Six female professionals from the art world, a team described by Maria Letizia Paiato as “a group of friends engaging with each other today”—a round table where environmental and social issues are discussed, together with how and to what extent these affect the art world.
On Saturday, 3 December, at Spazio Matta in Pescara, an event took place which focused on ‘Hub Aterno: di pietre e di acque’ (Hub Aterno: Of Stones and Water), a work by Laura Viale. This project represents the outcome of the artist residency curated by Marcella Russo, creator and curator of the Matta Arte Contemporanea section, which was part of the Matta#Texture project, winner of the Creative Living Lab call, and promoted by the Ministry of Culture.
The recounting of the work produced during the residency with reflections by the curator and the artist, together with a projection of the related docu-video, offered an opportunity to discuss issues related to the environment, the protection of local territories and the involvement of the people living there.
Laura Viale’s work, defined by the artist Piero Girardi as “a form of hybridisation with nature”, stems from the desire to take over the now man-made spaces along the Aterno-Pescara river through collective action. Frottage—a relief technique—restores the natural surface of stones through graphite marks on polished sheets, a subjective action that always produced different results.
“Frottage is a tool for recording and producing a trace, just like light on photographic film,” says Francesca Comisso, art historian and curator. This type of transcription is not new to the artist from Turin, who uses her work to physically relate to nature and involve the community in this tactile, rather than visual, work.
Caterina Riva, curator and current director of MACTE, Termoli’s Museum of Contemporary Art, also spoke of community and public involvement through her account of the work of artist Nico Angiuli. In addition to the works of the prestigious Termoli Prize, the museum’s collection also includes a work that is the result of a shared process with the town community, a collective work of art that relates the feeling of belonging to the museum to the public.
In fact, according to Maria Letizia Paiato, art historian and critic, an act of intense mediation and communication involving the different professions of the art world seems necessary to bring the community closer to the language and products of contemporary art. And public art is going in this direction, producing a form of art that “connects people with people and places with places”.
Finally, there is the contribution of Valeria Ribaldi, an independent curator who deals with territories and fragility for the magazine IRÆ, aimed at demonstrating that the theme of environmental sustainability can also be approached from an aesthetic perspective.
The permanent work by Laura Viale Particolari (d’après l’Aterno), installed at Spazio Matta, perfectly sums up the sense of the circularity of a sustainable system. This is a work that starts from nature and returns to nature, from stone to stone, passing through marks that are now manual, now digital.
