The Farnesina Digital Art Experience exhibition has finally landed in Barcelona, at the Espronceda Institute for Art and Culture. The exhibition, promoted by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation (MAECI) and curated by the Bright Festival of Milan, was organised by the Italian Cultural Institute in Barcelona with the sponsorship of the MAECI, the Italian Embassy in Madrid, and the Italian Consulate General in Barcelona.
Launched in 2019 with a big video mapping event of the façade of the Farnesina, the project was brought to Barcelona after touching Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Madrid, and Lyon in 2021. It is the first to be enriched with an immersive exhibition after the one presented last July at Milan’s Digital Culture Center. The Barcelona event is the fruit of the work of up to 26 Italian digital art studios and 22 artists and includes a 70-minute fully immersive original performance set up in the Center’s main hall in addition to an in-scale video mapping of the Farnesina Building and several 3D installations with which spectators can interact by immersing themselves in the digital images and process. Moreover, the exhibition was selected to be included in the programme of Barcelona’s City Screen Loop Festival, one of the world’s major international videoart festivals running from 8 to 20 November this year.
The exhibition’s ribbon-cutting ceremony was attended, along with Consul General, Emanuele Manzitti, by the Director of the Italian Cultural Institute, Lucio Izzo, the Director of the City Screen Loop Festival, Emilio Alvarez, the curator of the exhibition, Stefano Fake, the curator of the Centro Espronceda, Savina Tarsitano, and the Director of the Center, Holger Sprengel.
The title of the exhibition, which is based on the building that hosts the MAECI and the Farnesina Collection, one of the major public collections of contemporary art hosted in a non-museum entity, testifies to the MAECI’s commitment towards the dissemination of Italian contemporary art, also in its most modern forms, by highlighting the evolutionary continuity with the great traditions of past centuries, which continue to forge the world’s culture and, at the same time, the ways in which digitalization in the world of art enables us to interpret and understand the contemporary world through direct messages immediately enjoyable by the public.
