Art’s visionary approach and science’s ability to anticipate meet at an exhibition in Castel Belasi, imagining desirable futures. “Come Pioggia” is curated by Stefano Cagol, the Castle’s artistic director, and is born in collaboration with MUSE – Trento Science Museum and its s creative platform “We Are the Flood | Noi siamo il diluvio”, dedicated to environmental problems, one of the first of this kind in Italy.
At the same time, water is one of the most important resources and the main element for the perception of climatic change: from drought to floods, alle inondazioni, from sea level rise to the disappearance of ice. Meanwhile, for us water abundance may be friend or foe: we are begging for rain and, suddenly, we’re escaping from it raging. We are afraid if the river's or the lake’s water level is lowering but, as soon as it returns to normal, we forget about it. Philosopher Timoty Moorton explains that these phenomena confuse us through their erratic, ever-changing and viscous nature, but the universal language of art may try to suggest new thoughts.
At the medieval Belasi Castle, at the foot of the Dolomites, the “As Rain” exhibition (June, 11 - end of october) dialogues with the ancient frescos of the top floor and makes us think about these topics of today. There are about fifteen artworks - videos, sculptures and installations - by italian and international artists, some well known and some emerging. The works are recent, some unpublished, other presented at great international exhibitions, and they are going to make the public to wonder about them and to activate multiple reading levels, maintaining their aesthetic and evocative charm.
Mary Mattingly’s (USA, 1978) “Tear” is the first work in the path of the exhibition. It’s the result of an artist residence at MUSE in december 2022 and of the discussions with the scientists. She created sort of a water clock, marking the melting of our glaciers. Produced by MUSE and presented to the public for the first time, the video of Nezaket Ekici's (Turkey, 1970) intense performance near Ledro lake stilts showcases a sequece of actions and sculptural stances as an allegory of the distance we took from our environment. The work of the young g. olmo stuppia (Milan, I,1991) has been created as a side project of the italian pavillion of the last Venice Biennial. The video by Eugenio Ampudia (Spain, 1958), one of the leading spaish artists, has been created in 2020 and exhibited at Cuenca Biennial. “Concierto para el Bioceno” shows a string quartet playing in front of an audience mad of 2,000 plants. A paradigm shift: we in the service of nature. Stefano Caimi's (Merate, I, 1991) “Phytosynthesis” is made with the help of a personalized software which re-reads botanical forms as super-real flowers images. As an artificiality symbol, Philipp Messner (Bolzano, I, 1975) uses snow cannons in order to generate an unreal freezing rain coloured with food dyes. This is harmless for the environment but generates a marked coloring of snow, clearly showing our impact. A black rain is at the root of Saverio Bonato’s (Schio, I, 1991) monochrome. During an artist residence in Taranto he left a painting canvas outdoors, to collect the pollution from Ilva steel plant. Elena Lavellés (Spain, 1981) mixed gold, oil and coal, the root elements of the western civilization, creating a black and gold, mesmerizing fluid. Clouds are the stars of Giacomo Segantin's (Abano Terme, I, 1995) video, sequencing explosions, storms and ludicrous YouTube experiments, from real to fake, so that smoke becomes a metaphor of our struggle to understand the complexity of surrounding events. A site-specific installationby Giulia Nelli (Legnano, I, 1992) seems to seep into plants roots, as if it were water, to evoke the interconnection of natural world. D’interazione parla anche l’opera di Micol Grazioli’s (Trento, I, 1989) work tells us of interaction too. She exhibits a monumental drawing, built by a participatory peperformance last year at MUSE, as part of the “We Are the Flood” platform. In Silvia Listorti's (Milan, I, 1987) glass scultures, which are casts of human trunks, there’s a match of transparency and opacity, fragility and hardness, evoking the connection of glass (and ourseves) with water. Hannes Egger (Merano, I, 1981) showcases a high mountain hut, a shelter by definition, floating on Venice lagoon, letting us imagine scenaries of floods and sea water raising to the top of Alps, devastating what we see as safe havens. Naked, lonely, defenceless, on an iceberg floating in the Greenland sea: she is Hannah Rowan (Brighton, UK, 1990) in a large video projection in the center of the exhibition. Does she clings to the last piece of ice in the Planet in order to remind us of its importance? Does she embrace it, taking care of its survival?

The “As Rain” exhibition path continues in the Project Room situated in the "Sala delle Decime”, on the ground floor of the castle. Here the subheading is “Antropocene Generation”. While we see climate change exasperated youngsters doing activism in the Museums, MUSE and Castel Belasi involve very young artists and question the role of cultural institutions helping imagine possible futures.
In this section 15 under 35 italian artists showcase their work. They took part in november 2022  "We Are the Flood” masterclass by New York art historian  Julie Riess (US) (former director of Christie's contemporary art master). They are Eleonora Ambrosini, Eduardo De Maio, Francesca Fattinger, Pamela Frasson, Angela Fusillo, Marco Gentilini, Nicoletta Grillo, Lisa Guerra, Angela Miceli, Paola Monardo, Isabella Nardon, Jacopo Noera, Leonardo Panizza, Edoardo Spata, Maria Chiara Wang. 

