Arena is an Italian artist who was born in 1978. He considers news report as the reference point for his personal critical reflection and thinks of it as an unchangeable element since it is both part of the past but still open to transformation by memory transmission; according to the artist, news stories lose their tangible characters and become pure concepts, which collective memory elaborates.

For example, this happens with the work Untitled (Bologna), 2001. It stands as a square marble sheet, which is pierced in the middle as if a grenade would have torn it. Actually, the deep cut is due to the 85 names of the victims of the massacre at Bologna train station in August 1980: they are carved repeatedly until they create a central hole that passes through it. It seems that the presence of the sheet as the symbol of collective memory and the continual celebration are not enough to stop the complete abstraction and cancellation of those names. Arena’s work is both charming and moving at the same time: he matches a formal with a perceptual antithesis. While plunging into the historical event, he appropriates it and gives us back a barer though more significant version.

In Genova 2011 (group picture), Arena goes one step further and summons up collective and political conscience to reflect on what has happened. He does so by producing one of his most engaging works. Starting from the official group picture of the ten leaders who were at the Genoa G8 in 2001, he produced ten square molds (40×40 cm) of different height (from 0,5 cm to 22 cm) in a way which, if Carlo Giuliani would have been alive, he might have come up them to look in the leaders’ eyes searching for culpability or maybe only answers.

For 18.900 meters on slate (Pinelli’s way) of 2009, Arena physically became integral part of his creative project. He himself travelled through again anarchist Pinelli’s last way as a free man from the train station to home and then at the bar, anarchist circles and up to the central police station. He walked through an 18.900 meters long way as everyone of us carelessly does every day. The installation is made up of 332 slate sheets of 60x60x1 cm on which Pinelli’s 18.900 meters long way is carved.

The confrontation with these affairs goes through the artist’s very spirit, both from a conceptual and physical point of view, becoming the measurement unit of his own reflection and, hence, of the project itself, as it is for the more recent work Tube of 2013. It is a square box-shaped metal tube, which has been cut and recomposed to become a square. The amount of metal employed corresponds to the artist’s body mass in cubic centimeters when the interior of the tube would be filled up with earth.

Therefore, the news report is no more employed as a medium to reflect upon the flowing of events and the memory depository; instead, it is the Self, our own presence on earth in a specific given moment. The artist becomes himself the question, starting and ending point of the investigation, his own weight and height become the limits and parameters of his works. This centrality and personal calling into question seems to be clarified and expressed in works as Untitled (Eliot), 2013 and Untitled (Agostino), 2012. The first work is made up of two marble plates marquinia on which the artist carved the initial line of the quartet East Coker “In my beginning is my end” which Eliot himself chose for his own epitaph. In the second work, Saint Augustine’s words “I Have Become a Question to Myself” are stamped on two square slate and white Carrara marble molds. In this second work the answer itself becomes another question, actually a flood of questions as much as the beholder’s gazes. Arena leaves the beholders questioning themselves about Saint Augustine’s words while returning the work to collectivity and following an almost inverse path to the one he did in the previously mentioned works.

It is exactly in front of a sometimes distracted collectivity that Arena presented Riduzione di mare (2013) in the spaces of Monitor gallery in Rome. The work included an installation and a performance, which told about the tragedy of emigration. Performers progressively licked a 34 kg block of salt during the days of the exhibition with the aim of overwriting on the block a text translated in Morse code. The document filled up by the Dutch organization United for Intercultural Action (European Network Against Nationalism, Racism, Fascism and in Support of Migrants and Refugees) included the list of the names of those 16136 people who died in the attempt of emigrating to Europe, which mass media told us about from January 1993 to January 2012. At the end of the exhibition, the block seemed eroded and changed by human movement and humors as a fragment of past and at the same time still fluxing in time.

This interesting group of works completely clarifies the coordinates of the artist’s action in creating and producing his works. Arena identifies certain news reports or apparently completely private and personal events with the reading keys to break up the ordinary worldview, which mass media and collective gaze sometimes refer to, establishing a dialogue with American minimalism and carefully rooting all of his projects in a planning scheme working as the conceptual skeleton of every installation and performance.

The square shape, which is present in this selection of works, is the artist’s favorite; indeed, even though it is one of the most elementary polygons, various artists have often chosen the square as the ideal expression of the spatial dimension of their own works. Let’s think about Josef Albers or Donald Judd who have been celebrating square for many years.

