STILLS OF PEACE

Stills of Peace and Everyday Life – Edition X

The X edition of the Review is a meeting with the 10 countries protagonists of Stills of Peace, starting from 2013, through the involvement of the Embassies and Institutions that have supported the project with their moral sponsorships: this is how we address Pakistan, Spain, France, China, Morocco, Iran, Japan, South Korea and Armenia.

Fondazione ARIA, renewing the decennial cooperation with the Municipality of Atri and Pescara, together with thirtysix artists, seven curators and three venues hosting five contemporary art exhibitions. Photography, sculpture, painting, performance, video-art, six o.v. film screenings and a cinema production portraying the history of the review.

Once again, the original spirit of Stills of Peace and Everyday Life achieves the purpose to make people open to differences and to the respect of diversity that comes from mutual knowledge through the shared humanistic and existential values that underlie every single Culture. Our globalized society is in need of a multicultural and inclusive vision, and contemporary art is a strategic trailblazer for a new vision of the world where East and West live together peacefully.

Giovanna Dello Iacono
Stills of Peace Director

PROGRAM:

MA.CO. / Maratona del Contemporaneo

JUl 8 06.00 PM / Atri

Duchi d’Acquaviva Square – Atri: Inauguration ceremony of Stills of Peace

Jul 9 06.00 PM Ore 18.00 / Pescara

Fondazione La Rocca | Volume per l’Arte – Pescara: Inauguration ceremony of Stills of Peace

Jul 10 09.00 PM / Atri

Duchi d’Acquaviva Square Court: Launch of Cine Italia and screening of “Roma città aperta” (1945) by Roberto Rossellini

Finissage Mostre Stills of Peace

SEPT 9 06.00 PM / Pescara

Fondazione La Rocca | Volume per l’Arte – Pescara: Stills of Peace exhibitions closing event

SEPT 10 06.00 PM / Atri

Municipal Theatre: Launch of ‘Voci di dentro. Still of Atri‘ short film by Dino Viani
Presentation of ‘Black Spring’, curated by Lavinia Filippi

MOSTRE:

Jul 8 – SEPT 10 2023

ATRI – 10.00 – 12.00 / 16.30 – 19.30 / 21.00 – 23.00 / Closed Monday morning
PESCARA – 10.00 – 12.00 / 18.00 – 22.00 / Closed Sunday and Monday

Cisterne di Palazzo Acquaviva – Atri

Whoever you are
Navid Azimi Sajadi, Jean Gaudaire-Thor, Liana Ghukasyan, Massimo Ruiu, Barbara Uccelli, Wang Youngxu

Curated by Mariano Cipollini

Five artists, four nations. Distant from each other for history, social political geographies, poetic narrations. Today, they are all here united by a single will: to let their art witness that cultural differences embody an essential value to be fathomed in order to strengthen the most noble and representative aspects of the human being in the flux of becoming. It is possible to use the might of each identitary artistic language here featured to try and affect the various souls of a deliberately disoriented society, ever more distant from an ecumenical sharing of everyone’s available wealth and values. And that’s how it is, whether we are talking about the tangibility of a physical space and its resources – the common patrimony that has to be indispensably distributed, in order not to allow a minority to rack it up – or the intangibility of free thinking, which favors diversified cultures and their free flow.

If supported by scrupulous inner search and intellectual honesty, each personal creative journey may help to instigate considerations to be assimilated and shared, as the necessary process to resume relational-cultural practices that would be independent from economic powers. Tolerance and knowledge would be then able to reinforce their boundaries, which find themselves now modified in substance by the action of an exclusionary globalization, where the value of a single community is essentially measured in numbers, monetized by definition. No special requirements are needed. Whoever we are, whatever knowledge we have, we can, if we want, open up with them, give and take what we need. We can reopen ourselves to a socializing chorality, making the creative gesture become the keystone to an inclusive language, in an effort to reverse the evident downward trend.

Cisterne di Palazzo Acquaviva – Atri

Purity
Mohammad Alì Famori, Jukhee Kwon, Ignacio Llamas, Kaori Miyayama, Gino Sabatini Odoardi

Curated by Antonio Zimarino

Purify the gaze, purify the form in order to get right to visual essences to be contemplated rather than intellectualized. The attempt to make judgements over a rationalistic approach comes from the search of those differences and oppositions that would concur at the generation of merely divisive interpretation patterns, if during the investigation process we lost sight of the sense of wholeness of things embedded in an artwork.

When opposition is not meant as a tool to understand what we see, it is likely to generate discord and conflict of ideas, positions and terms; whereas a pure eye is drawn to a pure form, to essentiality, circularity and reflection, and open references to concentric circles, and to concepts that reveal themselves rather than impose themselves.

