At the start Face Festival, the first artistic residency project in Aspromonte: an experience of natural immersion between the mountain profiles and the ancestral suggestions of the Aspromonte National Park, in the splendid setting of the former Cucullaro Forest Nursery and among the woods of Gambarie di Santo Stefano in Aspromonte (RC), to rediscover the hidden wonders of the Calabrian “white mountain” through a path of symbiosis between art, nature and man.
Face Festival Aspromondo is a contaminating event that has been able to break the barriers of museum art by triggering emotional extemporaries, fruitions conditioned no longer by the rigid exhibition structure but by empathic transport, by passionate involvement.
Curated by the art director and teacher Paolo Genoese and by the director Giacomo Triglia, Face Festival Aspromondo was born in synergy between the Municipality of Santo Stefano in Aspromonte and the Academy of Fine Arts of Catanzaro. A project that aims to strengthen the link between art and territory, through a cycle of activities, creative spaces and an artistic residence, which give the artists involved the opportunity to get in touch with different experiences, places, cultures and ways of making art . The generating idea of the project is to host creatives from the Italian Academies of Fine Arts as well as Italian and international artists, uniting them under a common goal: to create an open-air museum in Aspromonte, the Bosco degli Artisti, which aims to make people discover beauties of the mountain territory through naturalistic paths and from today also artistic itineraries.
Face Festival Aspromondo aims to enhance the territory in a totally new way, the mountainous massif of the Calabrian Apennines, activating creative processes and exchanges, aimed at creating a new path, a new place, which can be known with a careful and innovative gaze aiming on the synergy of this with contemporary artistic practice. Actively dealing with the relationship between territory and man, through the artistic gesture, promoting alternative consumption strategies with low environmental impact, using the cultural vehicle, talent, the ability to create and aggregate, as engines for experiencing and discovering places.
The protagonists of the residence, starting on August 6, after the preview with the artist Massimo Sirelli, will create their works in a highly evocative naturalistic setting, with an authentic and “wild” beauty, activating through the artistic language, curiosity and interaction from part of an ever-growing number of visitors, of a museum nestled in the Calabrian woods.
From Canadian textile artist and stylist Maria Wozniak who is inspired by the natural environment and the exploration of sustainable practices, to the Zeroottouno collective whose artistic poetics goes towards a gradual attention to technical work and the alternating use of traditional and technological procedures that has led today to range their work, from ceramics, to sculpture, to mechanics, electronics, photography, anthropology and geography. Passing through the sculptor Tonino Denami who engraves his poetics linked to the essential in marble and wood, the art of removing; the multidisciplinary artistic collective Galleria Technè which explores the relationship between man and the urban or natural environment, between oneself and the world; the multidisciplinary artist Ninni Donato, whose practice investigates the relationship between nature and technology, between the organic and the artificial, between the real and the virtual. And again: the visual artist Giuseppe Negro, who in his works revives the memory dormant by time and threatened by oblivion; the sculptor Paolo Infortuna whose artistic research moves along lines and shapes with a universal language of knowledge and comparison; the set designers Federica Sorace and Beatrice Valenza who focus their research on interactivity and multimedia; Larissa Mollace, whose personal style is a hybrid between photography and ink; the sculptor and set designer Tamara Marino whose experimental artistic language mixes all the main figurative arts, seeking connections with the new performative and musical languages.
A call has also been launched for young female directors who want to tell the relationship between art and nature through images through a short film, through their expressive language, amplifying the mission of the project – the deadline is August 8, all the details are available on the website: www.facefestival.org/viviaspromondo.