Arte&Sud

You'll find Acicastello a few kilometres north of Catania, on the sea border. It is a small fishermen village around its Norman castle. Within the fortress, a small Museum of minerals and archaeological pieces will coexist for more than a month and a half with the works of contemporary Sicilian and Sardinian artists. A bit further away, Acitrezza and its Riviera dei Ciclopi, will guest the artists coming from the other Italian regions associated to the project: installations, videos, paintings, and performances, in the context of the rationalist Villa Fortuna.

For “ Arte & Sud obiettivo contemporaneo ”, I have given priority to the youngest art, an art that operates, and experiments with, individually. Thus, I have scrutinized some two hundred candidates' works, and finally chosen forty one from the GAI (Young Italian Artists) circuit, and nine from the Bartoli Felter Foundation in Cagliari.

The selected artists display the same energy and the same vision of their work; their endeavour is to express the spirit of the time, and what attracted me was precisely their projecting, their working in progress, attitude. In this perspective, I have proposed to put memory, in all nuances, at the exhibition's core; though – it is to be stressed – my quest was about a dimension, not just a subject. The real aim is that the public do find an overview, and an impartial sample as well, of young, i.e., most vital and purposeful, art.

Many, and different, works are assembled here: installations, performances, paintings, sound art, and, most notably, video-projections. Otherwise put, the coordinators (Rosa Anna Musumeci of ARTECONTEMPORANEA, and the Acicastello Administration) are doing a remarkable choice in favour of the valorisation and the promotion of the most updated artistic offer, including its most unusual variants. To work in the South does mean to confront nature's vitality, a rich historical record, but, first and foremost, a web of contradiction, the enigmas of a land that remains unforeseeable and overwhelmingly complex. Thus, to open this land to one of our times' most significant languages is all the more interesting, since is done through young artists, the very embodiment of future.

In contemporary culture, a mood prevails that values most the living in a minimalist world, a frigid, marmoreal, metaphysical world, as if one wanted to stress our recent past history and its aftermaths; artists, then, aim to be a “self mirror”, to record their own behavioural attitudes and actions. They share more a pulsion than common research endeavours.

Be that as it may, artists are, as always were, the straight symbol of a fully operating, unaligned, un-obsequious, un-rhetorical freedom. A simple freedom, solicitously dedicated to Mankind, reflecting both dramatic images and the promise of redemption; in a way, it is as if one did choose to leave the everyday world and return himself, and ourselves as well, an identity.

This research waves between manifold tastes and trends, is on the verge of contradiction and visual erudition, does polemize with received culture, or the unruly reproduction of established patterns, and is able to attain formally controlled, and really powerful, outcomes thanks to the last technological media. Be that as it may, today's art mirrors the free representations of his/her authors, it is more and more a projecting act, and less and less a realistic account. By showing their (sometimes thin) image, artists drive us towards small traces of stubborn survival by an endless re-reading from a contemporary perspective.

With Arte & Sud , I wish to prompt the diffusion of this way of thinking. Both art and the contemporaneous, after all, have to experiment with, in order to free themselves from the brackets of social and cultural norms that have fed false needs, and false values, to keep the imaginary under check and to spread the plague of ethnic, social, and economic, racism, sometimes with the avail of misused religious appeals. In short, a unique opportunity to establish an exciting strategy of continuity, to meet with an art already on the march towards the next borders.

Antonio Arévalo