🏆 Nomination: Best Of 2022

🏆 Nomination: Best Of 2023-08

Vera Bugatti

<div>Created for DeltArte<br><br></div><div>The mural is dedicated to uniqueness &amp; diversity. It takes years to fully accept our uniqueness as an asset.</div><div>Two female figures stand out in the work, set in a narrow space. In the center a young woman with a mirror in her hand and a hesitant gaze directed at the observer. In the foreground, a little girl with an old scarf, intent on observing the mirror and her reflections. Above a canary placed on the fingers of the woman, also intrigued (but disoriented!) by her mirror, below an apple and a note, in the hands of the little girl.</div><div>The two figures could be basically the same person, in two stages of life. In the mirror the reading key. Who do we really see through various and multifarious reflective screens?&nbsp;</div><div>If appearance continues to be slavery (especially female) what really remains of our uniqueness? What is truly profound if the content becomes a faint echo of the image?&nbsp;</div><div>After all, reflecting has multiple meanings: it is to send the light back but also to constitute a repercussion, a consequence or an effect, at the same time to continue, to be the outcome, to turn the mind on an object of thought and above all to reconsider it carefully.&nbsp;</div><div>In the apple a multi-significant symbol of redemption and perdition, spirituality and vanity but also a memory of a time of economic difficulties and sacrifices that marked the place that houses my work. The leaflet in the hands of the little girl refers in fact to the popular neighborhood built along the ancient bank road called Cengiaretto, which in 1943, following the fall of fascism, was renamed Borgo XXV July. The story made me rethink the freedom regained with liberation which was also the possibility of disagreeing, of expressing opinions different from those of a regime, a right that is never taken for granted and which we often risk underestimating.&nbsp;</div><div>If I had made the sketch a couple of weeks late I probably would have painted a piece inspired by the protests that erupted in Iran after the killing of Mahsa Amini and Hadith Najafi. My work wanted to be an ethical reflection on uniqueness. And yet, I believe that a thread links acceptance of self and of the other and equal rights at all levels, against any repressive regime or state. I would therefore like to dedicate this piece to Iranian women and their courage (if I had a shred of it) but also to the men who are supporting them.&nbsp;</div>

Crew

Reflecting Again

<p>The Cailleach is the divine sorceress and mother goddess associated with winter, the creation of the landscape and ancient monuments. She is linked to Loughcrew Cairns and Monasterboice Tower. “An Cailleach” was created in Drogheda Ireland, last addiction to the DRAWDA Urban Art Trail. The project is a collaborative effort by Droichead Arts Centre, Love Drogheda BIDS, and Louth County Council.<br>Pictures by Andrea Zampatti</p><p><strong>“DRAWDA”is a curated, multidisciplinary public arts programme that embraces our Mythological stories and figures from the unique mythological history of the Drogheda area.</strong><br></p>

An Cailleach

Vera Bugatti (IT)

<pre>A giant old female holds a stick on which a strange jay is placed. The bird carries in its beak a tiny dented alarm clock, neutral mirror of transience, miniaturized theater of human obsessions.
On the stick hangs a rickety balance that compares the weight of a human heart to a sack full of money, a sort of overturned psychostasis that replaces the Maat feather with a sense of possession, so sneaky and rooted today.
It is the ‘having' that prevails over ‘being', to which we should instead aspire intimately.
It is a symbolic work. Suggestions ranging from the Egyptian Book of the Dead to Aeschylus, from the experiments of the early twentieth century on the weight of the soul to Iñárritu, from the iconographies of the Archangel Michael to Paul Auster.
Or, simply, a reflection from which we cannot avoid: in the end, even though we are small, we are accomplices of others' suffering, of a collapsing planet, of discrimination and inequality, of innocent deaths.
Hope, resignation? I would prefer to say that there is an alternative and that it is not too late to change.</pre><div><br></div>

Aut Aut

Carlos Alberto GH

<div>“Wood Side Gallery” as part of the Krefeld change of perspective under the artistic direction of Fredda Wouters from Kevelaer in coperation with city marketing Krefeld.<br><br>Unusual art in an unusual place. Under the title “Wood Art Gallery”, 20 artists from Germany, Italy, Mexico, USA, France, the Netherlands, Russia, Ukraine and Great Britain turned nature into a stage for their art objects. Many great street art motifs can be discovered, but also concrete pipes or slab paths become unique art installations on the area around the Krefeld Environment Center. The Wood Art Gallery was created in 2015, but can still be explored on your own today - as long as nature does not take back its “exhibition space”. But be careful: Weatherproof clothing is appropriate, it can get thorny and muddy in between.<br><br>Carlos Alberto GH is a Mexican street painter and art painter.</div><div>As a child he discovered painting for himself and spent most of his childhood painting and drawing and successfully participating in painting competitions.</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>In the course of his artistic career he won numerous national and international awards and had more than 50 art exhibitions. He studied art restoration and conservation, but since he came into contact with street art six years ago, he has concentrated more and more on this art form.&nbsp;</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>He successfully participated in numerous street art festivals in America, Europe, Asia and Africa. Today he is a professional street artist and often creates wall and street paintings worldwide with his sister Adry del Rocio under the name "Street art Mx".</div><div><br>Vera Bugatti was born in Brescia (Italy) in 1979, she graduated in Conservation of Cultural Heritage in Parma and she was a research fellow in Mantua with a thesis dedicated to the 16th century heterodox treatises. He published essays on historical and iconological research and has collaborated with editorial offices.<br><br></div><div>Her artistic work is featured in the books: Julie Kirk Purcell’s <em>Sidewalk Canvas</em>, London 2011; Russ Thorne’s <em>Street Art</em>, London 2014; <em>The Art of Chalk</em> by Tracy Lee Stum, USA 2016; <em>Street Art en Europe</em> by Nath Oxygène and Brigitte Silhol, Paris 2018; <em>Designing graphic illusions</em>, China 2019. Her piece "<em>Die Erzähler"</em> was chosen by the London Flame Tree for the Street Art Calendar 2016.<br><br></div><div>Active since 2008 and expert in Anamorphic Street Painting since 2015, she painted in Italy, Holland, France, Germany, Ireland, Croatia, Austria, Malta, Sweden, Denmark, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Portugal, Spain, Latvia, Russia, Great Britain, Bulgaria, Belgium, the United States, Mexico, the United Arab Emirates and India.<br><br></div><div>She considers Urban Art as a variation of his artistic poetics, with constant references to the livability of the planet, man’s disturbances and social issues. She also works with different techniques and materials. First of all, the relief figures created by weaving wire with the help of nails, pliers and hammer (<em>Iron and nails project</em>). Then the wooden optical boxes, with locks that allow you to observe what is inside, which contain slightly deformed paintings or mirrors. Peeking you can see modern <em>Mondi Novi</em>, sometimes disturbing worlds. Finally the cylindrical anamorphoses with electric motor of the <em>Memory theater</em> series, restless elegies of time and at the same time homage to the world of the precinema.<br><br></div><div><br><br><br><br></div><div>&nbsp;<br><br></div>

