Natural and artificial spaces at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome

Natural and artificial spaces are the theme and heart of an interdisciplinary project realised by the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, which opens its doors to the public at various times during the autumn.

Young and established artists and different institutional realities will come together in a series of events and a confrontation with the public in a collaborative project between the schools of Cinema, Photography, Audiovisual and New Technologies of Art, with the collaboration of the Department of Communication and Art Didactics.

Several interventions will take place between September and October at Campo Boario (one of the venues of the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome), within Short Theatre (taking place at the Pelanda) and as part of the Cinema in verde festival (held at the Botanical Garden) and within the Digitalive Romaeuropa Festival. Natural and artificial spaces and everything that revolves around their symbiosis will take the form of photographic exhibitions, projections, interactive installations, talks, meetings, performances and, finally, a study day (Species of spaces) and a DJ set. The various artistic and research interventions will finally address the area of Artificial Intelligence, which is increasingly at the centre of world debate.

Natural and artificial space and the space generated by their contamination, as well as all that is generated by the contamination of techniques and technologies and by the different ways of making community among artists and researchers of the future, will be the focus of a series of events that should interest a very wide audience, from the youngest to the oldest who want to keep up to date with the new experiments in art.

The project started with a number of events organised as part of Short Theatre (5-15 September) with the Solo suono, a selection of sound works, curated by Francesco Giovannetti and Claudio Libero Pisano and Avverbi di luogo, a video review curated by Luca Valerio and with a video review presented at the Botanical Garden on 21 September, 2024 for the ‘International Environmental Film Festival’.

The European Researchers’ Night, Friday 27 September, 2024, is now approaching. This is the second year of the partnership of the Academy of Fine Arts of Rome with LEAF (heaL thE plAnet’s Future, a European project coordinated by the Frascati Scienza Association within the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions), an afternoon and evening full of events, with live performances (Leonardo Barbierato), screening of the short film Hara – Quando l’AI incontra il cinema (Hara – When AI meets cinema), a conversation with the artist Emilio Vavarella, the presentation of the works submitted for the project Nexus-ness /Manifesta XV Barcelona, where Cecilia Casorati, Fernando Nardi, Sabina Alessi will speak, at 21. 00 with Borderline. Throughout the day, a series of interactive installations by Mauro Palatucci and Cristian Rizzuti, Resonance Galactica – an interactive installation by Eliana Polvere and Manuela Violi (winner of the National Arts Award 2023) will be on show. The evening will close with the screening, at 9.30 p.m., of the film-documentation of the Monkeys video lab of the three days that in May 2024 saw the Academy transformed into a theatre open to the public entirely dedicated to performance.

The European Researchers’ Night will be followed by other days dedicated to the project in intertwining with other institutions and professional figures from the world of creativity.

On 11 and 12 October, again at Campo Boario in conjunction and in collaboration with the Digitalive. Romaeuropa Festival, it will be possible to experience Collisioni, a sensitive environment of light and sound realised as a collaboration between the Academy of Fine Arts of Rome and INFN-National Institute of Nuclear Physics, a way to explore in a performative manner the events of subnuclear physics linked to the discovery of the Higgs boson.

On 25 October, all this will be discussed during a day of meetings with leading scholars from all over Italy. On the 26th, the closing day with video installations, performances and a photographic exhibition, and a review of video clips curated by Bruno Di Marino, Giancarlo Torri and Luca Valerio, will close with a DJ Live Night with audio/video performances to the music of Hyperacustica.