Sports Futures will open to the public from March to July 2025and is the result of the work of research and reflection on sport as a total cultural factproposed as unifying theme of XNL Piacenza’s activities for the coming year. Through the works of numerous Italian and international artists, collectives and artefacts borrowed directly from sport, it will analyze the links between arts, sports and societies as parallel trajectories from the avant-garde to the present day.
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Media phenomena as well as megaphones of social, political, technological, ecological and economic issues of our time, the arts and sport are only apparently perceived as distant and incompatible entities. The former are linked to contemplation and thought and the latter to action and physicality, arts and sports have always contaminated each other just like two sides of the same coin. The body, the effort, the dominance of an athlete, the greatness of his victory or the pathos of his defeat, the social place in which he performs have been and still are subjects for artists of every generation and background.
On the occasion of the historic passage of the Tour de France in the city of Piacenza, portraits of three figures of international sport and artthose tied to the territory. Andrea Dallavallejumper, Savina Nicelliclimber and Giacomo Rovero, dancer, have generously offered their image for the first initial communication of a project profoundly oriented towards the transmission of sport culture as an artistic fact.
A sequence of their bodies in action, intent on celebrating the almost choreographic performativity inherent in sports, will be exhibited on the facades of Palazzo XNL so that the city and its visitors can mark down in their calendar that “sporting future” of which the project wants to tell stories and paths between arts and society.
The jump as a gesture, the climb as a metaphor for self-knowledge and one’s own limit and the power of dance as an epic act are on the other hand some of the characteristics that these athletes have in common with the languages of the arts. This proximity is the heart of the exhibition that the photographic project, created by Luca Santese – photographer and founder of the Cesura collective who returns to collaborate with the institution after the experience of Perimetro Piacenza -, will continue to tell until its opening, always inviting new artists and athletes to be part of it.
“The arrival of the Tour de France in Piacenza has always been the date not to be missed for the Foundation for the announcement of this exhibition project, which is destined to characterize the programming of our institution in the coming year”, comments the president of the Piacenza and Vigevano Foundation Roberto Reggi. “The “Futuri Sportivi” exhibition was born from the desire to offer a broad reflection on the links between arts and sport, from the proximity of their languages to the capacity for reflection on the idea of beauty and inclusiveness, in the awareness of the centrality of sport in the processes of education and formation of the company. In these very intense weeks for our city and the territory, XNL greets the public and the athletes of the Tour with the first three banners dedicated to three figures of the art of sport, who have generously lent their image to inaugurate the photographic campaign will continue until March 2025, the opening month of the exhibition”.
In the modern era, sport and the culture of sport have offered keys to interpreting our changing society, as forms of aggregation, development of skills and elaboration of psychophysical and identity balances. Within the perimeter of a stadium or a sports hall, as well as in an oratory or in an urban park, new progressive models of understanding bodies, identities, communities, the relationship with technologies and the environment manifest themselves every day; at the same time, these same spaces can generate new dynamics of exclusion and discrimination and therefore strengthen the status quo.
In Italy and in the world, on the other hand, sport has taken on a central role, an awareness and an impact in recent years not only as an image and communication industry, but above all as a construction site for experimentation and discussion of life models. The form of sporting life shapes the rhythm of our time to such an extent that for example the word performance as an index of evaluation of our work in the field of every job or occupation, public and private.
Furthermore, the digital revolution, the data economy and the archiving processes of “performances” are an inexhaustible pool of information destined to shape a living being and a global imaginary that is pervasive and perpetually exhibited by the multiple languages of contemporaneity.
Responsible for the production of imaginaries that have contributed to the sportification of contemporary society, on the other hand, arts and sports share ways of creating systems of representations, languages and codes of behavior; the symbolic production of objects and aesthetics of which they are undisputed champions is also a factory of desires and values, in turn agents of transformation of social spaces and their organizational criteria. We live in an era where the binomial art and life has often been replaced by the art and sport binomial, recognizing the latter’s ability to be on the one hand an enzyme of our emotions and a detonator of our failures, and on the other a powerful instrument of economic organisation, capable of shaping, also in relation to new pervasive digital technologies, the policies of a nation and the effigy of self-representation and “soft power” that it wants to show in international showcases of cultural diplomacy.
Sports Futures it is an exhibition project that he wishes to analyze as artists we have drawn from the world of sport – and its vocabulary of forms, actions, stories and spaces – to talk about universal themes such as limits, violence, competition, play, civil rights, resistance, solidarity, public space, propaganda, hedonism, mutation and more recently the power of data, inclusiveness, accessibility, sustainability.
The project confirms the programming guidelines of XNL Arte based on the relationship between the production of knowledge and their innovative transmission of different knowledge.