Save the baby duck

<p>Water resources management is a fundamental issue in the context of sustainable development. The United Nations 2030 Agenda includes various areas of action: access to water, protection of natural capital, promotion of responsible behaviour. Sacrosanct objectives towards which I feel a certain bewilderment when I think of the difficulties that all our attempts at sustainability encounter when at the base there are still enormous economic, hygienic-health disparities and essentially many lack basic rights.</p><p>A didactic or scientific work would therefore not have been up my alley. I therefore wanted to rely on a dreamlike vision, creating an aquatic environment (simultaneously marine, lake and river) that crossed the two walls of the building to make it unified through an anamorphic work (deformed on both facades).</p><p>This space with a suspended atmosphere is inhabited by two figures, an elderly man with a coral crown and a curly-haired little girl, leaning on each other. They are metaphors. The bearded old man with thick hair seems like a proven Poseidon, now far from the strength of the Hellenic divinity. He has lost his frowning face, his powerful physique, his impetuous gaze, his chariot, his trident. He seems painful, worried, clasps his hands (prays or welcomes, equally hesitant). Next to him the little girl is holding an octopus in her arms, protecting it. She looks up into the light as a turtle passes right over her head. A seahorse, a perch, a jellyfish appear.</p><p>But something doesn't add up. The old man has floating hair, he is actually part of the backdrop, he sings of his desolation while looking into our eyes. Not the little girl, she is as if stuck to him but her curls are not moved by the water, her dress is still, her gaze wanders far away towards the light. She is in an impossible condition, firm but not static, in an attitude of attention and curiosity. It wants to be a tribute to those who take care of all this, with the stubbornness of childhood (when nothing is impossible, on the contrary).</p>

The dream of water

<div><br>&nbsp;----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</div><div>Along the road of life we constantly carry a big baggage, an existential metaphor. It fills up, it empties. If it weighs too much on one side (how much space does the past have? And the future?) it throws us off balance and risks making us fall. Finding the balance is not easy, on this sometimes impervious path. Baggage is multicolored and asymmetrical, it contains burdens and pleasures, memories, pleasant sensations and pain. There are patches, dignifiedly adjacent to the rest but clearly visible, and hidden pockets that blend in with the texture of the weave, representing memories and dreams, falls and possible choices. If the burden is balanced it helps us on the journey and if as we grow we become guardians of what it contains then at the same time we carry the responsibility of an entire civilization on our shoulders.</div><div>The girl has a mature look and seems to turn back to say something (this is what Federica's father perceived and I agree with it). She has strong hands but with different attitudes: the first of hers firmly grips the knotty stick, she feels the weight of the house and of her guest and protects them; the second instead delicately holds a book showing its back, she deliberately does not let us understand what it is about, culture and education are together a powerful chest against intolerance and inequalities.</div><div>The fox and the robin inhabit our mountains, they are symbols of rebirth and renewal but above all of the need to return to a healthy relationship with nature, often plundered and disfigured. In fact, the fox travels protected by the backpack, the door of the wooden house is too small for the robin and the branch is bare except for the few green leaves next to the girl's hand. The animals look directly at the viewer.</div><div>So she is the keeper. The iconography was born from a reflection on the essential role played by young people from all over the world in mobilizations in defense of the environment. A commitment that has become evident and has recently become the subject of public debate. Environmental protection is considered by many young and very young people to be one of the top priorities, as is the fight against poverty and inequality. Everything is compromised, perhaps irreparably, let's try not to be anesthetized by this society which also tells us what to desire.&nbsp;</div>

The baggage, the path and other 8 titles

Tempus Edax Rerum

<p>It's a piece on interculture and I still have to write something about it. The enigmatic carachter wants to be the idea of interculture itself and the key is in the nocturnal bird and in the dandelion flowers. I'll explain why asap. </p>

InterColtura

<div>Little Red Riding Hood hugs a humble wolf looking at us resolutely from afar. In the foreground, her disheveled grandmother is ready to leave to join, the pannier on her shoulder. With her right hand she removes the scarf, showing us a sectioned heart that generates and supports a semi-bare, floating and vermilion tree as in the iconography of the sacred heart.<br><br></div><div>It is a modern and environmentalist version of the Grimm fairy tale, a fighting Little Riding Hood who welcomes and does not demonize the presence of the wolf in the woods. On a symbolic level, the wolf no longer represents danger and the unknown, on the contrary evoking a return to nature and a complicated but necessary rebalancing of the ecosystem. The forest has disappeared, the screams of a few branches bent by deforestation and the damage caused by pollution remain. The elderly woman guards and shows the tree as part of her vital apparatus. A twisted and diseased shrub, which however still lives.<br><br></div><div>It is necessary to pay attention to nature, take care of it, let yourself be pervaded, today more than ever.</div>

