From 26.05.2024 to 06.01.2025
Some of the most important works by Michelangelo Pistoletto, one of Italy’s most celebrated artists, including Quadri specchianti (Mirror paintings), Venus of rags, Sphere of newspapers, and the Metro cube of infinity, will enter into dialogue with the creations of artists from the region, Italy and abroad, invited to confront through their work the instances of ethical and social transformation that are characteristic of the master’s work.
This will be the heart of the “Terza Terra” exhibition, which will transform Villa Manin into a new stage of Cittadellarte, the citadel as large as a small town that Pistoletto created in Biella, his hometown.
The exhibition, organised under the curatorship of Guido Comis, director of Villa Manin for Erpac (the Regional Agency for Cultural Heritage), in collaboration with Paolo Naldini, director of the Cittadellarte Foundation, brings the authentic spirit of the citadel to the former Doge’s residence, a place where other artists can confront the themes of the master’s work, a place for debate on the ethics of production, a space for sociality and sharing with the realities of the territory.
“The presence of Michelangelo Pistoletto’s works at Villa Manin,” explains curator Guido Comis, “will be an opportunity to make Passariano a place of creation, discussion and experimentation along the lines of Cittadellarte, but above all a place where many different souls of the region can be involved.
It will therefore be Pistoletto’s works themselves on display at Villa Manin that will dictate the themes of discussion and debate: society, fashion, politics, education, food and agriculture. “The Quadri specchianti,’ Guido Comis specifies, ‘will allow visitors to enter into a relationship with the characters in the works and share their social situations, the Sfera di giornali will introduce the themes of politics and communication, the Venere degli stracci will represent the trait d’union with fashion’.
One of the highlights of the route proposed by Villa Manin is the Third Paradise, a symbol conceived by Pistoletto to express the balanced intertwining of artifice and nature, which has been created in the park of Villa Manin in botanical form, on a large scale (50 metres), and is also the cue to address the issues, now on the agenda, of agricultural production and food sustainability. A creation ‘in the making’, which will also be made to grow thanks to the use of a special vegetable coal that increases soil fertility, Biochar.
The Third Paradise is the fusion of the first and second paradises. The first is the one in which human beings were totally integrated into nature. The second is the artificial paradise, developed by human intelligence to the global dimensions achieved today through science and technology. The Third Paradise is the third phase of humanity, which is realised in the balanced connection between artifice and nature; it is the transition to an unprecedented stage of planetary civilisation, indispensable to ensure the survival of the human race. To this end, it is first necessary to re-form the principles and ethical behaviour that guide common life
The public programme is significantly dubbed “Art of Demopraxia“. It will involve public and private organisations, representatives of the productive and agricultural sectors, of institutions and the cultural world. Villa Manin will thus be a place for the exercise of demopraxia, a neologism coined at Cittadellarte to define the process of social transformation through the direct involvement of all the stakeholders of a territory. In particular, for the selection of artists called upon to dialogue with the themes and instances represented in Pistoletto’s works (including Ryts Monet, Caretto – Spagna, Collettivo Robida, Luigi Coppola, Chiara Sgaramella, Noor Abed, Nico Angiuli, Tiziana and Isabella Pers, PLoT (2021 – Colette Lewis, Marilyn Lennon, Elinor River, Michele Spanghero) Villa Manin collaborated with the curatorial committee of Unidee, Residency Program (Cittadellarte’s residency programme) composed by Juan E. Sandoval, artist COL, Andy Abbot, curator U.K., Alessandra Saviotti (curator) and Beatrice Catanzaro (artist), while for the public programme was made possible thanks to the collaboration with Giacomo Bassmaji.
As Paolo Naldini points out, “The content of this exhibition proposal weaves together three layers in an organic and innovative way: it starts with the works of Michelangelo Pistoletto as suggestions and indications of an artistic path of research from the 20th century to the present articulated in “rooms”; then a selection of artistic practices that deal with the same themes or “instances” chosen on the territory of Friuli Venezia Giulia, through the network of relations of Erpac – Villa Manin and the network of alumni of Unidee Università delle Idee International Residency Program started at Cittadellarte in 1999; and finally a third layer of innovative devices for activating the territory and its communities starting from the exhibition as an engine of engagement and possibility of transformation”.
The meetings organised around the exhibition will be held in a temporary arena made of ecological and recyclable materials in the central hall of the villa”
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