STILLS OF PEACE

Stills of Peace and Everyday Life – Edition V

Stills of Peace project has been proposing for five years meetings and comparisons, that have widely shown and confirmed that in the field of research of contemporary visual arts, there are common issues linked to a “spirit of the time”, or at least there are “obliged mixtures” between subjects, artistic forms and reflections. Surely, this is a quality of those artists who, although belonging to different cultures of formation, reveal themselves more sensitive and under a constant research, trying to define their own doing, their own saying, their fascination or their approach to the “common time” that we live.

In this fifth edition there is a dialogue between two “exemplary” art proposals, looking for a mutual talk, relationship and sense, starting from the specific identities. From a critical point of view the aim is to propose a visual contrast that opens up to a talk searching for meanings. It is a question of laying the basis and the ways for a dialogue.

This year Paolo Dell’Elce has also produced a shortfilm within the Stills of Peace for children project, a homage to the lost time of the childhood of every generation, in which one lived perhaps more fully, without differences and prejudices, thanks to the analog photography workshop carried out in primary school “Vittorio Bachelet” in Orsogna.

Exhibitions:

Scuderie di Palazzo Acquaviva – Atri

Materia Prima – Fatiha Zemmouri

Curated by Paolo De Grandis

The exposed works, full of striving, mark the various phases of human mutation and its evolution during the cycle of life. The symbolism of materials is an allegory through which Fatiha examines the universal dynamics linked to humanity, to the tragedy of existence, to man in front of his destiny and to the issue of his finiteness.

From glossy white of ceramics, declined in shapes inspired by the vegetable world, to the dusty black of coal, combustion is the mean of the creative process between modernity and tradition.
The work, through various processes such as baking, burn or gestures, expresses an original amazement, reveals a sphere that belongs to the common sense and can hence be understood as an element of cultural identity.

Scuderie di Palazzo Acquaviva – Atri

Infinitely – Alberto Di Fabio  

Curated by Antonio Zimarino

Di Fabio’s painting imposes a visual challenge that fascinates and impresses, it asks the observer much more than simple and emotional perceptions. A pulsating material emerges from the works, and evokes the continuous reference between microstructures and macro systems perfections, that seem to all respond to similar universal laws.

The approach requires a long time of relationship, and the particular spatiality that the artist develops aims to introduce us to the conceptual depth that moves his research. The paintings are opportunities for opening up to a physical and mental space, in which you can lose yourself to grasp its continuity. A journey of perception into the absolute, through real spacetime windows.

Museo Archeologico – Atri

Amazigh: Berberi of Marocco – Luciano D’Angelo

Curated by Sandra Fiore

The photographic journey proposed by Luciano D’angelo represents a moment of reflection on the common history that has crossed the Mediterranean, a crossroads of peoples. In this sense, the exhibition offers the opportunity to return to the theme of ethnic identity and necessity. The Imazighen who inhabit the Atlas Mountains, freezing in winter and burnt in the summer, have fascinated Luciano D’angelo. In his many travels in this country he has set in extraordinary shots the daily life of the characteristic villages that appear firm in time, in an ancestral dimension.

Museo d’Arte Costantino Barbella, Chieti

Depth of the sea – Fathiya Tahiri

Curated by Paolo De Grandis

The expressive research of Fathiya Tahiri has developed a rare consistency over the years. He insisted on his fears, his emotions and obsessions to compete with the world. The resources that have influenced it may seem obvious, such as the Moroccan color tradition or the surrealist background, but in reality the combinations and characters of the people in his paintings or his anthropomorphic sculptures assume a “pathetic” expression in a rebirth he continues, turning into the paths of the soul that were to be expressed in this way.

Its objective is to deconstruct the real in a process of abstraction, in which only some dominant chromatic tones of the reality of an image remain attributable to the subject expressed by the title, crossed by contradictory backgrounds and strong contrasts. The material of the works is magmatic, full-bodied and so strongly physical that it tends to come out of the second dimension. It has its own stratified mass, and internally maintains a pressure that recalls a force in constant tension and boiling.

Museo Archeologico, Atri

Progetto Stills of Peace for children

A short by Paolo Dell’Elce

A workshop of analog photography carried out in the primary school “Vittorio Bachelet” of Orsogna (classes 4 and A – 4 and B), with an important multi-ethnic reality that expresses itself in an atmosphere of happy cultural integration, has allowed to realize a short film that, through the narration of the various experiences, is the personal homage of Paolo Dell’Elce to the lost time of the childhood of every generation, in which one lived perhaps more fully, without differences and prejudices.

These children looked at each other differently, for the first time, through the lens of an old reflex camera, and got to know each other a little bit more by experiencing the time of vision. It is not the hasty looking to which the new means of acquiring images are accustomed, but the gaze of a human being who captures the beauty reflected in the eyes of another human being.

CINEMA:

Cortile di Palazzo Acquaviva – Atri

Cine Morocco – Review of Moroccan cinema

Movies screened in original version with Italian subtitles
Curated by Pino Bruni