 L'Attenzione

<div>The piece is inspired a 1997 documentary called “Partigiani” by D. Chiesa, precisely the short interview with Iva Montermini, a partisan woman relay who lived in Correggio. The photographic cut and the lighting prevented me from reading her face precisely, but I still tried to portray her as a tribute. Iva, in a monumental version, while she evokes the three partisan brothers and the fact that once captured she had not spoken to protect them.&nbsp;</div><div>I was very impressed by her words, when she remembers that after a night of interrogation and torture she was released and returned home across the fields: “it seemed to me that the sky was who knows where” – “The fields seemed to me all upside down”. A harrowing and poetic epiphany: it was so upset inside that even the outside world had completely turned upside down. Those fields were impossible for me to paint, any pictorial attempt (with my language) would have been less powerful than his words. But I had her to occupy that wall. So I represented her thoughtful, moved, while showing a photograph from when she was young. Below is a clear silhouette of a bicycle. The bicycle is no longer there but something remains to evoke it. I thought about Plato. The luminous outline is not the shadow of the bicycle (its memory) but the very idea of ​​the bicycle and the fundamental role it played for the Resistance. Palpable, on the other hand, is the story of Iva as an elderly woman, the precious role of the conservation and dissemination of ‘memory’. For this reason, in the upper left corner I painted a child of today crouching, to represent the new generations, while listening to the story of a distant time.&nbsp;</div><div><br><br></div>

I CAMPI CAPOVOLTI (The inverted fields)

<p>This is the first part of a big artwork I created in a old factory in Italy, a big 370 m2 wall with two characters. On the right, a young mother nature with leaves in her hair and a sweet look embraces a peacock while on the left a more enigmatic female figure (a sort of sibyl) supports a young woman fox. A robin sits on her finger and around her are seen two fish (one in a bubble) and a butterfly. Her hair turns into light ribbons (like fabrics/yarns/cloth strips) that they invade all the surrounding space. They are two 'faces' of the same woman, two states of mind of a mother nature that does not always we treat as we should. The title is Biophilia. Biophilia literally means love of life, therefore the innate tendency to focus your interest on life and natural processes, with fascination and empathy asymmetric (i.e. participating emotionally in different forms of life).</p>

Biophilia - Part one

<div>&nbsp;</div><div>I chose Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland cause it is really a special story for my personal life and it returned often in feelings. Carroll describes the fall into the rabbit-hole as very long and he mentions bookshelves (I’m a Librarian!) on the sides of the hole. Perhaps it is also an escape into literature he hints at and I deem in that way of travel too.</div><div>I loved Carroll both for his irony and his dark side. There’s a lot of humour in the first Alice’s book, but in the second the mood becomes darker and melancholic. The story about Alice falling through a hole and finding herself in a silly and nonsense world, is fairly guileless as a tale. Moreover the underlying story is about a girl maturing away from home in what seems to be a world ruled by chaos and nonsense, is quite a frightening one. Alice finds herself immersed in different situations involving curious animals being all alone and she cries quite often when it’s impossible to obey the rules of the Wonderland. She hasn’t got any help at all there. The theme with Alice growing and shrinking into different sizes could reflect the ups and downs of life with young people sometimes feeling adult and sometimes quite the opposite.</div><div>The quote “Everyone in Wonderland is mad, otherwise they wouldn’t be down here” told by the Cheshire Cat can be given an existential meaning. Is it that everyone alive is mad being alive, or everyone dreaming himself away is mad due to the escape from reality? Time is a very central theme in the story and a quote that expresses Carroll’s feelings for getting old is: “We are but older children, dear, / Who fret to find our bedtime near.”</div><div>Surely the subject on Carroll’s tales is really vast and there could probably be years spent on it without reaching a definitive lec&nbsp;</div>

Everyone in Wonderland is Mad

<div>“La fiaba è il luogo di tutte le ipotesi: può darci le chiavi per entrare nella realtà per nuove vie, può aiutare il bambino a conoscere il mondo” G. Rodari<br><br>Essendo una scuola, avevo pensato di sviluppare il pezzo sui temi dell'educazione e del diritto allo studio, mai scontati e oggi inaccessibili a molti bambini (soprattutto bambine), ma ho voluto trattarli in chiave di scoperta, omettendo volutamente il approccio di denuncia che a prima vista avevo deciso di adottare.<br>Una bambina con lo zainetto in spalla ci guarda orgogliosa e tiene in mano un libro aperto come un bene prezioso. Il volume sprigiona una luminosa epifania di rami, nastri (che sembrano tentacoli?) e fiori da cui emerge il volto di una donna che si tocca il viso con le mani. Sulle pagine campeggia una lepre smarrita dallo sguardo attonito. Dalle sue zampe pende un cordone al quale è legata una piccola ampolla contenente un liquido color uva e recante un biglietto misterioso.<br>L'opera vuole fare riferimento al mondo della lettura e dell'immaginazione come strumento indispensabile per la crescita e il dialogo, interculturale e intergenerazionale. Vorrei però che fossero i bambini a decidere chi può rappresentare la donna, se la bambina stessa in quanto persona anziana, se la nonna, un'antenata o una figura del futuro, se una fata, una strega o una personificazione dello spirito.<br>Stesso concetto per la lepre, elemento altamente simbolico in molte culture ma qui liberamente interpretabile dai bambini. Ho scelto un animale totemico considerato un ponte tra i mondi. La lepre si rivela all'alba o al tramonto, collega realtà diverse.<br>Quale migliore guida per la fantasia? In questo senso l'opera vuole essere anche una metafora della letteratura intesa come strumento per cambiare la realtà, per migliorarla. Ho infatti voluto evocare atmosfere che rimandano a Carroll, Ende, Lewis, Tolkien, Rowling, Pullman, a mondi manichei in lotta. Pensate al coniglio bianco, alla lepre marzolina, ai demoni del Compasso d'Oro, al mondo di Narnia. La fantasia dei bambini farà il resto.<br>L'etichetta attaccata all'ampolla reca un'iscrizione, il titolo dell'opera: “HESITATION”.<br>La scelta prende spunto da un saggio del 1970 di Cvetan Todorov, La letteratura fantastica, uno dei primi studi sul fantastico che mi sono trovato tra le mani (nell'edizione italiana del 1977). Il saggio evidenzia come il fantastico duri solo per il tempo dell'esitazione, un'incertezza comune al lettore e al personaggio che deve decidere se ciò che percepisce fa parte o meno del campo della realtà.<br>Fantastico è, dunque, ciò che crea un momento di spaesamento all'interno delle leggi della ragione, e poi innesca i meccanismi della sorpresa o del turbamento.<br>&nbsp;----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</div><div>“The fairy tale is the place of all hypotheses: it can give us keys to enter reality by new paths, it can help the child to know the world” G. Rodari</div><div>Being a school, I had thought of developing the piece on the themes of education and the right to study, never predictable and today inaccessible to many children (especially girls), but I wanted to treat them in a key of discovery, deliberately omitting the approach of complaint that at first glance I had decided to adopt.</div><div>A little girl with a backpack on her shoulder looks at us proudly and holds an open book like a precious asset. The volume releases a luminous epiphany of branches, ribbons (which look like tentacles?) and flowers from which emerges a woman’s face touching her face with her hands. On the pages stands a lost hare with an astonished look. A cord hangs from her paws to which a small ampoule containing a grape-colored liquid is tied and bearing a mysterious note.</div><div>The work wants to refer to the world of reading and imagination as an indispensable tool for growth and dialogue, intercultural and intergenerational. However, I would like the children to decide who can represent the woman, whether the child herself as an elderly person, whether the grandmother, an ancestor or a figure from the future, whether a fairy, a witch, or personification of spirit.</div><div>Same concept for the hare, a highly symbolic element in many cultures but here freely interpretable by children. I chose a totemic animal considered a bridge between worlds. The hare reveals itself at sunrise or sunset, it connects different realities.</div><div>What better guide for the imagination? In this sense, the piece also wants to be a metaphor for literature intended as a tool to change reality, to improve it. In fact, I wanted to evoke atmospheres that refer to Carroll, Ende, Lewis, Tolkien, Rowling, Pullman, to Manichean worlds in struggle. Think of the white rabbit, the March hare, the daemons of the Golden Compass, the world of Narnia. The children’s imagination will do the rest.</div><div>The tag attached to the ampoule bears an inscription, the title of the work: “HESITATION”.</div><div>The choice is inspired by a 1970 essay by Cvetan Todorov, <em>The fantastic literature</em>, one of the first studies on the fantastic that I found in my hands (in the 1977 Italian edition). The essay highlights how the fantastic only lasts for the time of hesitation, an uncertainty common to the reader and the character who must decide whether or not what they perceive is part of the field of reality.</div><div>Fantastic is, therefore, what creates a moment of disorientation within the laws of reason, and then triggers the mechanisms of surprise or disturbance.</div><div><br>&nbsp;</div>