Soggetto: Ermanno Cristini, Luca Scarabelli

Partecipanti: Cesare Biratoni, Sergio Breviario, Giuseppe Buffoli, Umberto Cavenago, Ermanno Cristini, Oppy De Bernardo, Gabriele Di Matteo, Pierluigi Fresia, Samira Guadagnuolo e Tiziano Doria (WARSHADFILM), Cecilia Mentasti, Giancarlo Norese, Luca Pancrazzi , Pedro Riz A Porta, Luca Scarabelli, Luisa Turuani, Joykix, Giovanni Termini.
Foto: Pierluigi Fresia, Rebecca Bogni.
Video: Videoforart.

PROSSIMAMENTE is a closed to the public exhibition, happening during an afternoon in a disused movie theater.
Beyond closed doors, a light beam solidifies as dust. the seats-stage points of view celebrates the screen ritual, while the seats go into the darkness in order to accomodate the time of vision. Then, the lights switch off and everyone gets out of the scene.
It’s a “phantasmatic" exhibition, since “phantoms” are going to be the new movie theater inhabitants, catching a glimpse of artworks and artists. It’s a “phantasmatic" exhibition since it recalls the appearance of a cinematic image, a virtual, epiphanic movement. All the artworks share a reflection about cinema and its technical, linguistic, sociological, antropological and psychological expressions.
The whole becomes a poetic découpage at an exhibition timed by its install process, which is only visible to its own makers.
Almost like in “The Book of Illusions” by Paul Auster, where Hector Man, the director, asks himself: “If anybody makes a movie and nobody views it, does the movie exhist, doesn’t it?” Auster, in Hector Man case, entrusts to the biographer character the task of telling the story of a movie which only the troupe saw, before the film was burned.
Here instead two witnesses are entrusted, through their images which are going to become a book.
So an exhibition tooking place in a closed cinema opens and shows itself to its public’s view as a book: in the center is the issue of “traduction”, addressed inhabiting the gap between different languages.
This is a crack in the meaning, fed by untraslatability as well as by the consciousness of the untraslatable and misunderstanding as carriers of meaning

Soggetto: Ermanno Cristini, Luca Scarabelli

Partecipanti: Cesare Biratoni, Sergio Breviario, Giuseppe Buffoli, Umberto Cavenago, Ermanno Cristini, Oppy De Bernardo, Gabriele Di Matteo, Pierluigi Fresia, Samira Guadagnuolo e Tiziano Doria (WARSHADFILM), Cecilia Mentasti, Giancarlo Norese, Luca Pancrazzi , Pedro Riz A Porta, Luca Scarabelli, Luisa Turuani, Joykix, Giovanni Termini.
Foto: Pierluigi Fresia, Rebecca Bogni.
Video: Videoforart.

PROSSIMAMENTE is a closed to the public exhibition, happening during an afternoon in a disused movie theater.
Beyond closed doors, a light beam solidifies as dust. the seats-stage points of view celebrates the screen ritual, while the seats go into the darkness in order to accomodate the time of vision. Then, the lights switch off and everyone gets out of the scene.
It’s a “phantasmatic" exhibition, since “phantoms” are going to be the new movie theater inhabitants, catching a glimpse of artworks and artists. It’s a “phantasmatic" exhibition since it recalls the appearance of a cinematic image, a virtual, epiphanic movement. All the artworks share a reflection about cinema and its technical, linguistic, sociological, antropological and psychological expressions.
The whole becomes a poetic découpage at an exhibition timed by its install process, which is only visible to its own makers.
Almost like in “The Book of Illusions” by Paul Auster, where Hector Man, the director, asks himself: “If anybody makes a movie and nobody views it, does the movie exhist, doesn’t it?” Auster, in Hector Man case, entrusts to the biographer character the task of telling the story of a movie which only the troupe saw, before the film was burned.
Here instead two witnesses are entrusted, through their images which are going to become a book.
So an exhibition tooking place in a closed cinema opens and shows itself to its public’s view as a book: in the center is the issue of “traduction”, addressed inhabiting the gap between different languages.
This is a crack in the meaning, fed by untraslatability as well as by the consciousness of the untraslatable and misunderstanding as carriers of meaning

Prolegomena for an entropic earthquake: that’s this exhibition’s meaning, which stands instead of a holiday or in in the shape of not being there.
Lacking a standard planning, after the steadiness rule fell apart, the artists in charge of R + S / AK are dealing with an in-progress exhibition, where artworks, semifinished works, gestures and intuitions intersect, undergoing the deletion of the space-time signals defining an exhibition. Instead of an opening there is a likely kick-off and a possible ending of an exhibition with a known beginning but no closing date, since we would like it to live in our souls for an indefinite period of time. In that space and during that time, an unpredictable path is going to unfold, enlivened by the interference of other artists, which we’ll invite, occasionally and one by one, to a nomadic and active participation.
We are not sure if a visit to D.O.P.O. (After) will be more like a studio-visit or a visit at an exhibition, but we know that you have to walk through it physically, not virtually.

