PALERMO - "Blocks, stories of dialogues beyond the limits" is the title of the large exhibition that opened on June 5th at the Albergo delle poovere in Palermo.
Curated by the art historian Daniela Brignone and the historian Daniela Brignone (the homonymy is accidental), the exhibition offers the works of 28 artists from different experiences and countries.
They are pictorial works, photographs, installations, sculptures, videos and performances that tell the walls, the conflicts and the stories that have raised the too many barriers of contemporaneity.
The initiative was presented to the press by the regional councilor for cultural heritage Alberto Samonà and the director of the Riso Museum Luigi Biondo. In the idea of the curators, "Blocks is a limiting state, an interruption of the unstoppable flow of existence". The project, born years ago, has grown and acquired a new meaning with the pandemic which, although it knows no borders, has raised unprecedented divisions among peoples. The collective is proposed as a space for reflection and denunciation, a privileged place where you can express the inconveniences and contradictions of today's world. It is the physical and ideological walls that involve society, history, anthropology and prejudices that close the horizons, creating inequalities, separations and death.But also unprecedented explosions that open to different hopes as in the beautiful "Le coup de foudre" by the Brazilian Andrea de Carvalho, an accumulation of joy and death, a harmonious element that closes and summarizes the long journey of the spectator within the exhibition.
Divided into four sections (conflicts, control and power, prejudices, dialogues), the exhibition itinerary begins with the classic references of "Celestial debris" by the German Philip Topolavoc, an installation that collects the debris of violated memories, almost an allusion to fury destroyer of Isis in Palmyra, to which "Mapping" acts as a counterpoint, a resin and iron grid that recalls the Roman units of measurement and the stratifications of time. It is difficult to mention all the artists present, among the Italians, Paolo Canevari with his disturbing "ThANKS", tanks that, playing with the corresponding English words, seem to say thanks for the war and Mario Rizzi with the photographs of Yazidi women deserve to be remembered. and "Kauther",which tells the story of the Arab Spring of 2014 through the eyes and voice of a Tunisian woman Kauther Ayara. Also worth mentioning is "The electric infinity", a semantic short circuit by Valentina Palazzari, and "Walking on the Clouds" by Donato Piccolo which gives dreamlike values to the coldness of robotic technology.
If the mechanical devices of the American Jon Kessler (Exodus of 2016) tell in a deliberately ironic way the uprooting of peoples through a series of figurines that, like ancient clocks, move on a rotating platform, "997, 10/2" of Polish Mateusz Choróbski alludes to the value of the zlotys and, through slender columns of coins, speaks to us of social inequalities and life difficulties. While the postcards and objects of the German Julia Krahn take us back to a never forgotten war and the imprisonment of our grandfather in a Russian gulag. "'Blocks is the manifesto of a humanity that can come back to life - Councilor Alberto Samonà recalled - according to normal dimensions, aware of its essence and the conflicts that have marked its history, but reborn and regenerated by'having taken the road to overcome the last dramatic limit of the pandemic ". Created by the regional councilor for cultural heritage and the Riso Museum and promoted by the Order of Architects and the Rotary club Colonne d'Ercole di Palermo, the exhibition is open to public from June 6 to July 31. Free admission by reservation.