At a time of great prosperity for Western civilizations, but at the same time of recent instability, humanity of the future will face new issues related to climate change, habitat change, and resource management. Yuval Noah Harari, one of the greatest contemporary intellectuals, philosophers and popularizers, in his essay “HOMO DEUS. A Brief History of the Future,” foreshadowed some of the challenges that will shape 21st century humanity, from robotics to biotechnology, from genetic engineering to Artificial Intelligence.
Through the works of some of the most important contemporary artists, the festival’s exhibitions will investigate issues related to overcoming the anthropocentric dimension of man in favor of a techno-humanist (or trans-humanist) and datocentric vision. Homo Sapiens, as we now know him, has now run out of steam and, replaced by Homo Deus, will have to put these new technologies at the service of scientific progress for man’s biological and spiritual survival.
Five major exhibitions of painting, sculpture, illustration, digital art and new media are set up in dialogue with churches and historic buildings in the city of Parma, in a path spread throughout the territory that aims to enhance the city’s historical-artistic heritage and to propose to the public unprecedented visions and perspectives of contemporary creativity.
Promoted by the cultural associations 360° Creativity Events and Art Company, PARMA 360 Festival has received the patronage and contribution of the City of Parma, the patronage of the Emilia-Romagna Region and is supported by a wide network of public and private partners.
The main floor of Palazzo Pigorini, an eighteenth-century building frescoed with mythological scenes by Francesco Scaramuzza, hosts the exhibition “Survival” by Piero Gilardi (Turin 1942-2023), a tribute to the Maestro dell’Arte Povera – recently deceased – ante-litteram ecologist and among the most influential Italian artists of the post-World War II period internationally. The exhibition project, curated by Chiara Canali, recounts Gilardi’s path starting from his complex relationship with Nature, the subject of his work, and with Technology, which conditioned his techniques and models of fruition. Starting in 1965, Piero Gilardi began making “Nature Carpets” with the intention of stimulating in future society the sensory perception of the natural environment, reproposed through artificial “domestic devices.” Works of art that realistically and meticulously depict life-size three-dimensional sections of soil and landscape (fig plants, palm trees, sunflowers, cabbages, pumpkins, peaches…), carved in polyurethane foam and painted with synthetic pigments, to the limit of hyperrealism. They are painted sculptures that are not to be contemplated passively, but rather must interact sensorially with the viewer’s body, to welcome it and be touched, heard, walked through, experienced.
The concept of “interactivity” runs through the entire exhibition and is accentuated in some of the more recent works such as “Breton Rock” (2001), “Panthoswall” (2003) and “The Perfect Storm” (2017), which are part of the research path that, since the 1980s, has led the artist to use technology to allow the viewer to actively participate by interacting with the art object in order to mobilize a response towards environmental defense and the survival of the Planet.
The exhibition restores to us the figure of Piero Gilardi not only as an artist and researcher, but also in the guise of a cultural animator of a “creative militant activism,” for the benefit of an experiential sharing aimed at social engagement and biopolitical struggle. “In retrospect, Gilardi’s early awareness of the interactive yet contradictory dynamics between modernity and ecology as preponderant instances in humanity’s cultural and everyday transformations proved to be very forward-looking,” Hou Hanru said on the occasion of the exhibition at MAXXI in Rome.
The exhibition brings together some 20 of the artist’s works, including large-scale works, and features loans from the Fondazione Centro Studi Piero Gilardi, Galleria Giraldi in Livorno, Galleria Enrico Astuni in Bologna, and private collectors.
