The PAN | Palazzo delle Arti Napoli, an institution housed in the spaces of Palazzo Carafa di Roccella, which in earlier times was very active on avant-garde themes such as research around the digital, is about to reopen its spaces in 2025.
Conceived as a research centre, with a programme curated by Vincenzo Trione, it is now starting its activities with METAPAN, which also anticipates the architecture linked to the renovation by architect Giovanni Francesco Frascino, who intends to “rethink the current configuration of PAN, strongly reaffirming the original urban vocation of the 18th-century building”.
“Upon reopening,” the press release announces, “the spaces of the municipal museum will be allocated to the Museum of the Image. Photography, cinema, digital art, but also painting and sculpture in dialogue with new media. Museum as the territory of the iconosphere. A place to discover how images today are transformed, contaminated and hybridised, helping to change the world we inhabit’.
METAPAN inaugurates the activities of this space in the Metaverse with a ‘meta-operation’ curated by Maria Grazia Mattei, director of MEET in Milan and Valentino Catricalà, with the work of four Italian artists working on an international scale: Chiara Passa, Davide Quayola, Auriea Harvey and Bianco-Valente. All of this is under the technical supervision of the architect Giuliano Bora, who has realised the space within a three-dimensional immersive platform in an extremely careful manner.
After crossing the avenue and admiring the architecture of the future PAN, one enters its interior where the four projects of the respective selected artists are imagined as site-specific, four different ways of inviting the public into the future architectural and exhibition project, different types of artistic production translated into experience in space.
On the left, one enters Chiara Passa’s project, where her series of Object Oriented Stones, three-dimensional sculptures usable in augmented reality, are translocated into virtual space. Entering inside a gigantic stone-sculpture, one explores the landscape in a playful way, invited to capture the ten stones that are an integral part of the landscape.
On the right, the room dedicated to Quayola, an artist who places his work between the real and the artificial, between tradition and modernity through the extensive use of algorithms, presents the Laocoön Sequence, a translation of his series sculptures and studies on the Lacoonte into digital, presented in a very carefully designed exhibition space, including the lighting.
Continuing on, we encounter the work of artist and sculptor Auriea Harvey who catapults our virtual alter ego into a lost ziggurat, a room but also a condition that springs from mystery and disquiet, an inhospitable place from which one is nevertheless attracted, also thanks to the sound that accompanies the stay.
The duo Bianco Valente builds a room where human language and computer systems meet in the shaping of images from text. Their work, but above all their presence in this project, two artists who have always been interested in the body-mind duality and engaged in relational projects mostly linked to communities around the world, their hometown Naples in primis, gives a glimpse of the intention of PAN’s mission, in between dimensions, on an interdisciplinary level, and without ever losing sight of their roots with the territory.
METAPAN, curated by Maria Grazia Mattei, director of MEET in Milan and Valentino Catricalà
Artistis: Chiara Passa, Davide Quayola, Auriea Harvey and Bianco-Valente.