The Hesitation

<div>&nbsp;It is again related to environment issues. Above all on how bad behaviors humans are wearing respect to nature in general. The term <em>teratology</em> stems from the Greek&nbsp; τέρας&nbsp; <em>teras</em>&nbsp; meaning “monster” or “marvel”, and λόγος&nbsp; <em>logos</em>, “the study of the word”. Generally It refers to the<strong> </strong>abnormalities of physiological development.</div><div>It is often thought of as developmental toxicity so the area includes also all manifestations of abnormal development that are caused by environmental insult. These may include growth retardation, delayed mental development or other congenital disorders without any structural malformations. Actually the term is related to biological deformities and teratogenesis refers to congenital malformations or individuals with significant malformations.</div><div>Rather, in my artwork the use of the word teratology goes to the meanings it had especially from the 16-17th century, a discourse on prodigies and marvels of anything so extraordinary as to seem abnormal. Unique and extraordinary creatures were considered to be prodigies. Many chroniclers tried to explain the existence of such departures from ‘normal’ by juxtaposing both natural causes (following Aristotle), and divine responsibility, (following St. Augustine’s idea that Nature reflects the will of God). Monsters were thus viewed as signs and portents through which God communicated with man. Especially during the religious wars of the 16th century, they were often interpreted as political or religious omens.</div><div>The wall would also be an homage to artists fascinated by the study of theories linking imagination, art, and monstrous progeny, both in renaissance and in the ‘900.</div><div>In my painting the girl (she has young face but hard arms as an adult) holds an angry cock with a body that reminds a goat or a lamb. One hand is embracing it, the other seems to keep it in a hard way. The position is similar to many ones in the religious iconography. On the shoulder of the girl another strange animal is holding a piece of meal. It has the astonished face of a curious fish and half body of a rat. On the top, close to the dirty bowl kept on the head of the girl, a worried pink monster fish.</div><div>Therefore the dark girl with green hair was more dusturbing in the sketch than as she appears in the final painting. Still don’t know if she is a human child spirit or a nature one, if she is saving these extraordinary creatures or if she is catching/hunting&nbsp; them (and to do what at final?), if she is part of the dangerous changing and if so, in what scary way? What is expected?&nbsp;</div>

Teratology

<div>&nbsp;</div><div>The second mural of the project in Poggibonsi, colorful and oniric, shows 4 rooms without doors and small windows on the top. In the main room a girl with black shoes is coming out from a big bag. She looks at you (a scary sight) and she holds a two-faced disturbing fish. On the bottom some origami birds are keeping the bag open. The bag itself is surreal cause it cannot be closed (it has hooks that are not right from the closing space). Is the discovering moment of life with creativity mood. Anyway the subject is the same of the other mural. In her birth room she has a giant turtle floating (freedom and dreams) and from her adult room (empty except 12 white small stones) a black crow is coming to point out the changing of life through growing. In her death room the light bulb still has the fish inside. That’s why the girl is living her present and she doesn’t consider her future moment of passing by.</div><div><br><br></div>

