29TH EDITION OF PALINSESTI. FESTIVAL OF CONTEMPORARY ARTS

The 29th edition of Palinsesti – Festival of Contemporary Art, organised by the Town Council of San Vito al Tagliamento, was officially open on 7th November 2020 and will continue until 21 February 2021. With a rich and composite schedule of exhibitions and events, the Festival involves numerous national and international artists over four venues between Pordenone and San Vito al Tagliamento.
The 2020 edition starts with the presentation of Tempo al tempo. Percorsi di una generazione, an expositive project set up at the old hospital (Ospedale dei Battuti) and the church of Santa Maria dei Battuti, curated by Luca Pietro Nicoletti with the collaboration of Alice Debianchi, who gathered eleven artists born between the end of the Seventies and the Eighties. The exhibition offers two main themes that can be summarised in terms of “time” and “matter”: a return to the media of the visual arts in their tactile and material consistency, accompanied by the need to compete with the memory of the twentieth century as the new millennium begins; and to deal with the present and levels of reality that open in perspective. The exhibition highlights a renewed interest in themes and problems of sculpture, emblematically summarised by a work by Valdi Spagnulo (1961) set up at the church of Santa Maria dei Battuti, and that oscillate between the primacy of the matter (Nitti Sotres, Gianfreda, Kudo) and that of the design (Galluzzo). If a certain pictorial sensibility goes especially through the photography (Cremona) or the reinvention of the art of printing (Useli), the two-dimensional image undergoes manipulations that attempt to display metaphors of the memory (Moretti, Pizzolante) and ends up drawing from the imaginative processes of the collage (Marinelli, Gioiello), with technological means. Perhaps, on this path, we will be able to trace a profile of a generation.

The solo exhibition of works by Carlo Vidoni, curated by Antonio Garlatti, explores the production of the artist, starting from the work Grande pala (2015), already present in Punto Fermo, the permanent collection of contemporary art of San Vito al Tagliamento. The project Destiny_destination (2020), conceived in collaboration with Swiss anthropologist Alessandro Monsutti who is originally from Friuli Venezia Giulia, was created specifically for the exhibition space of the Essiccatoio Bozzoli, a historic building in San Vito al Tagliamento that was formerly a silkworm cocoon drying room. The installation tackles the topic of migration through the experiences of several characters.
It covers the trajectories of seven people who have left Friuli at different moments of their existence or have come to the region from distant horizons. The Friulians’ experiences are as heterogeneous as those of non-Friulians. But all these destinies tell us about a common humanity, characterized by a tension between the attachment to the places where one grew up and the curiosity for the world beyond the walls of one’s home.

The international appointment with the In Sesto Prize. Place as Art (Premio In Sesto. Il luogo come arte)–curated by Michela Lupieri in collaboration with Magalì Cappellaro and this year in its 12th edition–is renewed at the old prison of the town (Antiche Carceri). The Prize confirms its eleven-year-long vocation of promoting the relationship between history and contemporaneity in the territory by fostering encounters and exchanges among national and international artists. The artists selected in 2020 – Maria Walcher, Matteo Nasini, and the duo Sinta Werner and Markus Wüste – come from Italy (Trentino Alto Adige and Lazio, respectively) and Germany (North Rhine-Westphalia). The exhibition presents an overview of the participants’ artistic research and the three project proposals that, as usual, have been designed for a specific area of the town, the green area adjacent to the Elio Susanna parking lot, a space in the old town separated from Parco Rota by a moat of water: Nasini’s sculpture, Meriggio assorto; Walcher’s intervention, Tocca a te; and a sculpture by duo Werner and Wüste, Noise Reduction. It will be up to the public, then, to express a preference by voting for one of the three projects, which will then be realized and included among the works on display for the next edition of Palinsesti. The preferences for the projects can be casted by online voting only at www.palinsesti.org .

A solo exhibition curated by Giada Centazzo at the Fondazione Ado Furlan in Pordenone (via Giuseppe Mazzini, 53) is dedicated to Elisa Caldana, winner of the 2019 edition of the Prize with the project Monumento alle vie inesistenti (Monument to Nonexistent Streets). In the exhibition entitled “Hometown / Casa Città”, the artist presents a selection of works from her creative corpus in which she investigates the concept of “home” in its practical, ethical, social and metaphorical meanings from different points of view, where the domestic and urban dimensions mingle and merge. The artist, who has been living and working abroad for several years now, was actually born in Pordenone, a biographical aspect that charges the event with further emotional implications.

Some video tour to all the sections of the festival are available online at www.palinsesti.org