibition. Three other strands have strengthened the broader event in the three inaugural days (July 4-6): conversations, screenings in collaboration with Artecinema, guided tours. Francesco Vaccaro, director of Catanzaro Contemporanea, emphasized the importance of contamination of languages only apparently different such as, for example, art and architecture. Vaccaro also highlighted the centrality of art in daily and human living: «it is not escape, but responsibility, it is a necessity of the spirit», he stated, recalling the words of the late Pope
Raffaela Mariniello, “Still in life”, 2014, courtesy artist e Studi Trisorio, Napoli
And, speaking of words, the conversation schedule had two very significant moments. First, the inaugural debate La curatela come atto poetico (Curatorship as poetic act), in the presence of Chiara Bertola, director of the GAM in Turin and Michela Alessandrini, curator of Fondation Cartier in Paris. Introduced by a poetic and intense speech by the director of Catanzaro Contemporanea Francesco Vaccaro, capable of capturing attention starting from the magnificent words by Gianni Rodari on the analogies between stone and word, both capable of arousing infinite chain reactions, the two experts in artistic curatorship involved the audience with two really different public profiles. Chiara Bertola, strong in her twenty-five-year experience at the Querini Stampalia Foundation in Venice, centered her interventions on curatorship understood as closeness and trust towards artists, on the vitality that must be impressed on the exhibition thanks to the curator’s role, on the relationship that must be created between artist and exhibition space, especially when contemporary work must dialogue with a more classical heritage. Curator, artist and place – she stated with an excellent expression – must create a nutritive triad so that the exhibition can reach the preset objectives of audience involvement. More focused on the varied artistic south of the world, especially female, were Michela Alessandrini’s interventions. Lucia Pescador and the fiumara were the protagonists of Alessandrini’s words, who also showed, in the case of the Voghera artist, to signify how care towards art can be expressed, her own work arrangement table: the domestic bed. The fiumara instead was assimilated to Rodari’s words for the pebbles motionless and then set in motion by the flood, almost forming a land art work. The exhibition, as Vaccaro concluded, is a parallel space in which the whirling external world tries to stop.
Fiamma Montezemolo, “Fra un tremore e un altro”, 2023, courtesy artist e Magazzino, Roma
Artist Gregorio Botta and architect Luca Galofaro were at the center of the next day’s conversation, managing to contaminate their respective roles thanks to arguments at the invisible border between a certain way of expressing visual art and architecture. Moderated by architect Mara Varia, the element that operated as a connector was light. Varia introduced the comparison remembering how much both art and architecture use light as a technical element, poetic principle and structural principle. La luce si fa spazio (Light makes space) is the title of this remarkable promenade dedicated to the Calabrian artist Pino Pingitore, who passed away during the days of Catanzaro Contemporanea. Light in art enters from the left and Botta immediately magnetizes the present audience illustrating the novelty of light on bare wall of the Annunciation by Beato Angelico that frescoes Cell 3 of San Marco in Florence. It is the beginning of an innovative representation of light on wall that will have a magnificent follow-up, as Botta illustrates, in Johannes Vermeer and still later in Vilhelm Hammershøi, to then reach the apex in the wall that emanates light by Mark Rothko and even more in the physical rendering of Rothko’s works operated by James Turrell. The journey of light that becomes a fundamental element in arts and architecture is, with the same involvement, at the center of Galofaro’s illustration, which begins from the architectural conception of the Roman Pantheon of the 1st century BC, a true urban model of light monitoring. The constant intersection of natural light and artificial light is at the center (another example illustrated by the speaker) of the Salk Institute in Los Angeles, architectural work by Louis Kahn where the central canal, at sunset, creates a suggestive visual effect. The New York Pier 52 is one of the examples of building that Gordon Matta-Clark, before the planned demolition, loved to literally cut to revitalize it, creating new reflections of natural light, an operation technically also taken up by Alvaro Siza for the Porto Museum. The magnificent digression on the symbiotic relationship between light and art and architecture ends with a work by Galofaro himself, the Neapolitan Hospital of the Sea, in which the architect brings light to the two underground floors that, structurally misaligned, interact with light creating light beams at all hours of the day in different but constant ways.
Miriam Laplante, “Ricochet”, 2014, courtesy artist
Artecinema is a festival that has been held in Naples for 30 years and specializes in proposing documentaries about art. In partnership with this important exhibition, Catanzaro Contemporanea proposed three documentaries of absolute level. Arte povera. Appunti per la storia (Arte povera. Notes for history) is a 2023 documentary by Andrea Bettinetti with the narrating voice of Giuseppe Cederna, which, as said by the director present at the screening, required considerable commitment over several years, with the rediscovery of so much precious and determining material to arrive at an unpublished film project. Daniel Buren: L’Observatoire sur la lumière à la Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris is the 2016 documentary also screened in this case in the presence of director Gilles Coudert. As appropriately anticipated by Coudert, his work focuses on the making of of a work, with the double hope of approaching the user without overwhelming their free will and not damaging the soul of the work itself. The film triad was completed by Renzo Piano. L’architetto della luce (Renzo Piano. The architect of light), a 2018 documentary by Spanish director Carlos Saura, dedicated to the design and construction of the Botin Center in Santander, in which the points of contact with the logic of the making of highlight what happens in the different phases of the creative process, from the beginning to the end of its unfolding.
Catanzaro Contemporanea, day 2, ph credits Marco Barberio, courtesy Catanzaro Contemporanea
As already anticipated, in the territory of Catanzaro contemporary art has deep roots and the section of guided tours foreseen by the Catanzaro Contemporanea schedule confirmed this. The International Sculpture Park (also known by the name of Marca Open) hosts twenty-three works by international artists who over time have had a connection with this territory. The genesis and enrichment of this wonderful space at the magical border between green area and open-air museum intersects with the Intersezioni event, wanted by Alberto Fiz in the period between 2005 and 2012 and which was based in the nearby Archaeological Park of Scolacium. In those years, a Forum, a Roman theater, a Norman Basilica and a magnificent olive grove interacted with works by Paladino, Fabre, Buren, Cragg, Balkenhol, Marc Quinn, Delvoye and other international artists. An artistic residency project and some workshops that will be carried out in collaboration with the Academy of Fine Arts of Catanzaro will complete the Catanzaro Contemporanea program in progress for a calendar that should extend until November.
Info:
VIDÌMU
04/07 – 31/07/2025
Complesso Monumentale del San Giovanni
Corso Giuseppe Mazzini, 4 – Catanzaro
www.comune.catanzaro.it
I am Giovanni Crotti, born in 1968, and I feel obliged to thank writing because it drives my life. I cultivate within me multitudes that lead me to investigate, know, and deepen every cultural and creative expression, and then write about it, always trying to be clear and documented in the contents.
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