To Be Passing 2

<div>Gender disparities constitute one of the major obstacles to sustainable development, economic growth and the fight against poverty.&nbsp;</div><div>Reflecting on these issues, supporting female self-determination and fighting for equal rights at all levels of participation inevitably leads to addressing dramatic issues, such as violence against women, a cancer of tremendous relevance.&nbsp;</div><div>As an artist (but also as a woman) I attempted an approach to the theme that could combine my poetics with an iconic narrative arising from heterogeneous suggestions. The work is dreamlike and carries a symbolic value, proposing a monumental female personification that recalls some teratological pieces that I have painted in the past.&nbsp;</div><div>A young woman whose head turns into a mass of octopus tentacles slides between her fingers an elastic band holding a sleeping newborn baby wrapped in drapery. At the center of the composition, the girl’s corset shows an alienating environment that crosses her body from chest to belly, revealing a bare stage that houses an empty armchair and some objects.&nbsp;</div><div>The title alludes to the verb tense of the future perfect, which is revealed on an iconographic level as an internal future, a prefiguration of what is supposed to be her destiny, based on how she decides to act.&nbsp;</div><div>The same verbal tense is also called the compound future and this made me think of a temporal space with place, with reference to that session that awaits everyone as protagonist and judge of their own show, almost an inevitable psychological ethymasia that from the sphere of the sacred jumps to the phenomenon of consciousness.&nbsp;</div><div>Next to the armchair there is a suitcase and some books, symbols of knowledge and understanding of others. I didn’t want to refer specifically to the world of work, family, relationships, but implicitly there are all these elements in the work. In the sleeping child, the care of the children (mostly outsourced to the mothers) but also the idea that by coming into the world one is already strongly conditioned (in some cases by a hostile environment and opportunities that are difficult to seize, by abuse and ignorance).&nbsp;</div><div>The tentacled head is a double symbolic reference. On the one hand, the difficulties to be faced, the harassment suffered, the tyranny to which one is subjected. On the other, adaptability and the power of renewal, a true regeneration. In fact, flowers emerge from the tentacles on the left side of the work. Tied to them, to balance the tentacular movement, hangs another elastic band holding a gasping fish, to evoke the relationship with oneself in the face of the shocks of the world. Perhaps it is precisely this fish that I identify with.</div>

Futuro interiore

<div>&nbsp;The work is inspired by the history of Ciociaria women, described and photographed in the twentieth century in a sublime way. Brave and tired, busy at the fountain, looking at the horizon waiting for the return of their children or their partner, when the war had driven them away. At the same time austere and combative, then victims of abuse. My Ciociara, now gray, emerges from a narrow crack and looks at us through a tangle of branches, which she caresses with her hands. Her was a lush land, now suffering as the rest of the world. She would have many stories to tell, but the delicate flowers of her tree are about to fall to the ground, to reconcile with the ground, leaving behind the memory of a rare splendor. The latine title means "what comes from the roots", a humanity that shows itself shy but firmly anchored to the ground that nourishes it, and a firm foothold for us. To take root here means to deeply and definitively penetrate a story, at the same time longing for a harmonic origin of all things.&nbsp;<br>-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------<br>L’opera è ispirata alla storia delle donne ciociare, descritte e fotografate nel Novecento in modo sublime. Coraggiose e affaticate, indaffarate alla fontana, con lo sguardo all’orizzonte in attesa del ritorno dei propri figli o del proprio compagno, quando la guerra l’aveva allontanato. Contemporaneamente austere e combattive, poi vittime di soprusi.<br><br>La mia ciociara, ormai canuta, emerge da una fessura angusta e ci guarda attraverso un groviglio di rami, che accarezza con le mani. La sua era una terra rigogliosa, ora provata come il resto del mondo. Molte storie avrebbe da raccontare, ma i delicati fiori del suo albero stanno per cadere a terra, per riconciliarsi con il suolo, lasciando dietro di sé il ricordo di un raro splendore.<br><br>Il titolo vuole indicarla come “ciò che nasce dalle radici”, un’umanità che si mostra timida (magari!) ma saldamente ancorata al terreno che la nutre, e saldo appiglio per noi.</div>

Radicibus

<div>&nbsp;</div><div>The title of this work is taken from Ovid's Metamorphoses and means "time that devours everything", an expression coined by the poet and referring to the inexorable flow of time that transforms everything, regardless of human will and events.</div><div>Inexorable like the continuous becoming and transformation of nature, always able to repossess the anthropized spaces and among the central themes of the artist's poetics.</div><div>The work comes to life in quarry no. 7 of Botticino, part of a limestone deposit which for two thousand years has supplied the precious marble with which thousands of sculptural and architectural works have been created. The quarry itself is a site in constant evolution and metamorphosis.</div><div>I thought deeply about these concepts, passionately studying the theme of their bio-reversibility, coming to synthesize in this cultured title the meaning and message of a work that makes the need for a new approach to the natural environment an urgent priority of our time.</div><div>Gandhi, a universal symbol of change and non-violence, supported the equal right to life of all living beings on the planet, demonstrating an astonishing awareness for his time and testifying to his desire for a more balanced relationship between man and nature. In his hands, he holds out a red thread that connects him to the other figures that animate the work and to a mature quarryman, a metaphor for work and experience who, sitting on a large block of marble, seems lost in thoughts of him. To the right of the large block on which the quarryman is sitting, as a further element of connection and continuity between the figures, the ends of the roots of the large fantastic tree that grows on the left wall emerge. The roots seem about to envelop the block of marble on which the worker sits, taking up the theme of time and the reconquest of space by nature. On the left wall, fully visible only from a lateral point of view with respect to the work, the most surreal and visionary element of the project materializes: the enormous tree inspired by the Ficus Religiosus, a singular plant from whose roots faces and animals seem to take shape.&nbsp;</div>

<div>The work intends to accompany an ethical and environmentalist poetic with a reminder to the current current situation of some insights from Pier Paolo Pasolini. Perennially in conflict with the consumer society and with power, Pasolini wrote about how the ancient values of the farmer’s world had been transformed by the homologation of the rampant neocapitalist economy, with the television in his head.&nbsp;<br>Playing serious impact on the environment and on the individual. Predicting a dystopian future, he had defined the dictatorship of the market and consumption, which generates poverty, consensus and at the same time frustrated anger, as «the most repressive totalitarianism I have ever seen». What would he say today, if he could, about the invasion and persuasion of the web? Is it still possible to make a different choice?</div><div>The female figure is a very young contemporary farmer/farmer (more and more in recent years) who has chosen the roughness of rural life as an act of rebellion recognizing the benefits of investing this new one form of freedom, with the awareness of a deep culture. That's why in his new journey even the book becomes a basic luggage. <br><br>supported by&nbsp; '<strong>The Wallà collective</strong> '</div>

