Press release
Spazio Thetis: an important contemporary art and music event will be held on 20 May
These two unforgettable events will mark the start of Step No. 5 – “Le mille ed una favola dell’alba e del tramonto” – in the “Contaminante - Per il Pensiero che verrà” project. Curated by TheSeven, “Contaminante” is a contemporary history in images, divided into twelve chapters dispersed throughout urban Venice – the project’s title is composed of twelve letters, with each letter corresponding to one of the twelve semitones. Step No. 5, hosted by Spazio Thetis and conceived by Elisabeth Sarah Gluckstein in collaboration with Giorgio Persano Gallery in Turin, unites the fundamental elements of the Earth and the heavens, and corresponds to the Sol semitone. The project began with the idea that history, like myths and fables, provides a poetic, aesthetic and sociological tool for reflecting the current state of the world, without necessarily explaining it. Both of the artists involved are conceptual artists, rooted in a realm of transition that erases the dramatic threshold, the boundaries between Heaven and Earth, the sacred and profane, the visible and invisible. Artist Alfredo Romano, from Syracuse, presents a monumental installation featuring his signature “Madonnine” (small statures of the Virgin), this time in white resin. The statues are suspended in a perpendicular formation, on the walls of a renovated nineteenth-century building (in which ship models were once built) located in the Thetis complex. The composition is shaped like the letter T, which happens to be Thetis’ initial and represents the ethical integrity of the artist, defending – as does “Contaminante” itself – important values that are largely forgotten. The idea of ascension can also be found in Neapolitan artist Maurizio Elettrico’s flying creations – like the protagonists of fables, his solitary giants travel through the air without encumbrances, moving farther and farther away so that they can begin a new story.
The “Suoni dal Confine” event opens a dialogue between two different cultures – Italy and Japan – on the theme of soundscapes. The conference will examine projects involving the sonorous exploration of urban and rural areas, which aim to create a different way of experiencing “out-of-place places” that have been marginalized by the development of contemporary Western society. These marginalized places include rural areas, as well as places that are smaller, scattered, almost invisible: disused industrial areas where brambles and brushwood grow, and weeds in the centre of a traffic island flower-bed.
After the conference, Enrico Coniglio will perform a piece entitled “Porto Marghera e la Crisi del Sacro” and Yasuhiro Morinaga will perform "The Rural Soundscape of Irpinia".
Coniglio will present the results of a series of field-trips that he made to Porto Marghera in 2010, playing environmental recordings that he mixes and manipulates live, with the aim of addressing the loss of the Venice’s twentieth-century manufacturing identity in view of the recent global crisis.
Moringa, on the other hand, will offer a reinterpretation of field trips that he took, during a residence project connected with the “Interferenze” New Arts festival last July, on the high plains in the Irpinia region, amidst pastures of Podolica cattle, villages lost in borderless, abstract hill landscapes and coopers from the Taurasi wineries.
The event was organized in partnership with the Teatro Fondamenta Nuove.
Opening: Friday 20 May 2011, 17:30
Exhibition hours: Monday through Friday, 10:00 - 18:00
Spazio Thetis
Castello Arsenale – Bacini stop
Lines 41-42, 51-52
Biographies of the artists and other information about the event are available at:
ftp://ftp.thetis.it
User: Contaminante_SpazioThetis
Password: Thetis2011
Press Office
Knowledge Management Office
and Press Office
Thetis SpA
tel. 041 2406111
fax 041 5210292
Contact: Giannandrea Mencini
cell. 347 2823781
Roberta Lazzarini
Orange PR – Gruppo REM
Tel. 0432 179 33 50
Fax. 0432 179 33 60
Alberto Rochira
cell. 347 3354320
Anna Maria Told