Seeing in order to understand is kríno, a Greek verb of multiple meanings, and among them the main sense of ‘separate, distinguish, organize’, namely “see in a way different from judgement”, that is far from what we are used to dualistically consider. Understanding in meditation means to accustom to building bonds, to questioning them, and to harmoniously and progressively develop the comprehension of alterity. This is the non-violent gaze: understanding and not oppositional. The chosen artists live this purity; and through them we are taught to perceive it without denying the strains that inevitably dwell within the desire to feel it.

Museo archeologico – Atri

Survivors
Nazik Armenakyan

Curated by Paolo Dell’Elce

Survivors is a far-reaching photographic work about those among the victims of the Armenian genocide who survived. The project illustrates how photography plays an important role in the process of understanding the events of 1915 and how it impacts on individual identities. Starting from 2005 and for the following ten years, Nazik Armenakyan patiently built an archive of memory made of faces, places and testimonies, striving to give back to them that existential dignity that has been erased for long, together with giving voice to the victims. The photographer eventually managed to record the faces and the testimonies of forty-five survivors that were still living in Armenia. Physically conducting a census, a search for every single “survivor” has entailed a great moral and professional commitment over the years for Nazik Armenakyan thereby making her work stand today, both from a cultural and emotional point of view, as a great gift from the photographer to her people. The Survivors project represents the opportunity to recover the identitarian function of historical memory, which is eventually allowed to grow stronger and operate in the consciousness of every Armenian; but it is also and above all a noble act of civilization and compassion endeavoring to bring the stolen past (that the Turkish Government is still refusing to admit) back to an increasingly forgetful and indifferent present through the testimony, the offer of the pictured and exposed ‘resurrected body’ of the “survivor”.

Museo Archeologico – Atri

Polvere di stelle / Stardust
T-yong Chung, Sabine Delafon, Anna Galtarossa, Randa Maroufi, Aryan Ozmaei, Banafsheh Rahmani, Uzma Sultan

Curated by Eva Comuzzi

The idea of this Stardust exhibition originates in a hospital room. While experiencing the wait for something to be lost, and to be born again at once. The rebirth occurs elsewhere, in an unknown place. In the stars maybe, since we are all partly made of stardust, as the ancient civilizations and the native Americans taught us. The selected artists will cover therefore topics such as birth and death, the origins of humanity and its self-destruction, the concept of mask and transformation, and the lost relation with Nature and beauty. The struggle to shine. Through paintings, videos, sculptures and installations, the exhibition will deal with the concepts of metamorphosis and mask between Eros and Thanatos, of ruins, and also of totems. Of the rebirth of self, through another gender and identity.

Fondazione La Rocca | Volume per l’Arte – Pescara

Life is something else

Carla Accardi, Mirella Bentivoglio, Joseph Beuys, Daniel Buren, Gea Casolaro, Maurizio Cattelan, Giuseppe Chiari, Daniela Comani, Claire Fontaine, Ketty La Rocca, Lucia Marcucci, Elisa MOntessori, YOko Ono, Cesare Pietroiusti, Lamberto Pignotti, Vettor Pisani, Cloti Ricciardi, Luca Vitone

Curated by Simone Ciglia

Life is something else presents a distinctive focal point of research within Gianni and Giuseppe Garrera’s collection: art when it develops into poetic struggle, need for freedom, disobedience, social intervention and participation. This exhibition displays a varied set of media, such as posters, flyers, photographs, postcards, books and records realized from the late 1960s to present by Italian or Italy-based artists. Often extra-aesthetic, fast, fragile, light, able to slip through the net of control, these forms allow artists to perform a more profound and courageous action as part of the collective consciousness and awareness about global issues. Operations that are mainly conceived as gifts, not meant for commercial purposes, indifferent to Economy and Accounting.

The exhibition focuses in particular on 1970’s decade, as the phase when change do happen, bearer of revolutionary instances such as feminism and ecologism, and on its legacy in art over the last twenty years. The urge to give voice to these ideal strains leads to the experimentation of various operational strategies to be applied on public spaces which include leafleting, putting up posters and infiltrating in commercial systems: “Special exemplars of art, poetic acts, many a time on the sidelines, off the comforting and shielding network of museums, exhibitions and galleries, led among men and things, to draw attention, to speak out about their obstinacy to speak, to intensify listening, to spot every form of power and every abuse of power, or just to feel free. Traces then, signs and signals of freedom, where art becomes able to unravel certainties and conventions, possibly reporting neglected realities of disadvantage.” (Gianni and Giuseppe Garrera)

CINEMA:

Cortile di Palazzo Acquaviva – Atri

Cine Italia

Curated by Pino Bruni and Dino Viani
JUL 10, 17, 24 / AUG 7, 21, 28 2023 – 21.00

Stills of Peace and Everyday Life
A RESEARCH INTO THE SENSE OF CONTEMPORANEITY