L'Ostinazione

<div>In her latest work "PAG", Vera questions the theme of peace, even if she is aware that it is difficult to talk about, especially when the wind of war and the call to arms seem the most obvious answer and, according to many commentators , unavoidable.&nbsp;<br>Bugatti's latest work is an invitation not to lose hope. As she writes in the dedicated poetry, “we cannot stop cultivating and protecting peace, creating relationships, fighting against violence and for democracy, social justice and human rights, necessary conditions for peace to live”. The etymology of the word peace refers to the Sanskrit root paç / pak / pag which is found in the Latin pangere (“fix, agree, bind, weld”) and in pactum (“pact”).&nbsp;<br>She thought of this by creating a large triptych, a symbolic painting that evokes sacred iconographies. Five characters, whose facial features reveal various origins, which are not easily distinguishable because "they want to represent everyone". to fight against violence and for democracy, social justice and human rights, necessary conditions for peace to live ”.&nbsp;</div>

<div>In collaboration with Nassjo Konsthall&nbsp;<br><br></div><div>A huge little girl floating in the act of grabbing (releasing?) a grotesque fantastic animal, a terrified fish that carries monochrome garbage in its body. The work is dedicated to mental illness.</div><div>The title is inspired by a book by Mario Tobino, Le libere donne di Magliano, an autobiographical work that tells of his activity as a doctor in the women’s ward of the psychiatric hospital of Maggiano, an all-encompassing experience that began in 1942 and lasted forty years. I was struck by his way of interacting with patients, with deep empathy. I could not forget the description of the cells for the ‘agitated’, the most painful place, and the story of seaweed.Today the asylum of Maggiano – gradually abandoned since 1978, following the Basaglia law, and definitively closed in 1999 – has been transformed into a museum. There are told not only the mentally ill but also women with illegitimate children, poor people who had no other place to go and in general all the dispoest-demented of society, branded as “crazy” according to the social conventions of the time.</div><div>All this meanings I wanted to put my work, trying to sweeten a little so much suffering with the dreamlike and surreal identification, typical of my poetics. Maybe cells they are still here. It is difficult to free the mind and find a kingdom where to declare oneself but above all to resize that realm to escape into the light.</div><div>The work speaks precisely of this, of the difficulty of relating to that consciousness that wriggles like a strange fish. The girl squeezes him with one hand, lets him go (or welcomes him, protects him?) with the other. A metaphor of existence, in continuous Manichean struggle. This strange fish, with the head of a barracuda and the body of a goldfish, does not know what adequacy is. This fish is the teratology that we all wear throughout our lives. The garbage remains on the side but accumulates, it is what we are not able to grasp, what we do not accept about ourselves. Fighting against aspects and sensations that we have inherited, built and fostered.&nbsp;</div>

Cells are the most painful place

<div>&nbsp;This work was realized for the Biennale street art "Superwalls" (May-June 2023)&nbsp;<br><br>In quest’opera viene esplorata l’etimologia del termine rispetto, dal latino respectus, guardare indietro, guardare di nuovo. Qui il significato viene esteso a quello di osservare con occhi nuovi, ridipingere e custodire. Il murale si sviluppa su due pareti ad angolo e vede protagoniste tre figure femminili di tre età molto diverse: una bambina, una ragazza e un’anziana. La ragazza sta dipingendo il ritratto della donna anziana, ma il suo sguardo vaga altrove, come adombrato da qualcosa di inconoscibile che forse ha sede nei ricordi. Nel frattempo abbraccia la bambina che guarda lo spettatore, ma volta le spalle alla cornice che contiene il dipinto. Forse non sa che esiste, forse è altrove. Tutte e tre sono legate tra di loro da un vincolo fisico (l’abbraccio, l’atto del dipingere) ed emotivo, ma ciascuna di esse è anche indipendente e slegata dalle altre. Un intreccio relazionale che si dirama negli incastri che l’opera mette in scena. La figura canuta emerge letteralmente dalla cornice e attraverso le sue mani nodose sembra proteggere un ramo fiorito che raggiunge le estremità della stanza, la ragazza dipinge, ma si interrompe pensierosa. La bambina si stringe spaventata al corpo della giovane donna, in direzione opposta al ritratto della vecchia (fugge da lei?). Con il suo tratto realistico, che mette in risalto le profondità e le ombre, la muralista pone lo spettatore di fronte all’enigma delle origini, del passato, del rispetto per il tempo e per i ricordi che in esso creiamo.&nbsp;<br>_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________<br>This work explores the etymology of the term respect, from the Latin respectus, to look back, to look again. Here the meaning is extended to that of observing with new eyes, repainting and preserving. The mural develops on two corner walls and features three female figures of three very different ages: a little girl, a young woman and an old woman. The girl is painting the portrait of the elderly woman, but her gaze wanders elsewhere, as if overshadowed by something unknowable that perhaps resides in her memories. Meanwhile she embraces the little girl who looks at the viewer, but she turns her back to the frame that contains the painting. Maybe she doesn't know it exists, maybe it's elsewhere. All three are linked together by a physical bond (the embrace, the act of painting) and an emotional one, but each of them is also independent and unrelated to the others. A relational interweaving that branches out in the joints that the work stages. The white-haired figure literally emerges from the frame and through her gnarled hands it seems to protect a flowering branch that reaches the ends of the room, the girl paints, but she stops thoughtfully. The little girl clings scared to the body of the young woman, in the opposite direction to the portrait of her old woman (of her does she flee from her?). With her realistic trait, which highlights depths and shadows, the muralist places the viewer in front of the enigma of origins, of the past, of respect for time and for the memories we create in it.</div>

