On the occasion of the 17th edition of the Contemporary Art Day, the Italian Cultural Institute in Belgrade will present the video-installation called “Patrizio”, by Massimo Ricciardo, the winning work of the over-35-year-old section within the project Cantica21-Italian Contemporary Art Everywhere, a joint project of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Culture, for the purpose of promoting research and practice on contemporary visual arts.
The inauguration, in the presence of the artist, will be held today, 6 December, at 6 p.m. at the Institute. The work will remain on display until 5 January 2022.
“Patrizio” tells the story of Patrizio Decembrino who, fifty years ago, moved by the desire to build a small chapel to fulfil a desire he felt growing inside him, a place where the local faithful could meet and worship, along a mule track next to his house. His building emerges from nature as a complex but fragile construction, a work springing from an imaginative yet delusional mind. Through the eyes of its protagonist, the film shows us the day of preparations for the procession dedicated to the Madonna of Tindari. The chapel, revealed only at the end, becomes the pretext for a silent journey into the emotional world of its creator.
Massimo Ricciardo (Darmstadt, 1979) lives and works in Turin. He trained at the Academy of Florence and the University of Applied Sciences in Potsdam. He works with archive images, photographs, publications, amateur videos, but also objects and sounds. His installations include different materials, setting up a process for the creation of a new “memory”. His solo exhibitions include: Frag mén to, BOCS, Catania (2021); Visual Politics of (Im-)Mobility, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2020); Dispossession, Palazzo Donà Brusa, 56th Biennale, Venice (2015). Winner of Italian Council 10, MiC (2021).
The Cantica21 project, launched in September 2020, supports the revival of Italian artists in international cultural systems with the production of new artworks and the organisation of a worldwide exhibition, starting in autumn 2021, through the diplomatic-consular network and the Italian Cultural Institutes, through which each artist will present his work in a different foreign venue. Each of the works produced during the first half of 2021 has been acquired by an Italian public collection of contemporary art, in order to increase the public heritage: in 2022, at the end of the widespread art exhibition, the works will be returned to the respective recipient collections, which will be able to decide whether to transfer them on loan for temporary use to the Foreign Ministry’s Collection of Contemporary Art.
