It was presented on Saturday 4 May by the Filiberto and Bianca Menna Foundation,
edited by Gianpaolo Cacciottolo and Massimo Maiorino, project, started on May 4th That will end on June 30, 2024. The project is carried out with the support of SEV Iren and with the patronage of DiSPaC – Department of Cultural Heritage Sciences of the University of Salerno.
SPLEEN was born from the need to reflect on the role and position that a historical institution of contemporary art and criticism, the Filiberto and Bianca Menna Foundation – founded in 1989 and housed in the spaces of the Ex Casa del Combattente since 1994 – has all inside the urban and socio-cultural fabric of the city of Salerno. In the Prophecy of an aesthetic society (1968) Filiberto Menna traces Baudelaire’s work, and in particular his Petits Poèmes en prose (or The spleen of Paris, 1867-1869), an opportunity for reflection on the relationship between the artist and the modern city. Living in the present means for Baudelaire, says Menna, «entering the new reality, taking note of a profoundly changed situation in which the horizon of daily existence is no longer given by nature but by the city». The French author therefore entrusts the modern artist with the «task of living and representing this present», of «bringing out the eternal from the transitory», in the space of a very strong tension between multitude and solitude which materializes in the experience of the city modern. The artist, caught in the middle of a combinatorial game that places him between the experience of the crowd and a now programmed urban structure, thus becomes a «mirror as immense as this crowd; a kaleidoscope equipped with consciousness, which, with every movement, represents the multiple life and the mobile grace of all the elements of life.”
Photo
2 of 2
«I am happy to keep the commitment made as the Filiberto and Bianca Menna Foundation, which I am honored to chair – he declares Letizia Magaldi, president of the Filiberto Foundation and Bianca Menna – and to open our doors to the Spleen project. An opportunity to reflect on the relationship between man and the modern city and the role that a contemporary art institution can play for a city community. According to the dictates of artistic experimentation, art is that form of energy that performs the magic of regenerating and building new alternative paths. Combining thought and matter, abstract ideas, utopias and concrete realization, it directs the spectator’s gaze towards a new world, making the citizen a participant in the construction and regeneration of identities. And this is precisely the case of the three works that will be the protagonists of the Spleen project.”
«As already happened with the widespread exhibition “The rule and the case”, on the occasion of which significant works from the Menna collection were presented in decisive places in the art and history of Salerno, the Filiberto and Bianca Menna Foundation enters into dialogue with the urban dimension, which has always been at the center of Menna’s critical reflection and cultural action – he explains Stefania Zuliani
director of the Salerno branch of the Foundation Filiberto and Bianca Menna – The objective is to underline how the Foundation’s headquarters, a historic building which bears within itself the signs of different seasons and multiple functions, represents a luminous reference for those interested in the transformations which in these difficult years characterize the proposals of the art and the relationship, today more urgent and complex than ever, with the public. The three projects that mark the Spleen program therefore want to create a bridge that is not only symbolic between the research activity that the Foundation, thanks also to its precious library, has been promoting and presenting within its rooms for over thirty years and the open space of the city, which is a public space and, therefore, privileged for every practice and thought of art, as Giulio Carlo Argan, first president of the Foundation and teacher of Filiberto Menna, taught us.”
«The three projects site specific Of Davide Sgambaro, Marco Strappato, collective damp were conceived or adapted to the context of the Foundation, in the hope of building a sort of “transitional space” where the experience of art is at the same time an experience of life, where the work of art can silently and luminously fit into the ” “planned structure” of the city and can allow citizens to focus their attention on the existence of a place, the Filiberto and Bianca Menna Foundation, which is very often forgotten, neglected, or even ignored” explain the curators of the project Gianpaolo Cacciottolo and Massimo Maiorino.
The first work of SPLEEN And Hey there you, looking for a brighter season (moth) Of Davide Sgambaro, an environmental light installation redesigned for the space of the Foundation’s tower: the intermittent projection of three strobe lights, connected to a DMX recorder, reproduces in loop a light trace based on the binary system of morse code. Dedicated to the city of Salerno – a symbol, like other cities in Southern Italy, of the beginning of the liberation from Nazi-Fascism – the work sends a luminous message that corresponds to VVVV (…- / …- / …- / …-), code used by Radio London to transmit messages to the Italian resistance. The succession of the four Vs follows the metric of the first two bars of Ludwig Van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5.