Arena’s works, as those by Albers, indeed, show an extreme reduction of forms in a lapidary and geometric style which is rendered through technical perfection. More than other 20^th century artists, Albers gave shape to philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s words, which stated that everything we see can be different and everything we depict can be different in the same way, showing that sometimes the most basic things are the most incompressible ones. As in Albers’ works, Arena’s installations as well might set some traps in which the spectator risks to be repeatedly caught because of the insecurity the work itself instills.

At the same time, Arena’s research formally materializes in tridimensional works, which place the experience of the space at the core in a similar way to Judd’s works. The apparently autonomous installations can’t be perceived without considering the relationship with the space they take up and influence. Formal rendering, instead, although materializes in a geometrical and abstract art, conceptually distances from the cold elegance of Judd’s research, which seemed to be banning any form of subjectivity.

Pattini d’Argento – courtesy the artist and Piccolo Artigianato Digitale – Milano

Franceschini has always been working with video; the investigation of space through the movie camera lenses allows her for deconstruction from a peculiar viewpoint showing us new worlds, new visual, interpretational and emotional possibilities. The unveiling of new worlds through fragmentation of what is commonly visible is experienced as a journey into personal intimacy, memories and memory. Franceschini is attracted by fragments better for their signifier quality rather than for their significance: “I believe  the function of fragments is parallel to that of anecdotes: little devices helping memory stabilize, flow and fill all the gaps”.

Pattini d’argento – courtesy the artist and Piccolo Artigianato Digitale – Milano

By looking at Franceschini’s works, one can feel how every work comes from meetings with places, objects and people, which are finally raised to the state of a homogeneous work. The identification of the subject to be shot does not imply a choice – which is experienced by the artist as a mournful and painful act -, rather it comes out of a kind of methodological and conscious approach searching for a shifting order: “Choosing implies constriction of the visual field, blocking of horizons and loss of that kind of happiness one feels, sometimes, when confronting with the infinite possibilities of different universes. I try not to choose, I rather put things in order, go on consciously, piece by piece, and keep thinking that there exist infinite encounters, innumerable situations, multiple changes”.

Casa Verdi – courtesy the artist and Invisibile Film – Milano

The human figure – expect for those works as Pattini d’argento (2007) or Casa Verdi (2008) – is always missing from her videos, as if objects prevail. And it is thanks to the ‘activating’ quality of these objects – “by objects I mean a plethora of ‘things’: situations, places, interactions, artifacts and also living beings” – that the relation artist-outside world starts off, a relation which is probably also assisted by previous experiences, which are more or less conscious and more or less far in time.

A siberian girl – courtesy the artist and Ex Elettrofonica – Roma

It is probably with videos like It’s about light and death (2011) or The siberian girl (2012) that this evocative relation with objects gets materialized more clearly and profoundly. Both works, indeed, come from a collection of objects; the concept of collection is equal to that of editing in the sense that they both join fragmented elements together by juxtaposition (objects on the one hand and sequences on the other hand). This time, Franceschini works on groups of collected objects not to select them through the camera, but to reveal their new and more intimate narrative power in a dynamic and fluid flux with an always positive and evolutionary tension.

it’s about light and death – courtesy the artist and Vistamare/ Benedetta Spalletti – Pescara

Anna Franceschini graduated in Television, Cinema and Multimedia Production from IULM University of Milan; her background in film studies, which is not fundamental to understand her artistic career, effectively illustrates the will for confronting herself with the film language, bending the grammar and syntax of cinema to her own will power.

Early works, indeed, show more clearly her background in film studies: objects and people are part of a narrative. It is  with Untitled (Almost Lost) (2009) that Anna seems to be changing direction: in addition to the employment of Super8 film, she discovers a new narrative process which materialized into more powerfully abstract but at the same time evocative works, as if video would turn into a moving canvas.

Untitled (Almost Lost) – courtesy MNAM / Centre Pompidou – Paris

Starting from 2010, she has been working mainly with Super8 and 16mm, producing images which might sometimes appear dirty or saturated, though with an incomparable output thanks to the quantity of information retained by that kind of film. “I like the relation you have with the film when shooting: there is a tension because every waste (money, time, opportunities) is crucial; therefore, the level of attention is higher, there is indeed a chemical-physical change of matter and this is interesting. However, stocks all over the world are running out of film”.  The employment of Super8 film and 16mm is assisted also by short-term works.

