Ilya & Emilia Kabakov at Festival del Paesaggio Aria di Capri
The sixth edition of the Festival del Paesaggio, curated by Arianna Rosica and Gianluca Riccio, celebrates the figure of Edwin Cerio on the occasion of the centenary of the famous "Landscape Conference" (1922 -2022) organised on the island by the then mayor in the summer of 1922. Aria di Capri, the title chosen for this new edition of the Festival, is the name of a book by Cerio published in 1927, in which the Capri writer and intellectual imagines the island as a place created and continuously recreated by the words and images produced by the writers, poets and artists who have inhabited this extraordinary place.
The guidelines of the new edition of the Festival are developed in the wake of this tradition, which sees the island as a place of artistic creation and - at the same time - as a space for designing a new idea of reality. Indeed, Aria di Capri, rather than exalting the most worn-out island stereotypes, is an invitation to observe the landscape that surrounds us from new perspectives and to inhabit reality outside a rigidly anthropocentric perspective. It is precisely this urge, so alive in Cerio's thinking, to escape the commonplaces of landscape culture, to go beyond the usual parameters linked to the perception and representation of reality, and to reinforce the link between artistic creation and the natural world, that is the thread that runs through the various site-specific works created by the participating artists.
In an itinerary that winds its way through the spaces of Villa San Michele in Anacapri, from the façade exterior that hosts Patrick Tuttofuoco's large light sculpture, to the interior cloister inhabited by Valerie Krause's floor sculpture and Henrik Hakansson's large monochrome canvas – a new chapter in the Swedish artist's Butterfly painting series – to the small chapel immersed in the garden of the Villa, which becomes the casing for the installation The observer by the two great Ukrainian artists Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, and to the spaces of the church in which the video The School of Narrative Dance – Ongoing Documentary, 2013-2016 by Marinella Senatore is projected, the Aria di Capri project is structured as a multifaceted observatory on the contemporary landscape.