Hunter

Animata contemplazione

<div>The artwork comes from a contamination between my artistic imagination and the articulated world told to me by the artisans of my city. The theme is that of the complex relationship between tradition and innovation, non-antithetical concepts to be thought of in necessary coexistence, re-evaluating what we often consider otherness. The fruition of the work, in a marked 320 m2 anamorphosis, presupposes the search for a different, unusual, unexpected point of view.
<br>The title is a sort of oxymoron that combines the concept of tradition (handed down) with the idea of the future as a part of time that has not taken place and is therefore unknowable. We therefore speak of a Tradition understood as in the philosophical sphere, dynamic and active over the generations.
<br>Two characters who represent tradition and innovation, with different skills and resources, deliberately very diversified by age. The elderly man in work clothes represents the craftsman as per collective imagination, the workshop master who hands down ancient knowledge, manual skills, technical ability. The young woman wearing a futuristic headdress with visor and headphones symbolizes 4.0 craftsmanship, born from the technologies of the fourth industrial revolution. Her hands hold a box from which tools related to the artisan world come out. Both look at the observer, recall him from the street, the girl is direct, self-confident, the man is thoughtful.
<br>The transmission of knowledge is perceived in the passage of the box. The young woman has received it and turns to hand it to the artisans of the future, represented in black silhouettes in the light coming from one of the virtual windows. They appear almost evanescent but their role is not yet known, an open point remains. In my opinion we will return to manual skills, to the single piece, but it is not known.
<br>A swarm of white figures can then be seen above the upper right window (the real window of the building) and also on its ideal (fictitious) continuation on the left, until you reach the metaphorical 'house' that connects the stick to the ' A 'of the luminous writing. They are the shadows (luminous as signifiers) of the workers of the past.
<br>The house placed like a lantern on the top of the stick refers to the iconography of the pilgrim, replacing the shell and the emptied pumpkin with the idea of a safe place, of welcome, of dialogue. It is held by the workshop master, custodian of tradition and the spread of techniques throughout the world.
<br>The mural was to be completed in the spring of 2020. Then the project was postponed for the reasons we all know. I therefore reflected on how to touch the Covid19 theme without making the piece dramatic, which is not easy on an iconographic level. A mask and a pair of crumpled gloves emerge from the toolbox. We have overcome the most acute phase of the pandemic also through solidarity works and therefore these elements are supplied in the knowledge kit. However, they are not fully inserted into the box, they hang from a hammer. I deliberately didn't nail them to the wall. The hammer is available to do this but we know that the risk is always present and that perhaps this bad experience is not closed (or that it could repeat itself, in other forms).
<br>On a symbolic level, I therefore wanted to play with perspective again. In fact, if the theme of the pandemic is only evoked by photographing the work from the correct point of view, it becomes more and more significant as you approach the right side of the painting, where you realize how the space occupied by the mask and gloves is very large. Hope therefore, but also a warning to caution</div>

Futura Traditio

<div>&nbsp;A serious old man is carrying a baby and looking to the viewer. The baby is watching something far and the man keeps a rooster that is placed on his body.</div><div>The composition refers to the iconography of Saint Christopher, a man of who helped travelers to cross a dangerous river. The story tells that one day a child asked Christopher to help him to cross, but the infant seemed to grow heavier and heavier with every step. When they arrived on the opposite shore, the child identified himself as Christ, telling the holy man that he had just carried the weight of the world. Despite he is usually depicted as a giant in my draw the man is simply a thin poor one. Big wrinkled hands tell about difficulties he encountered in his life. The rooster (looks like quite scared) represents vigilance but it is also considered a time-keeper and it is a sign of time passing in our lives.</div><div>The design talks about migrants, crossing borders, escaping. Very actual issue.</div><div>It tells about feelings in roots of generations too. What your grandparents told you about their life? Your family, any kind of family I mean. Stories that are like ropes that link you to some memories that make you now exactly as you are.</div><div>Also, when I draw animals and human together (very often) I wish to highlight how is important to recover our relation with nature cause we are loosing the proportion if things: we create too much food, too much trash, to much bad feelings</div><div><br><br></div>

ROOTS

<p>This is the second part of a big artwork I created in a old factory in Italy, a big 370 m2 wall with two characters. On the right, a young mother nature with leaves in her hair and a sweet look embraces a peacock while on the left a more enigmatic female figure (a sort of sibyl) supports a young woman fox. A robin sits on her finger and around her are seen two fish (one in a bubble) and a butterfly. Her hair turns into light ribbons (like fabrics/yarns/cloth strips) that they invade all the surrounding space. They are two 'faces' of the same woman, two states of mind of a mother nature that does not always we treat as we should. The title is Biophilia. Biophilia literally means love of life, therefore the innate tendency to focus your interest on life and natural processes, with fascination and empathy asymmetric (i.e. participating emotionally in different forms of life).</p>

Biophilia - Part two

<div>The artwork is dedicated to the fascinating history of the underground printing press of the Resistance, set up in 1944 at the Podere Piave in Cànolo by Pinotti brothers with the printer Gino Patroncini, a Communist who the fascist state had inscribed in the lists of special supervised. He coordinated for 11 months the activity of a small printing house, a secret and very dangerous job, and they haven’t been discovered till the end of the war.&nbsp;</div><div>Through my work I have tried to evoke Patroncini’s experience as a recluse, the cramped environment, the light that illuminates half a face, experiencing only one pupil, the ear tense to perceive the external danger, the tired aspect of whole days of incessant activity, the fear of getting caught. Yet this surreal nocturnal is tinged with blue and is a light that comes not only from the candle (around which only darkness would be perceived) but also from the flying characters and from the character himself. An unreal and magical light that is the power of the word, of the struggle through ideas. The title Clam refers to the Latin adverb which means “secretly, without the knowledge of” (The etymology of the word clandestine is in fact due to the Latin clamdestinus: clam = secretly + dies = day. He who hides himself from day, it conceals itself, it conceals itself) but also at the same term which in English means “mollusk”, recalling the idea of ​​the bivalve mollusk that hides something precious (and symbolic, like truth) inside.</div>

CLAM

<div>It is a work on the power of art and creation. Joung people are surprised by the emotions coming from making art. Music, reading books, telling stories, watching and making movies, performing theater. Could culture and education make this tragic world better? If the values we tell are ethic, maybe. Tolerance and respect as first.&nbsp;</div>

Storytellers, a kind of magic

Fabio Fedele

<div>It is a work dedicated to an Italian poet and writer, Antonio Fogazzaro (1842 - 1911). In his works he investigated the conflict between faith and science, and between Catholicism and the modern world. His novel Il Santo (1906) was put on the Index of Forbidden Books due to its modernist setting.The artists wanted to portray him in the last year of his life, disturbed by the fact that his novel had been censored. The following year his last opera, Leila, was also put on the Index. &nbsp;</div>

