Piazza Armerina, Sicily

Thematic Pavilion

Mediterraneo: Mosaico di C(OU)lture

The Mediterranean, a Mosaic of Crops and Cultures represents a piece of wider journey started with the creation of the Park of the Soul, a creative laboratory that binds Nature and Art in a project in progress, to study new forms of balance between Man and Nature, recovering ancient crops and cultures in Italy and the Mediterranean. The Pavilion is supported by Piazza Armerina, in Central Sicily, recognised by UNESCO for its heritage and timeless mosaics. These mosaics are living metaphors for life’s complexities and diversity. Just as mosaic pieces come harmoniously together to form one whole, so does the Pavilion, becoming an emblem of plurality, embracing history and contemporary challenges for future generations.

Curator

Alessia Montani

Barrister of the Supreme Court by profession, Alessia Montani is a Cultural Manager, conceptualising and curating exhibitions that bring together art and human rights in Italy and beyond: FabulainArt; Trasparenza: L’arte per le Energie Rinnovabili; M.EATING; Dangerous Red; Io Sono Qui. Her focus is on themes like artificial intelligence, violence on women, renewables, food security, sustainability and biodiversity. She is the President of AVASIM-MAMA-SEEDS, which she founded to promote multidisciplinary projects that bring together agriculture, medicine, food, art, fashion and design, for the protection of agricultural biodiversity and crop variety at risk. She has also created the Parco dell’Anima, an open air museum holding a seed bank and contemporary art. Montani is a Lecturer in Judicial Administration at the Sapienza University in Rome, LUISS ‘Guido Carli’, Aquila University and Calabria University and author of various conferences and publications, including JUS.

Artist/s

Michelangelo Pistoletto

Michelangelo Pistoletto is a major player in Italy’s contemporary art world, famous for his installations through which he calls for an equilibrium between Nature and Science (artificio). In Noto’s Parco dell’Anima, he installed The Third Paradise using exclusively the Russello Ancient Grain, an ancient cultivar common to all the Mediterranean People

Domenico Pellegrino

Domenico Pellegrino is known as the artist of the light. He believes in the synthesis between the past, the roots and the future and he is particularly sensitive to the themes of sustainability, the protection of the sea, traditions and biodiversity. His work ‘Diversity’ represents the botanical heritage of Mediterranean plants, transferring to the spectator all their colours, images and light. The different plants also narrate the multicultural and diversified nature of the people who live in and share the Mediterranean. Making use of this iconic language, the artist paints a colourful, botanical scenery, to convey the all-important message of Inclusion. Diversity is about all of us; it includes all the differences that exist in all human beings. An emotional collage that goes beyond plants to evoke the Mediterranean artisan traditions, from rush weaving to mosaic in churches that represent a heritage identity.

Franco Politano

Franco Politano is an artistic director who mobilises an army of farmers to portray the sacrifice of the people who have made agriculture the base for nourishment and prosperity for their civilisations born from the fertile Halfmoon, where agriculture started 9,000 years ago to the present day. The journey of the seeds through civilisations, synthesized in an olive branch is also the journey of hope for thousands of migrants who nowadays cross the Mediterranean in search of Peace and Harmony.

MariaGrazia Pontorno

MariaGrazia Pontorno is an Artist and Lecturer of Multimedia Projections at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence. Her artistic research is focussed on the relationship between art and science, contemporary vs traditional, using Nature as the symbolic element. Her works have been exhibited internationally, from the MACRO and MAXXI in Rome, to the Biedermann Museum, Donaueschingen; Stadtgalerie, Kiel; MLAC, Rome; Museo di Castel Sant’Elmo, Naples; Art Center, Thessaloniki; Museo Riso, Palermo; and CIAC, Genazzano. Nobilis Golden Moon (www.nobilisgoldenmoon.com) remains one of her boldest and most powerful works, consolidating the boundaries between environmental militancy and sustainability. The short film, featuring the Pinna Nobilis (a mollusc in extinction), was shot in Spain and Sardinia, in between two pandemics and two full moons. The work of scientists from Imedmar in Valencia is put against rituals by Chiara Vigo, the last Master of the byssus who sings the chant of the water at Sant’Antioco on the full moon.

Chicco Margaroli

Chicco Margaroli: The multifaceted artist Chicco Margaroli has put up various international exhibitions, in both public and private spaces, with Nature as her central. She is distinguished for her use of organic material in her creations, an investigation on how Nature attracts, as well as evokes, fear, being both comforting and menacing. Her installations invite the public to reflect on the theme of Sustainability: ‘Nuove Forme’, Spazio della Tradizione, Satellite Regionale Biennale di Venezia al Forte di Bard, Aosta; ‘20 x 1’ MACLA Museo de Arte Contemporanea Latinoamericano, Istituto Garuzzo Arti Visive e Ministero degli Affari Esteri. In circulation in Cordoba – Espacio Cultural MUMU; Buenos Aires – Centro Cultural Borges; Montevideo – Uruguay; ’Oltre il Paesaggio Mistico’ Ministero per i Beni e le Attivita’ Culturali, on the occasion of the 55th International Biennale di Venezia, Singapore Garden Festival 2016, Nature Resolution Project which won the golden medal for Best of Show; ‘Io sono qui’, Roma, MACRO.

Giulio Rigoni

Giulio Rigoni is an artist of international stature, with works in museums and galleries around the world, Rigoni delves into the study of classic and contemporary aesthetics. His art is loaded with unreal images, enchanted, hanging in atmospheres suggestive of mythical times past. At the Museo Macro in Rome he presented a project designed around the theme of the Hug: The Hug between Cultures and Peoples, who have always considered the Mediterranean as the natural place where exchanges take place. The Meeting theme develops in plastic, through two rods of metal, silken brass, which idealistically wrap the spectator. Both sides represent the cities of the Mediterranean with their Renaissance and Oriental architecture, which at a glance then seem to unite all together.