The second floor of Palazzo Pigorini hosts the first section of the group exhibition “The Work of Art in the Age of Artificial Intelligence,” curated by Chiara Canali, Rebecca Pedrazzi and Davide Sarchioni, the first group exhibition of Italian artists on Artificial Intelligence. The title of the project, “The Work of Art in the Age of Artificial Intelligence,” is related to Walter Benjamin’s famous essay L’opera d’arte nell’epoca della sua riproducibilità tecnica, published in 1936, in which the German philosopher argued how, at the beginning of the 20th century, the invention and use of new techniques, such as cinema and photography, was radically changing the modes of artistic production and reception. Similarly, in recent years, Artificial Intelligence has seen a rapid rise-Artificial Intelligence has been designated the word of the year 2023 by Collins Dictionary-and today more and more artists are confronting and using this technology to create artworks and collaborative art projects toward new aesthetic languages. On display: videos, immersive projects, digital artwork, but also physical works: from mosaic to installation, from sculpture to photography – all works resulting from the artistic creativity of a pool of 20 artists who have included the use of AI in their research and production.
The exhibition aims to investigate different ways of using AI by some 20 pioneering digital artists or next-generation AI artists. Themes such as nature, botany, the environment, as well as humans, humanity, communities, cities, monuments, machines, dreams, and mythologies are shaped and/or transformed through the use of GANs, algorithms, and AI Generative, among electronic art, glitch art, augmented reality, virtual reality, and other expressive forms of the digital age.
On display are works by: Antonio Barbieri, Domenico Barra, Davide Maria Coltro, Andrea Crespi, Giuliana Cunéaz, Debora Hirsch, Nick Landucci, Giuseppe Lo Schiavo, Manuel Macadamia, Vincenzo Marsiglia, Mauro Martino, Angelo Demitri Morandini, Max Papeschi with Michele Ronchetti, Chiara Passa, Giuseppe Ragazzini, Martin Romeo, Svccy.
The project dedicated to AI is completed with a second exhibition section, set up at the Torrione Visconteo, a medieval tower located in Via dei Farnese, in front of the Pilotta, which presents site-specific and immersive video installations by artists Luca Pozzi, Kamilia Kard and Lino Strangis.
During the course of the exhibition, the book-catalogue dedicated to the project, published by Jaca Book, will be presented, bringing together essays by curators Chiara Canali, Rebecca Pedrazzi, and Davide Sarchioni, an unpublished contribution by Piero Gilardi, and the critical and iconographic apparatus dedicated to the twenty artists in the exhibition. The exhibition will have its digital twin in the Metaverse on Spatial thanks to the collaboration with Dario Buratti, who has created a new space with futuristic architecture that will host the artists’ works in their digital version.
Emanuele Giannelli, one of the most celebrated contemporary sculptors, is the star of the exhibition Humanoid, curated by Camilla Mineo, at the deconsecrated Church of San Ludovico with forty large-scale works and present in the city with the iconic Mr. Arbitrium, a monumental work of more than 5 meters that supports the Church of San Francesco del Prato, a Gothic jewel of the City of Parma, reopened after 200 years of troubled history, located a few steps from the Cathedral and Baptistery. At the center of the work of the sculptor – who graduated from the Academy of Carrara and from Rome landed with his workshop in Pietrasanta, Versilia – is Man, investigated in his being simultaneously primitive and futuristic, human and non-human, poised between a primal state (the ironic Monkey Tribe) and an uncertain, globalized future. On display is a selection of works from the last few years, made mainly in resin and ceramic: sculptural groups composed of single figures or groups of humans that dialogue closely with each other, creating a universe with futuristic aesthetics imbued with filmic and literary atmospheres. In Giannelli’s works, bodies are modeled as if they were hybrid entities, equipped with technological prostheses: welder’s goggles, binoculars and visors (Korf) project Man into a virtual world that distances him from reality, a universe in which technological progress, artificial intelligence, and new technologies have revolutionized and challenged the most fundamental concepts of identity.
Giannelli seems to project us into apocalyptic and science-fiction scenarios by telling us about an alienated and homogenized humanity, equipped with serial numbers on its chest: hieratic and silent armies, as in the work Mr. Kirbiati, or as instead in Sospesi, sculptures in which the artist represents the physical effort of the human body trying to oppose the force of gravity, figures floating in a suspended dimension, searching for balance.