Casa verdi – courtesy the artist and Invisibile Film – Milano

Video is the artwork that by its very nature allows the artist to define the duration of fruition, imposing a minimal time which is that of the viewing of the complete video. Usually works last for about 5-6 minutes on average and are screened in a loop. This time in Anna Franceschini’s works is defined partly by chance because of the necessities imposed by every different work and is partly established by Anna’s reflections which she describes as “comparative – more than stylistic – reflections around fruition of a film at the movie theatre and fruition of one or more films, or video, in a space dedicated to art”.

A siberian girl – courtesy the artist and Ex Elettrofonica – Roma

Her mastery of the technique and the research on poetry merge into Anna Franceschini’s videos contributing to the creation of unique works, which emancipate from the static quality of the screen impressing the retina and involving the senses through their strong evocative power.

Among the most interesting realities offered by the Roman contemporary sphere, there are certainly foreign academies, which were born to host and support artists, researchers and scholars coming to Italy to deepen their knowledge of archeology, art, history or classical languages and which today host scholarship holders in humanistic studies.

Anybody who has ever entered one of the many foreign academies in Rome probably happened to get the odd feeling of being catapulted into a world apart, where nuances differentiating cultures of nowadays globalized world get emphasized, showing new possibilities for mutual understanding and revelation.

Entering the British School at Rome is not right as visiting the UK Pavilion at the 55^th Venice International Art Exhibition – where artist Jeremy Deller set up a sort of mythical pavilion putting together all those elements which usually build the concept of Britishness, the essence of what means, or it is supposed to mean, being specifically English.

Founded in 1901, the British School at Rome is to date an important research center for history, archeology, contemporary art and architecture, proposing every year a rich program of events, conferences, workshops and seminaries, as well as a publications program and a dense residency program. Every year, the BSR hosts scholars and artists from the UK and Commonwealth, nationally selected in Great Britain for the quality of their work. Chief aim of the Fine Arts and Humanities programs is that of supporting and promoting the intellectual exchange between Italian artists, architects and scholars and the residents at the foreign academies, “in a pluralistic perspective, never to favor a specific trend or kind of practice”, as the director of the Fine Arts program Jacopo Benci underlines.

Every year the Fine Arts program proposes three exhibitions where resident artists are invited to show their work. The choice of the works to put on show and the arrangement are up to the artists themselves: this is not only consistent with the figure of the artist/curator which is very common in the Anglo-Saxon countries, but it also allows for the creation of a real working group stimulating critical dialogue among residents. The outcomes of this mix are obviously always new and every exhibition becomes a sort of big bang, especially for those artists who get annual scholarships and have therefore the opportunity to participate to all the exhibition dates.

Some months ago, we had the opportunity to interview three residents form 2012-2013 Fine Arts program, Todd Fuller, John Di Stefano, Zed Nelson: what came out form their words was an interesting and articulated panorama showing how different the residency experience might be in the very same context. Todd, John and Zed also told about the research they did during the residency and the itineraries that brought them to present certain works during the exhibition Please Be Quiet, which opened from the 14^th to the 22^nd of June 2013 at the BSR gallery.

This year as well the British School at Rome has the opportunity to present to the city of Rome an extremely interesting group of artists, whose researches trace the route towards the future of Anglo-Saxon art and not only.

Besides Archie Franks (Sainsbury Scholar in Painting and Sculpture Fellow October 2013- September 2014), a painter focusing on the research around non-linear narratives, and Danièle Genadry (Abbey Scholar in Painting, October 2013 – June 2014), whose research mostly focuses on the way memory, migration and movement influence perception, there will be four artists at the British School during the trimester October-December 2013: Ann Marie James (Derek Hill Foundation Scholar 2013), whose work ranges from painting to drawing, sculpture and photography, making quotation the key element through which the elements in her works can recognize and confront with art history; Marius von Brasch (Abbey Fellows in Painting 2013), whose research aims at exploring the forces in the flux of things in the tension between manual production and new technologies, between strategy and emotion while doing art; Johann Arens (Rome Fellow in Contemporary Art 2013), a German artist producing video installations which make us reflect over perception and behavior in front of digital images; Julia Davis (Australia Council Residents 2013),  artist from Sydney whose site-specific works investigate perceptions and relations between objects, places and spaces. The artists will be participating to the usual exhibition date next December the 13^th… it is needed to get ready for a new big bang!

