Ferrara and its artists pay tribute to Michelangelo Antonioni with the exhibition The City of Silence. Ferrara artists for Antonioni .
Curated by Andrea Forlani, Tiziana Giuberti, Stefano Tassi and Paolo Volta and organized by the City of Ferrara – Art Museum Service and the Ferrara Arte Foundation, under the patronage of the Emilia-Romagna Region, the exhibition will be open from June 10 to July 10, 2022 at Pavilion of Contemporary Art.
On the occasion of the one hundred and ten years since the birth of Michelangelo Antonioni (Ferrara 1912 – Rome 2007), sixty-two artists of different generations, active in Ferrara and its territory, have been called to celebrate the multifaceted figure of the famous director. The very title of the exhibition, which takes place in the rooms that will house the museum dedicated to him, the “Spazio Antonioni” – in which the materials belonging to his personal archives that joined the heritage of the civic collections in 1997 will be displayed – alludes to the first de The Cities of Silence, as Gabriele d’Annunzio wanted to call Ferrara, in his own way pointing to a condition that Antonioni himself would decline to “incommunicability.”
The artists tried their hand at the compelling, as well as difficult, task of conceiving a work that had as its inspirational motif Antonioni’s poetics, the form and content of his cinema, his pictorial research, as well as his own biographical story. The multiple suggestions that the art of the great master is able to offer were interpreted, translated and returned by the authors through painting and sculpture, photography and video, installation and performance. Each work, from the most traditional to the most experimental, indicates a significant continuity and a vivid persistence of Antonioni’s vision, intimately marked by the memory of Ferrara.
“Some artists,” the curators explain, “were inspired by his best-known films (The Cry, The Red Desert, Beyond the Clouds, Blow Up, Zabriskie Point), others delved into the voids, the concept of incommunicability, the misty landscapes and the souls of the first ‘city of silence’.” “The project,” they specify, “stems from the need to give birth to a new ‘Ferrara workshop,’ with the intention of establishing on the one hand a collaboration between established and emerging artists and on the other hand offering the public an insight into contemporary art trends.”
Edited by.
Andrea Forlani, Tiziana Giuberti, Stefano Tassi and Paolo Volta
Organizers
Art Museums Service and Ferrara Art Foundation, under the patronage of the Emilia-Romagna Region.