Il Santo

<div>&nbsp;</div><div>The title is inspired by the verse of a work by John Donne, an English metaphysical poet of the seventeenth century: Notturno sopra il giorno di Santa Lucia, the shortest day of the year. I recently found it again in an intense essay by Cristina Campo (La Tigre Assenza) and it struck me. Saint Lucia’s day is called “the years midnight” because it is the shortest. Apparently it is not true, the shortest day would be December 21st, but we must also have some certainty in this post and now we ignore the clarification! Lucia’s day for only seven hours lifts her mask.<br><br></div><div>The composition was probably written in December 1611. The poet, who had painfully left his pregnant wife for a trip to Paris, had a terrible dream in a dream: of her, with a dead child in her arms. Frightened, he sent a courier to London to make sure of his condition.<br><br></div><div>And it was in the tremendous expectation that the five rooms of the Nocturnal were born, where the desolation of the bare earth is festive when compared to the mood of the poet, who says “I am nothing, I am nothing, I am annihilated” and also “Everything is up to me superior (…) even the shadow, to be such, must boast something that produces it, a body and light”. At the end you will find the complete nocturne.<br><br></div><div>I was disturbed by the poem (it’s incredible how autobiographical everything seems to us at times) and while quoting the poet in the title, I wanted to cover my Lucia’s head with flowers, fruits, leaves, palpitating insects, color as a reaction. A luxuriant version that exalted the stubbornness that emerged from the Passio and left the martyr’s fleeting gaze imprinted on passers-by. A face that could also inspire awe, while the sweet muzzle of the donkey peeped out, losing the meekness of the sketch to assume a more restless attitude. The detail of the eyes as an iconographic attribute is present but in a softer vision which is that of a plant whose leaves “observe us” and which culminates in a lily, a symbol of innocence. The suggestion was born by observing the saint Lucia by Francesco del Cossa preserved in Washington, which holds its eyes on a sort of map. It’s a wonderful work.<br><br></div><div>In the end, although my intent was to paint the donkey and transfer the strength of the work there, I realized that I had put power in Lucia, an intensity that makes her internally immovable but lets her fears leak out. The result is an inner nocturnal (mine, the martyr’s, the poet’s) that emanates light, a sort of chromatic paradox, a color that arises from the shadows like spring exploding in winter.<br><br></div><div>However, a disquiet remains, the indelible shadow of a violent death which reminded me of the many other previous or contemporary ones and above all a slightly later one which I madly loved, Ipazia from Alexandria, illustrious victim of the fanaticism of those same Christians who until a hundred years earlier they were victims.<br><br></div><div>If this suffering were relegated to the past, perhaps we could sweeten it. Instead it made me think of the many victims of every day, the lives taken in the name of a selfishness that someone atrociously calls love but which is only possession, another form of fanaticism.&nbsp;<br><br></div>

The Years Midnight

<p><em>Subtle Balance</em> is an interpretation of <em>The Snow Queen (Sneedronningen)</em> by Hans Christian Andersen, published in 1844. Its subtitle is Fairy Tale in Seven Stories because it is divided into seven sections, each of which describes a completed story.</p><p>My summary of the fairy tale focuses on some symbolic elements to give an environmentalist reading of the story, stimulating a reflection on climate change and the need to protect biodiversity.</p><p>Two female figures, Gerda and the Queen, stand out on separate walls. Opposite seasons in harmonious contrast and the contrast between the explosion of colors and the cold monochrome, an almost missed dialogue. A subtle balance holds the scenes, woe betide anyone who removes an element.</p><p>The little girl holds an old metal milk jug full of flowers on which a crow is perched. On the cap decorated with half-withered roses, a bee of enormous proportions is active and two butterflies of impossible colors are about to take flight from the wall. The queen holds a stunted polar bear firmly with one hand and protects a strange element with the other, which then turns out to be a battered heart crossed by cracks. Anomalous floral decorations appear on her cloak, the snow has disappeared and a bare tree can be glimpsed behind her. She is helpless, she cannot be the antagonist, the responsibility lies elsewhere.</p><p>Gerda and the Queen, whose melancholic gazes see far away, do not meet except ideally on the facade that shares – according to opposite perspectives – bare branches and a strange red object, later identified as the little girl’s anamorphic shoes (so long when seen from the front, they recompose themselves if observed from the correct point).</p><p>Gerda’s wall, referring to the third story (called the flower garden), where the little girl speaks directly to various types of flowers – which respond to her – would like to encourage the protection of biodiversity and ecosystems, and at the same time remember the importance of pollinating insects.</p><p>The Queen’s wall, on the other hand, which appears as a silent, almost two-dimensional enigma, refers to the issue of global warming and the progressive melting of glaciers, which determines the disappearance of the natural habitat of many animals including the polar bear, which has now become a symbol of the climate crisis.</p><p>And the mirror? It isn’t there because it is clear that we have become blind, the fragments are everywhere. We are facing increasingly extreme, frequent and devastating climate phenomena, it is now a fact.</p><p>For decades the scientific community has described how the planet’s climate is changing in a worrying way and how the responsibility lies mainly with human activities, starting with the massive use of fossil fuels. Is it still possible to do something?</p><p>In the fairy tale Gerda cannot resort to magic but, with extreme determination and guided only by a good heart, she lifts the curse. She is stubborn, she does not listen to those who tell her that Kai is dead, she sets out alone, she convinces those she meets of the absolute necessity of her goal, she abandons what is precious to her (the red shoes at the river), she talks to the flowers and the animals, who consciously escort her to the destination.</p><p>I would like us all to be like Gerda.</p>

Equilibrio sottile, la Regina delle Nevi

<div>The piece is on de-horning rhinos. Some cultures believe rhino horns are an aphrodisiac, while others covet them for decorations. The keratin parts have traditionally been ground up and used to make medicines for illnesses like rheumatism or cancer, although there’s no scientific evidence that these treatments work. Poachers primarily seeking the rhino’s horn. In order to save them from being targeted, conservationists have begun to surgically remove the horns from rhinos, preventing them from entering the black market. Though it is sad, they believe it is a drastic step that must be taken. Just the mention of ‘dehorning’ evokes a sense of brutality. It is a short-term solution, therefore it deflects the risk onto populations that have not been dehorned yet.<br><br>For IFÖ center. For more information see: http://ifocenterenglish.weebly.com/</div>

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Vera Bugatti

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