“It is a short space that suggests infinity”: with these words Jean Grenier defines the Mediterranean. With its problems and its myriad resources, the Mediterranean stands there to remind us of the challenges we face and the need for the salvation of the planet through the realization that everyone’s contribution is needed.
Precisely because of this, it would be useful to think for the Medina Biennial (Malta) the women artists who saw the Mediterranean as a metaphor for a paradigm shift, the possibility of evoking a rebirth. The fact that these are women artists is not to be overlooked, especially since the theme of the Mediterranean in the years between the 1970s and 1990s, the years when most of these women artists were very active, seemed to have marginal aesthetic potential. The themes addressed in their works are borders, plots and warps, as a metaphor for life, an allegory on the idea of travel, exchange and memory. These are artworks by Goddesses who lost and found the perenniality of the theme, of Goddesses rediscovered as evidence of a current discours.
Artists Mirella Bentivoglio, Francesca Cataldi, Chiara Diamantini, Elisabetta Gut, Gisella Meo, Maria Jole Serreli, Greta Schödl, and Franca Sonnino
Non-profit cultural organization Artefact Athens presents The Butterfly Effect, a contemporary art exhibition curated by Kostas Prapoglou, which will take place in numerous spaces of the prominent textile industry “Butterfly Threads – Mouzakis”. The conceptual framework of the curatorial practice of this exhibition involves a poetic and allegorical metaphor of the butterfly effect that lends its name to the title. Curator Kostas Prapoglou invites 41 contemporary artists to present works that will respond to this unique space (site-specific) and context, creating with their visual, multidisciplinary vocabulary, installations, video, sculptures and painting.
Gramma_Epsilon Gallery participates through a site-specific installation of two Italian women fiber artists of different generations: Franca Sonnino and Maria Jole Serreli. Through a grandiose cocoon-installation, made by Serreli, which embraces Sonnino’s textile piece, the project highlights the dialogical relation between intergenerational and collective narratives of fiber art in relation to the space and the history of the Athenian factory.
Fernando Sebastiani’s donation of precious original linen and cotton cloth made by his grandmother Elvira between 1920 and 1950 with a domestic loom, takes the form of a unique cultural encounter. Thanks to the intervention of the invited artists, these precious artifacts can continue to narrate a unique love story to the visitors within the extraordinary scenery of Gubbio.
The artists have interpreted this story, each of them according to the specificity of their language of love which, however, was only the incipit of a story yet to be written. The total freedom with which they worked the sheets allowed them to create highly original works where the memory of the past is composed in a new vision, achieved through an individual creative process.
A particular tribute is dedicated to Oscar Piattella, who recently died, and who therefore is present with a virtual intervention carried out on one of the sheets thanks to the precious of the Oscar Piattella archive.
Artists Toni Bellucci, Vito Capone, Federica Luzzi, Francesca Nicchi, Oscar Piattella, Marilena Scavizzi, Greta Schödl, Maria Jole Serreli, Franca Sonnino