«The main question I was asking to myself was how poetry could resist and live today, what possible developments it might go through, its metamorphoses; art and especially the avant-gardes had already dealt with this issue with brilliant, futuristic and charming solutions. Many of the protagonists of that unique season were originally poets and men of letters (Breton, Marinetti, Tzara, just to mention a few), who later applied their own poetics to life itself and shared it with the outside world, making their poetry alive and flooding it with innovative points of view. From here, it seemed natural to me dealing with life and action and involving that portion of contemporary theatre which was interested in installation and performance.”

Although every work portrays dynamics which are constantly tied to the wills of an always different “tyrannical present,” it is with space that Domenico manages to merge the various demands of his work into a univocal dimension which gives life to it.

And it is exactly in a well-defined space – such as those spaces offered by Morra Foundation in the 18^th century Palazzo Bagnara, in the old town center of Naples –  that Mennillo staged Atlante della Fertilità (Atlas of Fertility) between the end of 2011 and the beginnings of 2012.

«When I was in Naples, I started writing a poem about a Western city, portraying its habits and manners, verses which arose every morning when I woke up. I had a draft almost every morning. Once I finished the poem, I was convinced that the operation should stop with the writing process itself and I decided to add a visual part to the poem. I started this visual work in New York during the following fall when I finished the final draft. Photographs, papers, cardboards, sketches on notebooks, books from local markets, objects found in the street, materials to be used for collages; once I got back to Italy with sketched collages from New York, I understood that the poetical work could go beyond the collages and that instead it could have sound and installation applications».

From there, the natural need was that of setting up his own Atlas, consciously inspired by Warburg’s precedent Mnemosyne-Atlas, in a physical and “sensual” space in Naples. Mennillo’s physical and sensual space is obviously a sensory space, a dimension dedicated to the experimentation of physical perceptions and coming directly from senses, where the mixture of space, language and sound is creatively experimented by the artist and perceptively ventured by the beholder.

The need of creating a classification system for memory comes from the idea that «memory is the basis of human thought and it is conceived via emotional images». Creating a sensual space made up of sounds, smells and especially images, Mennillo gives the possibility to the visitors of Atlas to meet a series of combinations of images of three cities  symbols of the Western decadence, Naples, Paris and New York: «The past of those images was mine, but symbols and images were communal heritage which could be grasped and met by those people wandering around the installations and whose memory was put into close contact with stimulations-thoughts».

It is exactly the role of nowadays decayed capitals of the Western culture that allows the artist to associate the cities of Naples, Paris and New York in his Atlas. This work, indeed, made up of thinking and poetic language –  with the fundamental role of images – digs up memory to reveal the decadence and oblivion of our age: «The slow oblivion of images is what strong powers and the related economies aim the most to for the individual, their attentions and cares are often directed towards those even very slight processes of evaporation and formation of thoughts which come from images».

The production of Atlas took up a lot of Domenico’s time (from 2008 to 2011). During this long period, he had the opportunity to search for the known and the unknown through the innumerable visual and sound combinations which were offered by the chosen places, as well as to confront himself with three key figures which characterize the work as a whole: Giordano Bruno, Abi Warburg and Charles Baudelaire.

The exhibition, indeed, went through three rooms. The first room was inspired by Charles Baudelaire’s Addiition de la troisième édition des Fleures du Mal: paper drawings, which illustrated and expanded Baudelaire’s texts, took inspiration from Giordano Bruno’s engravings which he employed to clarify his philosophical writings. «Baudelaire has always been a very important author for me (and not only for me); all of his words, from verses to fragments of unfinished projects, conceal treasures which meant a lot for the 20^th century as a whole to understand the fundamental contradictions and implications of modernity».

The second room hosted an “infinite library” or a “library of the infinity,” which conceptually recalled Warburg Institute Library in Hamburg. Finally, the third room hosted an installation with soundtrack from the unpublished poem Atlante della Fertilità (Atlas of Fertility), realized through super8 projectors and analog machines from the 70s (this project was born in collaboration with composer and musician Nino Bruno).

Domenico Mennillo will exhibit again in  Naples next December in the rooms of Nitsch Museum, with the show Alcune Architetture di Napoli 2003-2013 – Il teatro di lunGrabbe nelle architetture napoletane: a retrospective to celebrate ten years of activity for lunGrabbe in Naples. LunGrabbe theatre, founded by Domenico Mennillo and Rosaria Castiglione in 2001, is based on the duo architecture-theatre and centered on Mennillo’s writings. It employs always different spatial solutions and favors performances simulating representational theatre. During these past years, cinema as well has gained a lot of attention thanks to films and videos in relation with performances and poems-concerts, which focus on verses and acoustic or electronic instruments and are practically always staged outside the theatre itself.

