The Academy of Fine Arts of Catanzaro does not stop. While the international dissemination activities of the Performing project are still underway – which throughout the month of June will see conferences organized by the SIEDAS association at the Institute of Private Law in Toulouse, the Institute of Cultural Studies of the University of Sofia and the Italian Institute of Culture in Mexico City – a new and significant recognition arrives from the Ministry of University and Research regarding internationalisation.
The “Culture Med Hub” pilot project
The Catanzaro Academy has obtained funding for the pilot project “Culture Med Hub”, dedicated in its first edition to the theme “Mediterranean_Roots of resistance”. The project will be developed in collaboration with the International Culture Foundation, the University of the Arts of Tirana and the University of Salamanca. It involves study and research activities in Italy, Spain and Albania, which will start in the next few days and continue until December.
The artistic research and the partners involved
The scientific and artistic fulcrum of this first edition is the research of the Zeroottouno duo – composed of Giuseppe Guerrisi and Davide Negro – who have always been engaged in a reflection on the anthropization of nature, with particular attention to the grafting and intertwining of roots. For “Culture Med Hub”, Zeroottouno will direct its investigation to centuries-old olive trees as a symbolic and scientific subject, capable of holding together memory, resistance, landscape and Mediterranean identity.
The program includes moments of work and research in the offices of the partner institutions, an international conference and a final exhibition as the outcome of the journey completed. The project is curated by Simona Caramia for ABA Catanzaro and Pierfrancesco Pullia for the International Culture Foundation.
The numbers of internationalization are growing
The new financing is part of a rapidly expanding internationalization framework. The Academy’s International Relations Office – made up of Simona Gavioli, Miriam Piccari, Biagio Vitale and Romina Scozzafava – recorded significant results in the last semester: 45 teachers and students had the opportunity to deal with the educational realities of Spain, France, Slovakia, Sweden, Lithuania and Romania, while 10 foreign teachers and students came to Catanzaro from Spain, in a constantly growing flow of bilateral exchanges.
The vision of Director Virgilio Piccari
«Every new international funding we obtain is not just a recognition for the Academy: it is a door that we open for our students and for this city – declared the director of the Academy, Virgilio Piccari – Internationalization is a precise training choice that we carry forward with the belief that an artist, a designer, a researcher is truly formed only when he learns to deal with worlds different from his own, discovering other languages, other traditions, other realities. This semester’s numbers show that that choice is bearing concrete fruit. And they also say something important about Catanzaro: that it can be, and increasingly is, a place from which you leave for the world and where the world chooses to come».