The installation will therefore transform the Filiberto and Bianca Menna Foundation into a lighthouse whose light, turned towards the sea, will symbolically represent a possibility of landing in a historical moment marked by great drifts.
The three works of SPLEEN will respect the following inauguration calendar:
- May 4: Davide Sgambaro, Hey there you, looking for a brighter season (moth)
- May 24: Marco Strappato, I feel at home here
- June 14: collective damp, Hikikomori
Other events such as a conference are planned – Beyond the Museum: curating and exhibiting in public space organized by the ABCD DiSPaC Student Association and moderated by Olimpia Di Domenico; a cycle of screenings of the historic format Art in the evening of the Menna Foundation and a calendar of educational workshops curated by Rita Ventre. In the fall of 2024 There will then be the presentation of the catalog and the screening of a documentary on the entire project, created by director Elio Di Pace.
ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES
Davide Sgambaro (Padua, 1989) studied at the IUAV University of Venice, lives and works in Turin. His practice restores irreverent dynamics of resistance in response to generational paradoxes within the social order.
Among his personal exhibitions: Nope!Galerie Alberta Pane, Paris (2022); Too much and not the moodLOCALEDUE, Bologna (2022); Feeling Fractional9 French Place, London (2022); Kiss, kick, kissItalian Cultural Institute, Cologne (2021); Eternal landscapesSpazioSiena, Siena (2019); Black and white stripes and a red noseLocanda dell’Almanacco, Turin (2019).
He has participated in residencies and collective exhibitions in Italy and abroad including: Spoleto Civic Museum (2023); Klemm Gallery, Berlin (2023); Nuovo Forno del Pane, MAMbo – Museum of Modern Art Bologna (2023); SUPERBLAST II, NAM Manifattura Tabacchi, Florence (2022); Cantica 21, Ministry of Cultural Heritage, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Rome (2020-2021); Monte dei Paschi di Siena Foundation (2019); Q-Rated Quadrennial of Rome and Castello di Rivoli, Turin (2018); Spinola Banna Foundation for Art, Poirino (2015, 2018); Bevilacqua La Masa Foundation, Venice (2015).
He received the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award, New York (2023-2024).
Marco Strappato (Porto San Giorgio, 1982) lives and works in Milan. You obtained a Master’s Degree from the Royal College of Art London, a Bachelor’s Degree from the Brera Academy of Fine Arts and one from the Florence Academy of Fine Arts. Her work engages in an urgent reevaluation of contemporary understandings of image production and distribution, through a multidisciplinary practice involving collage, video, photography and installation. He mainly uses landscape images, as desktop wallpapers (strictly
linked to the idea of desire and escape). These images can be used to understand aesthetic experience in the contemporary world, between rhetorical discourses on the authentic and the inauthentic, the exotic and the familiar, the artificial and the natural. He has exhibited in various institutional spaces, including: 16th Quadrennial of Rome; MAMbo – Museum of Modern Art, Bologna; MAXXI – National Museum of the 21st century, Rome; American Academy, Rome; Royal College of Art, London; Victoria Art Center, Bucharest; Palazzo della Permanente, Milan; Luigi Pecci Center for Contemporary Art, Prato; Macro – Museum of Contemporary Art, Rome; Prague Biennial 5; National Gallery of the Marche, Urbino; “Osvaldo Licini” Civic Gallery of Contemporary Art, Ascoli Piceno; Monte Foundation, Bologna.
collective damp was born as an unintentional project in 2017 from the meeting of Alessandro Armento, Luisa de Donato, Viviana Marchiò, Adriano Ponte. The group’s research revolves around the interest in the temporary nature of things – from forms of life to ideas – and the dialogue with the specificities of places, which often leads them to work in artistic residency contexts.
Between these: KoinotesCasa degli Artisti, Milan (2023); Fabra i Coats – Fabrica de Creació de BarcelonaBarcelona (2022); State of the CityPavjlióen aan het Water, Rotterdam (2020);
Fingerprints, Lercaro Collection, Bologna (2020). In 2023 the collective started a Shopan artistic work in the form of project space, in which it is proposed to dedicate, within the market area of Portici, a space for the useless. Recently the damp collective exhibited at the Embassy of Afghanistan, Rome (2023); Palazzo Fondi, Naples (2023); Spazio Volta, Bergamo (2022).