Although during the last years the museums of the main European cities have been hosting big exhibitions dedicated to the greatest artists of the 20^th century every year and cultural tourism has become routine, contemporary art remains until today unknown field for strangers and this is not because of lack of interest or curiosity, rather because of the perplexity hovering around something so incomprehensible as the production of contemporary art can be.

Undoubtedly, it is true that the art of the last century has evolved and transformed so much that it has become nearly unrecognizable and references for the non-habitual beholder of the contemporary scene have diminished; however, art never stopped being a game of creation and interpretation, hiding and revealing are today, as they were five hundred years ago,  the keys for an expressive means, for an interpretation and representation code of the present time.  And if it is true that contemporary art is the mirror of present society, plunging into an apparently foreign world could be a worthwhile challenge and in-depth analysis. During the last years many people have been dealing with the theme of the interpretation of contemporary art from the non-habitual beholder’s perspective (see Francesco Bonami’s Lo potevo fare anche io and the TV program of the same name for SKY) trying to debunk some common places and explain that just like literature, classical music and theatre, fine arts as well went sometimes to unexpected and winding roads, which does not imply the crumbling of the artistic value, but rather shows its evolution and progress.

Yet, it must be happened to many: to be in front of a work of art and feel a bit like Remo and Augusta at the 1978 Biennale – the two protagonists of the episode Le vacanze intelligenti, directed and performed by Alberto Sordi, find themselves catapulted into a cultural tour de force, which includes also a visit to the Venice Biennale, where the exhausted Augusta is believed to be a living artwork.

After thirty-five years, we went back to the Venice Biennale and, although the movie tells a story far from the interpretation of contemporary art and the disoriented beholder, who nowadays questions himself or herself on contemporary art does not have much in common with the two protagonists, it is still true that many of us would have liked to be able to turn aside from explaining the meaning of a work of art with hasty slapdash attitude and easily answering: “Should I explain this to you?!…it is a work of art!”, just like Remo would do with Augusta.

To solve such inconvenience and try to have fun by calling into question and then know and understand a work of art, the section Ma che te lo devo spiegare?! (Should I explain this to you?!) is born: every week we will publish the image of a bizarre and apparently incomprehensible work, matched with an explanatory label and a bit of irony, since if it is right to consider Pollock an artist, rather than a drunk with the bad habit of stumbling into paint cans, it is equally true that the discovery of art and culture should be a pleasure to be lived also with playful attitude and without fearing to be mistaken.

The different lifes that Yasmin Fedda tells seen together seem to compose a variegated world of emotions and perspectives and hopes, distant in space and time, but concretely nearby in the representation of the Other. The Other told by Yasmin has never declared as such by either synonym of exclusion or marginalization, what clearly emerges from her work is rather as the other – intended as a different point of view, of experience, of culture or condition – can easily become a collective self, different each time, in which each person can recognize its own identity. On the other hand, is Boutrous the Syrian monk protagonist of the film Milking the Desert (2004) to reveal the crucial point in the Yasmin’s work: telling the relations between the Muslim and Christian communities Boutrous says, with tangible genuineness, which in deep “a person is a person”.

The Yasmin Fedda’s work, in fact, is focused on people, individuals symbol of springtime cultural.

Yasmin looks to these universes with authenticity and raw purity with through the camera, and it is evident in the two works exhibited last March in Rome for the group exhibition “Ides of March” at the British School of Rome: the award-winning Breadmakers (video of the 2007, filmed to the Garvald Bakery in Edinburgh, where a community of workers with learning disabilities, makes a variety of organic breads for daily delivery to shops and cafes in the city. The Garvald Bakery’s project is inspired by the Rudolph Steiner’s ideas, according to which the workers realise their potential for self-discovery and creativity in a social environment) and the unpublished Siamo Tornati/We are Back (2013) outcome of the roman experience.

