Le mostre in corso a Castel Belasi, centro d'arte contemporanea per la pratica ei lpensiero ecologici in un maniero medievale nelle Alpi

   CASTEL BELASI
       contemporary art center for eco practice & thought in a medieval castle in the Alps
      ITA | ENG

Janet Bellotto (CA/UAE), Stefano Cagol (IT), Wim Delvoye (BE), Heba Dwaik (KWT/EG), Annamaria Gelmi (IT), Mary Mattingly (US), Gianni Motti (IT/CH), PSJM (ES), Thiago Rocha Pitta (BR), Esther Stocker (IT/AT)

Millennials (IT): Michela Longone, Silvia Negrini, Monica Smaniotto, Marco Tagliafico

The visionary approach of art and the anticipatory approach of science come together to imagine desirable futures.

The idea of mountains as islands evokes a time when the Dolomites were atolls of a tropical sea and opens up to a fearful tomorrow with lands that are submerged by the waves. It takes inspiration from the rise in sea levels, the loss of glaciers and the unbalance between the elements, and deals with the concepts of change and time, between a past long before us and threats of the future. We imagine ourselves isolated from the rest due to the arrogant illusion of superiority of the contemporary human being and the physical and emotional detachment that characterizes this digital age.

Castel Belasi, contemporary art center for eco practice & thought in a medieval castle in the Alps, reopens on May 31st after the usual winter break. It is municipal exhibition space owned by the Municipality of Campodenno in a 12th-century medieval castle at the foot of the Brenta Dolomites in Val di Non, Trentino, became a privileged venue for the arts and reflection on environmental issues with the artistic direction of Stefano Cagol.

The exhibition “Come Isole / As Islands”, through fifteen works, videos, paintings, photos and installations, dated between today and the nineties, by fifteen international, national and regional, consolidated and emerging artists, proceeds through suggestions, because we cannot imagine of being self-sufficient entities, rising detached from the earth's surface.

The exhibition culminates with an extensive video projection of Thiago Rocha Pitta (Brazil, 1980), a work in the collection at the MoMA in New York, and opens with an installation by the Vienna-based South Tyrolean artsist Esther Stocker (Italy, 1974), now present also at the MAXXI in Rome. Her crumpling sculptures are read in their ability to question our will to control and dominate nature. The opic of the island is addressed in an irreverent manner by the Flemish artist Wim Delvoye (Belgium, 1965) in one of his rare cartographic works, while the relationship with water is at the centre of the research of the Canadian Janet Bellotto (Canada, 1973), active in the Emirates. The amazement towards the disarming simplicity of nature comes unexpectedly from a video by Heba Dwaik (Kuwait, 1983) made in the centre of the megalopolis of Cairo and already included in the OFF Cairo Biennale. Also on display is the Trentino artist Annamaria Gelmi (Italy, 1943) with a ceramic sculptural work, while the American Mary Mattingly (USA, 1978), already acclaimed by the New York Times, warns of the weight of our society's consumerism with a work that served as the cover of the book “Art in the Anthropocene.” A glimmer of hope is opened by the "social geometries" of the Spanish collective PSJM (Spain: Cynthia Viera, 1973 and Pablo San José, 1969), which stage graphs, this time encouraging, on prospects for improving the air and good use of resources.

The exhibition triggers a dialogue between different generations, so the works of consolidated international artists are intertwined with those of four millennials, born in Italy in the 1980s and 1990s. The sculptures in wax, paper and blue spindle by Michela Longone (Milan, 1995), the youngest artist in the exhibition, recall ephemeral glaciers or icebergs. The rise of the seas is also recalled by the enamel painting on canvas by Silvia Negrini (Sondrio, 1982), while the pictorial work by Marco Tagliafico (Alessandria, 1985) is the result of the artist's intervention combined with that of atmospheric agents, as a declaration of the importance of letting go of the laws of nature. The photographic medium is used by Monica Smaniotto (Cles, 1986), who portrays a short circuit between nature and the waste of our society.

The exhibition ends concisely with a work by Gianni Motti (Italy, 1958), an Italian-born Swiss artist who has participated in about fifteen biennials around the world. This is the video from the 1990s that was exhibited at the beginning of the 2000s at the Swiss Institute in New York, in which he rises on the top of a mountain, recalling the erroneous sense of superiority that we have developed towards what surrounds us, that Greek hubrys that makes us feel higher than the gods. We cannot think of ourselves as entities that are self-sufficient and rise above everything.

The exhibition is curated by Stefano Cagol and realized in collaboration with MUSE – Trento Science Museum, where he created in 2022 the platform “We Are the Flood”.

The project room is devoted to emerging contemporary art, the 2024 exhibition is titled “Theories of Climes” and collects the works of the artists and the contributions of the curators under 35 who participated last year in the MUSE masterclass as part of We Are the Flood curated by Alessandro Castiglioni, author of a book of the same title, and the participation of Antonella Anedda and Franco Buffoni. The young artists are Giuseppe Bergamino, Noemi Cammareri, Andrea Gubitosi, Lorena Ortells, Nadia Tamanini, Gloria Tamborini.

IMAGES ABOVE: Wim Delvoye, Atlas # 1, 2003, Cibachrome print on aluminium, 100 x 125 cm, Courtesy the artist