Giannelli’s works surprise and intrigue and prompt a profound reflection on the historical moment we are living through, on man’s relationship with technology, on the inability we have to communicate with each other in an ultra-connected world (States of Alert), and on the role that human beings will play in the future of the world, on the choices they will make for themselves and, above all, for the planet that hosts them.
The Space Between at the Open Laboratory of the Complex of St. Paul, features the work of four major contemporary illustrators who have long established their names and work in national and international circles and who are dialoguing with each other for the first time. The exhibition, curated by Federico Cano Correa of Caracol Gallery, displays the most recent works of Emiliano Ponzi, Bianca Bagnarelli, Antonio Pronostico and Manfredi Ciminale. In a world where it is increasingly difficult to recognize the human hand over an AI, the role of the illustrator becomes that of a silent storyteller, a craftsman of drawing who suggests that we stop and dwell for a few seconds on an image, unearth its deep meaning and make it (somehow) our own.
Ponzi is one of the most internationally acclaimed contemporary Italian authors and, working in digital technique, he brings forth an absolutely recognizable and unique conceptual style, where perspective, vanishing point and colors give the subjects he illustrates an almost cinematic dynamism and movement. On display are editorial illustrations made for clients such as The New Yorker, Feltrinelli and Einaudi, some plates from the book commissioned by MoMa New York on Massimo Vignelli “The Great New York Subway Map.”
Bianca Bagnarelli is one of the great emerging talents of Italian illustration and comics. Hers is a style that is very much influenced by contemporary American comics, thanks to her great compositional skills combined with a high artistic sensibility, Bagnarelli has come in a short time to be one of the most sought-after signatures by magazines such as The New York Times and The NewYorker for which she recently created the infamous “Deadline” cover. Antonio Pronostico, author already of three books for Coconino Press, is one of the most interesting and original pencils of the last years. He too divides his work between illustration and comics and uses the pencil and acrylic technique, remaining faithful to a more analog approach. Finally, in Manfredi Ciminale’s work we can recognize influences from different historical periods and different styles.On display will be his series dedicated to clouds, which is part of a personal project he has been pursuing for some time. Ciminale is an artist who puts environmental issues first, emblematic is the image on display that shows the Empire State Building in New York an instant before it is submerged by a giant wave.
The eighth edition of PARMA 360 Festival is completed with a series of talks, meetings and workshops with the authors who are the protagonists of the exhibitions and some speakers, art critics, curators, journalists and cultural operators in dialogue with them.
Like every year, the Festival extends to the entire city through an OFF CIRCUIT, organized thanks to the contribution of the Department of Urban Regeneration and Economic Activities, to revive the city’s spaces in a new way, promote the artistic culture present in the territory and involve all citizens actively through a branched route in the historic center of Parma. Around fifty creative spaces in the city are called to the call, including shops, restaurants, bookshops, artist studios and various companies. This year the CIRCUITO OFF of Parma 360 lands in Galleria Polidoro and Galleria Bassa dei Magnani, proposing a wide cultural offer which has the aim of reviving, revitalizing and redeveloping the space of the Galleries through the protection of the area, the decoration, the care and implementation of artistic and creative activities articulated in a rich calendar of events in collaboration with traders and a network of partners such as the Young Entrepreneurs Group of Ascom and Bia Garden Store.
PARMA 360 Festival of contemporary creativity, curated by Chiara Canali, Camilla Mineo and Silvano Orlandini as Production Director, is organized by the associations 360° Creativity Events and Art Company, with the contribution of the Municipality of Parma, the patronage of the Emilia-Romagna Region Romagna, and a wide network of public and private partners, including Gruppo Zatti, BPER, Euplip, Studio Livatino, Athena – associated professionals and consultants, Fiere di Parma – Cibus 2024, ARA 1965 S.p.A, Termoblok, Colser, Ascom, Villani wines and spirits, Starhotels Du Parc.
(from the press release)
PARMA 360 Festival, 06.04 – 19.05.2024, Parma, various locations
