October 26th 2018
Casa Morra – Archivio d’Arte Contemporanea
Salita San Raffaele 20/c, Napoli
A transdisciplinary course on reading and engaging with places through art
Sapere i Luoghi (‘Knowing Places’), a project organized by Fondazione Morra, Fondazione Lac o Le Mon, and Cantiere Giovani, winner of the 2018 call for proposals for the “PRENDI PARTE! Agire e pensare creative” initiative run by the Directorate General for Contemporary Art and Architecture and Urban Suburbs (DGAAP) of the Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities to promote cultural inclusion among young people in areas characterized by situations of economic and social marginality, gets to the very heart of transdisciplinary-community education. It will use various contemporary artistic idioms to provide methodologies and tools for a new reading of – and engagement with – places through research, experimentation and artistic expression.
The 20 participants, chosen from 89 applicants in the public selection process for young people, especially those in the NEET category, i.e., young people who neither study nor work, will have the opportunity to attend lectures and workshops where they will be able to investigate the concepts and practices of place and identity,
territory and map, and differences and opportunities, with input from Prof. Pasquale Persico. Encouraging contamination between the contemporary and the non-contemporary, Prof. Rossella Bonito Oliva will focus on the possibility of building new crossing points by reversing the relationship between the inner city and the outskirts, taking the Archives as the point of departure to attain a new, shared, imagination. These reflections will lead to the community-based explorations conducted by Nicoletta Ricciardelli, who will be working with the group in the Avvocata District, which, being home to the Museo Archivio Laboratorio Hermann Nitsch, the Associazione Shozo Shimamoto, and the Casa Morra-Archivio d’Arte Contemporanea, will form a basic training ground and a centre of artistic research. That of the “Art District” will become a geography of the imaginary and the virtual thanks to Prof. Mario Franco and “his” film locales: artistic manipulations that “invent” spaces for narrative purposes, experimenting with the possibility of changing routes and place names, bringing the sea into the backstreets of Naples, spaceships into churches, and surrealist dreams and Dadaist reversals into the story of everyday life. For tutors Loredana Troise and Raffaella Morra, these collective investigations will turn the territory into “an area sensitive to the inrush of experience, shaped by what we might call ‘thought from outside’, to quote Foucault: a fence where a convergence is established between the soul and the forms, between language and life.
From this point of view, the workshops run by Cesare Pietroiusti and Emilio Fantin will be of particular importance. With the help of Maria D’Ambrosio, they will take place in Casa Morra in the Avvocata District and the enchanting Vigna di San Martino, a piece of urban agricultural land in the heart of the city of Naples, with vineyards, citrus, and other species of fruit trees. The topic of inquiry will by art itself, the living forms and aesthetics of the process; how contemporary art can relate to places; the difference between site-specific and context-specific; artistic intervention in the urban context, possible strategies and historical examples; the concept of “relational” and the importance of relating to others.
Lastly, the experience of community will be consolidated by a residency at the Foundation Lac O Le Mon in San Cesario di Lecce, in an early twentieth-century farmhouse now given over to autonomous experimentation with self-sustainable and self-organized art and education. The activities will be developed within this framework through discussions on theory and project design, in a circular exchange of knowledge and new ideas, of collective reception and production. The work group will therefore be invited to design projects where sharing counts more than individual authorship. It will be a formative experience but also one of artistic production in which the participants will be guided indirectly in the realization of an individual project as well as in the co-production of a collective work representative of the experience.
The workshop experience begins in Naples on March 4 and runs until April 7, 2019. Tutoring will be provided during the production and design of the individual projects before the residency in San Cesareo di Lecce in Apulia, where “community” and “land” will be the key words until May 2.
The fruits of the experience gained outside the city will be on display at Casa Morra – Archivio d’Arte Contemporanea from May 20, with the preparations for the closing exhibition of the project, a “demonstration” of the in-out-in transformation process as experienced and interiorized by the participants.
The “exhibition of the places included” is scheduled to open on June 1, 2019.
Bando Iscrizione Sapere i Luoghi (Beneficiari Ammessi)
About the Fondazione Lac o Le Mon
The Lac o Le Mon Foundation is a non-profit organisation dedicated to contemporary art and culture founded in late 2015 by artists Emilio Fantin, Luigi Negro, Giancarlo Norese, Cesare Pietroiusti, and Luigi Presicce. Shortly after its creation, the Lac o Le Mon Foundation acquired a marvellous building, renamed Casa Cafausica, with a large plot of land located on the border between San Cesario di Lecce and Cavallino (in the south-east of Italy). Today, it is the site of an experimental arts training centre running laboratory activities, community experiences, trans-disciplinary activities, and promoting a culture of sustainability through bringing together and being together, joint projects, and osmosis between disciplines, knowledge and skills.
About Cantiere Giovani
Cantiere Giovani is a non-profit organisation founded in 2001 in Frattamaggiore (Na) thanks to a group of young people who, pooling their social, educational and cultural experiences in Italy and Europe, decided to take up the challenge of setting up a secular and independent organisation in the Neapolitan hinterland. The “Il Cantiere” project, a socio-cultural centre for social aggregation, has been recognised by the Council of Europe as being one of the most successful in getting young people involved in active citizenship. Cantiere Giovani is a member of the Coordination Committee for International/UNESCO Voluntary Service, the European Italian Voluntary Network, and the ITER Network. It promotes the resources of young people by combining social and cultural commitment to support processes of change and emancipation. It shares the running of Piazzetta Durante, a space for social, cultural and artistic experimentation.
www.cantieregiovani.org | www.piazzettadurante.it