Siamo Tornati/We are Back tells about the growing phenomenon of italian social occupations – Teatro Valle, Cinema Palace, and others – as a reaction to the cuts on public services and the unemployment significant increase. In roman district of San Giovanni the boxing teacher  Gianni other sports trainers and activists have come together to create S.C.u.P (sport e cultura popolare) a popular gym, school and community centre. I ask Yasmin why her decided to show together these two works that clearly address the theme of community as a place of positive growth: «because I felt that both films, in different ways, show how different communities are finding positive ways to deal with the issues they face. I found both projects inspiring and I felt they complimented each other».

The films are however stylistically quite different: Breadmakers is fully observational, without any voiceover or interview. The public can only look at the bakery, the bread and the social interactions while everybody is working. In Siamo Tornati/We are Back the main protagonist is Gianni; he explains what is the project S.C.u.P and why he realized that, and tells about this experience’s meaning for him and for the entire community. Yasmin select the players for her films in different ways adapting each time to the circumstances, this happen also in the editing phase where the style does not overlie the content, but is sculpted on it making every work unique and complete. It is in the film phase that Yasmin tends to propose always the same pattern of approach, spending long periods of time with the people who will film, this is in aid of her to obtain trust, and be able to film life ‘as it happens’.

Yasmin Fedda has palestinians origins, she lived in Syria and in different parts of the Middle East, after moved to UK and spent the first three months of 2013 in Rome at the British School of Rome, as winner of the Creative Scotland document24 Fellowship 2012-13. When I ask her if she feel herself a world citizen she answers: «It is sometimes hard not feeling rooted anywhere, but at the same time I enjoy feeling a part of many places and not any one place in the world».

Yasmin Fedda, Siamo Tornati/We are Back, 2013 http://vimeo.com/63646958

Engraving is the very origin of Gaia Scaramella’s work. Her encounter with engraving occurred during the years at the Rome Fine Arts Academy. This technique allows Gaia to express herself at best through what is the main feature of her work: the serial production, which is conceived as a creative need rather than a production modality. Incisions are indeed produced as monotypes, which Gaia has always printed in a few pieces.

In Annunciazione – Icone Familiari, Gaia merges tradition and innovation, sacred art and everyday life, combining the sacredness of the religious theme together with the family theme, in a way substituting herself to the divine. The actualization of the subject, without being trivial, allows for the discovery of the Self and the identification with the iconography portrayed, grasping the more real and concrete aspects of an earthly sacredness.

To live the life of someone else: sometimes people think about it. In “Essere, apparire e divenire”, Gaia Scaramella decided to be someone else, actually someone dead. This was not a provocation, but rather an opportunity to talk about the sacredness of the dead, between memory and folklore. The funeral tributes,  found in her grandmother’s drawer and placed one next to the other, tell us how the memory of the dead often blurs into sanctification. Each one only tells unexceptionable earthly lives. With this work, Gaia performs a real appropriation of texts, words and thoughts, which are dedicated to the dead close to her. As in the relationship between actor and character, Gaia and her everyday saints become one thing, allowing her to be virtuous and sanctified.

With the artworks produced for the show “God and I” in 2007, Gaia Scaramella distances herself from the family themes and starts focusing on a more public iconography. The geography of the ecclesiastical institution is utterly reconsidered and read through a critical but at the same time ironic approach.

On a technical level, Gaia goes beyond the physical limits of the prints: she carves her sign on doors and wardrobe shutters and paints them with varnish. These big sectional plates allow her to employ the engraving and painting techniques in a more experimental way, producing a series of installations.

The recent process of emancipation and evolution of Gaia Scaramella’s engraving technique had explicit concrete consequences for the creation of the series Calco Trito Mix of 2008. In the creative process of the works, the desire and need to shred both the paper and the creative process itself are clear, leading to a new level of artistic production and self-awareness. After going through the printing press, the prints undergo a further mechanical step by passing through the paper-shredding machine. The images are broken and fragmented becoming unreadable and waiting to be recomposed  again according to a new vision. The only readable symbols are those of the three great monotheistic religions overlaying  the ” sign tapes.”

A panorama of negatives, made up of impressions from shaped molds, form the two-dimensional installation “Ex-Vuoto” (2008). The so called ex-voto – the object generally used by different religions to thank the deity for a saving grace – displays different but precise forms, including lungs, liver, brain and ovaries – mixed with images of a variegated humanity, including men, women and lovers. The ex-voto, fixed on the wall with nails that encumber movement, portrays images which are deeply significant for Gaia. This intense mix of strong emotions and light spontaneity clearly represents the two dichotomies which characterize Gaia Scaramella’s work: formal/impersonal and personal/inner.