Alex Turco

Alex Turco is an Italian designer and artist who lives between Miami and Ibiza. Turco’s works are a mix between digital graphic, photographs and material art, using liquid metals and crystals, which he extracts from nature, like the Mediterranean sea salt, for his works of art. Turco’s Waterproof Art Panels are resistant to liquids, to emphasise the importance of protecting the water and the sea, for the survival of the Planet.

Toni Campo

Toni Campo is international photographer. Among his most distinguished projects is his participation in ‘Born in Italy: Food, Fashion, Design and Ancient Seeds’. It is a dialogue between tradition, design and fashion, where Italian excellencies are revisited through the photographic lens in an innovative vision that focuses the attention on the richness of the indigenous ancient seeds in Italy and the Mediterranean. It is a heritage – that of the plant and animal biodiversity – to protect, through sustainable development in the interest of innovation, accessible wellbeing and environmental protection. ‘Born in Italy’ consists of seventeen (17) shots by Toni Campo, which capture the various phases of the agricultural processes of ancient seeds in a contemporary and innovative language. The background is the Mediterranean countryside with old citrus groves and secular olive, almond and carob trees.

Danila Mancuso

Danila Mancuso’s artistic currency is the way she uses material and colour. Her matter is one time dense, then light, through different climates, connecting clean surfaces which explode with the colours of nature, as well as the darkness of the abysses. Her characteristic remains the colour, the chromatic paste, which is no longer a means, a tool, but a reality that the artist manages to shape as she pleases to communicate and identify herself. Her art has a life; flicks of emotions that escape time and space, using unusual material that reveal a mysterious energy. Through her art, she narrates the sea and challenging themes of collective relevance like the emergency in marine ecosystems and the endangered coral reefs, for which she received the ‘Premio Cultura e Identita’’ Arti Visive at the Festival di La Spezia and the ‘ Premio Pitturiamo a New York’. “The sea always gifts something extraordinary,” said the author when she spoke about her works; coral is enriched through the symbolism of the tree, seen as a world axis, and water as the origin of the world, of life, of future generations.

Nicholas Peall

Nicholas Peall is a Londoner of Anglo-German descent who now lives and works in Noto, Sicily. Having lived in the UK, France, Germany and now Italy, his work is heavily influenced by the landscape and how it interacts with themes of identity, relationships and human conditions. In his paintings, the figurative elements fade in abstract spaces, to give space to multiple interpretations. He held various exhibitions and his work was selected by Grayson Perry RA for the 250th edition of the Royal Academy.

The ONE SKY Academy

The ONE SKY Academy has been recently established in Piazza Armerina, Sicily, by Frank Alva Buecheler, a German-born theater-maker, cultural entrepreneur, university lecturer and migration expert. Frank’s point of departure is that the world is facing gigantic problems, but they are man-made. So they can be solved by man. Despite all the historical, cultural, social and individual differences, all people can unite under this, our, one sky. At the Biennale, the exhibition department of the Academy, Galleria Mari Aperti, will be presenting four young artists from Syria: Ali Amam, Anas Homsi, Simon Henawi and Fares Al-Sawaf. Their entire oeuvre revolves around the themes of loss of home, the experience of flight, migration, and arrival in exile.

Marianna Masciolini

Born in Umbria (Foligno), Marianna Masciolini began her training as an actress at the University Theater Center in Perugia with Masters Ludwik Flaszen and Tage Larsen ( Studio J. Grotowski, Odin Teatret) and later with the companies Machine de Theatre, Sosta Palmizi and Ninni Bruschetta. She is chosen at the Centro Teatrale Santa Cristina directed by Luca Ronconi, perfecting her training with Ronconi himself (I beati anni del castigo – Fleur Jaeggy) Maria Consagra and Massimo De Francovich. She works with the artist Samuel Samore on the Shakespeare-Caravaggio project at Stazione Leopolda, with Giancarlo Cobelli at Teatro Fabbricone on M. Gorki’s Bassifondi and with Zoe Teatro for the Trend season of Teatro Belli in Rome and Teatro Stabile dell’Umbria.Since 1997 she has authored sculptures and installations addressing the concept of visual and physical traversability of matter in the void, winning her multiple awards internationally.

Rossella Pezzino de Geronimo

Rossella Pezzino de Geronimo (Catania, 1950) is a graduate of the European Institute of Photography. She has worked at several photographic studios and was assistant to Lionel Pasquon. Her photographs have been shown at several exhibitions and two catalogues have been published so far (Japan. Faces Details Geometries and Domina). She calls herself a portraitist: what she tries to capture with her lens is the encounter with the most hidden part of the individual and his emotional sphere – the soul.

Fernando Miglietta

Fernando Miglietta born in Squinzano, Lecce, in 1950, is an architect, artist, critic and theorist. He is director of the International Research Institute and the magazine “Abitacolo, Forms and Languages of the Contemporary.” In his multifaceted work, he is characterized as a lively promoter of dialogue between architects and artists and promotes an idea of architecture as a discipline of dialogue and coordination between different specialized knowledge. Open to the most diverse codes, he practices his idea of plural art and architecture as a strong educational tool for a free society in the search for a new space of existence. A leading intellectual since the 1980s, he has created numerous works and projects in architecture, design and urban planning with his “City of the Arts” Laboratory, with the involvement of internationally renowned artists.