At a time marked by global crises, radical transformations and conflicts, six young artists from France, Italy, Germany and Uganda, selected through the ARP – Art Residency Project, come together to create HIC ET NUNC n. 5 – Repairing the Present, Imagining the Possible.
The exhibition is the outcome of an international residency project exploring the meaning of the contemporary through a workshop dedicated to in-depth research, dialogue and exchange around practices of care, listening and resistance. The project is organised by the Centro Luigi Di Sarro, with the support of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation (MAECI) and other partners.
The ARP artists were selected by a jury composed of Alessandra Atti Di Sarro, Simone Ciglia and Carlotta Sylos Calò. This year’s HIC ET NUNC workshop, directed and coordinated by Alessandra Atti Di Sarro, features contributions by Simone Ciglia, Giulia Bordi, Barbara D’Ambrosio, Paolo De Gasperis, Mirella Manfredi, Matteo Piccioni and Alessandra Troncone.
Challenging the often monumental logic of the contemporary art system, the project adopts the Pack&Go philosophy: all the works on display are small- to medium-sized, analogue works, transported by the artists themselves in a simple piece of hand luggage. This radical nomadism becomes a political and ecological manifesto: an art that is light enough to cross borders without leaving traces, holes or wounds in the places it passes through, while redefining space through infiltration and flexibility.
For its first public event, the exhibition enters into an osmotic and generational dialogue with the permanent collection of the Luigi Di Sarro Museum, dedicated to the experimental artist Luigi Di Sarro, whose research developed throughout the 1960s and 1970s. The works of the young artists – ranging from textile embroidery incorporating computer code to sculptures made from recycled materials, from participatory installations to micro-archives of human emotions – are arranged within the historic Roman space according to an archipelago-like logic: conceptual islands infiltrating the exhibition rooms as a creative incursion.
For its second event, the works will inhabit WHITESPACE Projects/Naples, a contemporary art hub in the heart of Naples founded and directed by artist Pietro Costa. Here, after another journey and a further stage of research, the works will once again emerge from their suitcases and speak through a renewed presence in a new space.
At both events, visitors will not encounter a linear exhibition route. Instead, they will be invited to activate the works themselves: by touching, playing, exchanging dreams, sabotaging the rules of the game and visually disrupting the idea of a dominant point of view.
To repair the present, together. Here and now.