With “Capasanta” – shown during the exhibition “Sant’Elena, la seduzione nel segno”, side event of the 2009 Venice Biennale – Gaia Scaramella decided to offer the molds of the prints which formed the installation “Ex-Vuoto” to Saint Elena, as a real ex-voto. The work, conceived exclusively for the space in which it was set up, involved a geodetic ball which hung from a crane and rotated around its own axis. Inside the ball there were the zinc ex-voto which, because of the passing of time, fell into the water below, giving the votive element back to the sea and to the Saint. The process of emancipation of the engraving technique comes to an end with this last installation, where Gaia decided to symbolically and physically distance herself from her origins, offering them to another dimension.

Geometrically arranged and placed at about one meter from one another, Gaia Scaramella’s 300 pinwheels remind us of a platoon, an army of brave soldiers ready to attack, or perhaps packing the defense. The installation, designed for the coverage plan for the tower of Anfonsino Castle in Brindisi, involves three hundred black monochrome pinwheels which spin constantly dialoguing with the incessant air currents around the tower, returning to the wind the sound of the wind. The pinwheels lose their primary purpose, that is the ludic lightness, and become mourning symbols imposed by war.

“Legami o legami”… request or complaint? Gaia Scaremella’s installation is made up of two walls closed at an angle where hands made of epoxy resin cling. This work deals with the theme of close emotional relationships that sometimes might become binding. Colored woollen yarns branch out from the hands similar to veins, arteries, capillaries and ligaments, conceptually illustrating the inner extension of the pulsating casing of the human body. The yarns go from wall to wall closing and crosslinking the corner as a hug or grip, and physically define an immobilizing state of anguish.

The holocaust is in this work portrayed as an interruption of the human and social thought, life and dignity. There is a white and sky blue old formica-coated table with metal legs and wooden structure, surrounded by four chairs. Also, ten little monochrome white man are placed on the floor. On the head of each little man there is a memory card. Inside the drawer of the table one can find an Ipad displaying the pictures stored in the memory cards.

“Memorie dell’altro ieri, memorie di dopodomani” is Gaia Scaramella’s work dedicated to the tragedy of the holocaust. The memory of the past melts with a clear look towards future. Gaia focuses on the before and after of the massacre, without showing the darkest moments, creating an interactive work. While inviting the viewer to remember, the artist searches for a shared elaboration of the grief, providing a positive perspective, which excludes a mere denunciation.

Gaia Scaramella’s articulated itinerary about the relationship between life and death leads us to “Nepenthes”. This work is made up of large pods which contain male and female profiles. The pods, ideally connected one to the other by thin branches, are actually separated through black or white frames, which symbolize in turn bereavement or heavenly candor. The human presences, connected as in a family tree, but separated by frames in closed areas that evoke either urns or shrines, stay peacefully in their pods, as if it is right the dying plant which gives them life. It is the death of one thing for the life of another.

In 1999 Will Ramsay, founder and CEO of Affordable Art Fair in the world, launched the first Affordable Art Fair in Battersea Park, London, where approximately 10,000 visitors took advantage of the ease of purchase, the choice of works and friendly approach! But 2001 was the turning point year for AAF. In 2001 Will Ramsay launched a second event, the Spring Collection, in order to expose completely different artists compared to the ones proposed during the Autumn Collection. Since then, the AAF has become a global phenomenon with fairs that take place in more than fifteen cities in the world and during the last year it has registered very high numbers despite the crisis: 200,000 visitors for more than 1,250 galleries and a turnover around 33 million euros.

What makes this phenomenon interesting, though, are not only numbers, but the need to make the market of art accessible to a growing number of people, from a cultural and economic point of view, underlining the words of the artist William Morris – I don’t want an Art for a few people, not more then how I want an education freedom for a few people. Offering visitors the chance to buy a work because they like it and not because it should be purchased, Will Ramsay free the potential buyer by immobilising the ‘performance anxiety’ that too often accompanies the potential contemporary art users and buyers; and provides a simple ‘buying art guide” for those who take the first steps, in order to support them since the beginning.
It seems therefore clear that the main objective of the AAF project is to form an aware and enthusiastic band of buyers, who begin to buy works at an affordable price, not to chase the dream of a large collection in a cheap style, but because they know that time has come to live in contemporary art, not simply watching and leaving just a few people such a fun!