On 4 May, for the SPLEEN series, the Fondazione Filiberto and Bianca Menna inaugurated the installation project Hey there you, looking for a brighter season (moth), by Davide Sgambaro. This was the first of three installations, part of a project by Gianpaolo Cacciottolo and Massimo Maiorino, aimed at rethinking the role of a historical institution in the urban fabric of the city, through the realisation of site-specific works that go beyond the confines of the Foundation and place themselves in direct dialogue with the community of reference.
The second artist called to this challenge was Marco Strappato who realised an artistic intervention entitled Qui mi sento a casa (Here I feel at home), inaugurated on 24 May. It is a neon light installation, white in colour, which recalls the iconography of the bookmark, a bookmark often used on the Internet or on apps to save a place or a page among one’s favourites that one wishes to remember and find again later. An automatic operation, which has entered the common language of the digital era, and which Strappato himself also performs when he searches on Google Maps for the Filiberto and Bianca Menna Foundation and ‘saves’ it, adding a bookmark within the application.
Starting from this action, the artist’s desire was to transform this gesture from the digital to the real, by placing the bookmark, made of an iron structure, on the upper part of the Foundation’s façade, implementing a fundamental shift from bookmark to landmark that not only transforms the institution into a reference point for the city, but also highlights its most important and precious nucleus, the Art Library. The title of the work, Qui mi sento a casa (Here I Feel at Home), now takes on a double meaning, linked first of all to a personal feeling of the artist but also, in Strappato’s words, to the possibility that ‘turning a light on this space I believe can help everyone feel a little at home’.
Closing the SPLEEN project was the work, inaugurated on 14 June, by the damp collective, an ‘unintentional project’ born in 2017 from the meeting of Alessandro Armento, Luisa de Donato, Viviana Marchiò and Adriano Ponte. Again, as with the previous works, it is an environmental installation placed, this time, on two sides of the Fondazione Menna, on the façade and on the north side. Entitled Hikikomori, the work consists of a supporting structure on which are placed three sheets painted with Musou Black, a pigment capable of absorbing 99.6% of sunlight, placed to obscure two windows of a room in the Foundation’s Library. Starting from a reflection on the figure of the fighter, which stands out imposingly on the façade of the Salerno institution, today meaningless in the contemporary precariousness, the collective proposed an act of ‘declared will of dis-integration’, through the subtraction of a part of the building from the urban overexposure of light. The ‘standing aloof’ declared by the meaning of the work’s title is what happens to the Foundation’s space, which portrays itself silently without any kind of claim to rule over the world.
Through operations with different meanings, the three installations demonstrated the same awareness that Baudelaire had expressed in his Petits poèmes en prose – Le spleen de Paris, linked to the change in everyday existence, now given by the city and no longer by nature, in the face of which it was necessary to react forcefully. Experiencing reality means understanding all its facets, dialoguing with it, questioning it also and above all thanks to art, which, having now emerged from the institutional and ‘sacred’ spaces of the museum, comes to the aid of the community to confront it with the new everyday reality. Thanks to the works of Davide Sgambaro, Marco Strappato and the damp collective, the Fondazione Filiberto anb Bianca Menna has managed to obtain new lifeblood, becoming an effective cultural point of reference for the city of Salerno and finally emerging from the oblivion to which it had been relegated.
SPLEEN. Tre opere per la Fondazione Filiberto e Bianca Menna, curated by Gianpaolo Cacciottolo and Massimo Maiorino
Fondazione Filiberto and Bianca Menna, Salerno, Italy 04.05-30.06.2024
images: (cover 1) Marco Strappato, «Qui mi sento a casa», 2024, neon sculpture, 85 x 88 cm. courtesy the artist Fondazione Filiberto and Bianca Menna, Salerno, Italy, ph: Elio di Pace (2) Collettivo damp, Hikikomori, 2024, environmental installation, courtesy Fondazione Filiberto and Bianca Menna