35 artists investigate one of the most explored areas in fine art.
Each of them interpreted it in their own medium, taking part in an exhibition/workshop in an environment open to confrontation and debate.
The exhibition was articulated over three floors in the vast spaces of Assab One with paintings, drawings, photographs, videos, installations, acoustic pieces and performances and included a series of meetings correlated with the exhibition held during the inauguration and over the following days.
The Painter and the Model develops the experience of a group of Italian artists (Ermanno Cristini, Luca Scarabelli, Cesare Biratoni, Armida Gandini and Federica Pamio) who took part in the residency in Aveiro in Portugal in 2016, on the initiative of a group of Portuguese artists, mostly painters. It was because of a conversation between Ermanno Cristini and Simona Squadrito, a young Milanese art critic who also had experience as a life model, that the Portuguese residency concentrated on the tradition of life drawing, apparently not as common as it once was.
The preliminary meetings with Luca Pancrazzi, Marta Dell’Angelo and Elena Quarestani at Assab One and the rare availability of its vast and articulated space with the freedom offered by this particular context, opened up the possibility of broadening the sphere of contemplation to a wider variety of artistic practices and extend the invitation to the numerous artists who took part in the exhibition, creating a choral work that remained open to further interventions.
The artists: Pedro Andrare, Simona Barbera, Cesare Biratoni, Vincenzo Cabiati, Gianluca Codeghini, Ermanno Cristini, Leonel Cunha, Mario Dellavedova, Marta Dell’Angelo, Flavio de Marco, Alessio de Girolamo (collaborazione di Elisa Mossa), Gabriele Di Matteo, Ivana Fall, Matteo Fato, Joao Fonte, Pino Guidolotti, Armida Gandini, Giovanni Hanninen, Sebastiano Impellizzeri, Francesco Lauretta, Jorge Leal, Corrado Levi, Andrea Mastrovito, Concetta Modica, Angelo Mosca, Giancarlo Norese, Federica Pamio, Luca Pancrazzi, Giustina Pancrazzi, Pedro Pascoinho, Stefano Peroli, Steve Piccolo, Federico Pietrella, Luca Scarabelli, Carlos Seabra.
WEBSITE: https://www.assab-one.org

A project by Ermanno Cristini and Susanna Janina Baumgartner, displaying the following artists: Simona Barbera; Marion Baruch; Susanna Janina Baumgartner; Anna Bromley; Giovanna Caliari; Umberto Cavenago; Matteo Cremonesi; Ermanno Cristini; Ronny Faber Dahl; Debora Hirsch; Martin Larralde; Sergio Limonta; Marco Andrea Magni; Carlo Miele; Anna Pontel; Laura Santamaria. Photography: Rossella Moratto, Carlo Dell’Acqua; video: Lorenzo Baldi e Liliana Carugati L&L Videoforart; setup collaboration: Diana Dorizzi.
Ermanno Cristini: A “slow moving workshop" requires us to slow down. But its own time appears as slowed, in comparison to the rapid fugacity of people passing through. So the word implies three concepts: building, delay and transformation. Without a delay you can’t build anything, while the act of building creates a process achieved in the space of delay. That’s what happens in this exhibition, where the riss(e) space suggests the mobile uncertainty of a work in progress. A series of semifinished objects alternate and cross paths in temporary setups, creating a dialogue between the artworks and between them and the space, during the amount of time before their completion. A short exhibition, only some hours long, in order to find again the thickness of the whole in a time scrap. Then, when the object is complete, the workshop disappears.
Susanna Janina Baumgartner: I like “Slow Moving Workshop”. I’m thinking of Alain Badiou, "Second Manifeste pour la philosophy".
From that book I seized the time in a space created by an encounter. I worked at an art-lab in Pavia, in a psychiatric institution. There were serious cases and we never achieved anything endowed with sense. There I understood that you find your way in an encounter, not in a finished object. In that instant which stays in your memory as an encounter. Real instants fulfilling a dream, becoming memory, not illusion. This could be the meaning of a “Slow Moving Workshop”. What do you think? 

SITO WEB: https://risseart.jimdo.com

Videoforart took part to NoPlace 3 - 49° Suzzara Price, the meeting/exhibition devised by Umberto Cavenago and developed with Ermanno Cristini. We've managed the "Self-Criticism" space, where each participant has been able to videotape a statement.
NoPlace is a social experiment, a meeting-exhibition one day long.The event is based on the rhizome metaphor: no single curator following a one-way direction, on the contrary many origins creating multi-directional connections.
The first edition took place at an industrial space, in the ex Pirelli in Monza, october 9th, 2015, with almost one hundred artists participating.
The second edition, 2016, march,12th, took place at Fombio Castle, where more than 300 artists invaded the castle's space with luminous artworks, videos, insallations and performances
The third edition took place in Suzzara, at the Galleria del Premio and in the whole town, with more than 5 hundred artists participating.

NOPLACE WEBSITE: http://noplace.space
PREMIO SUZZARA WEBSITE: http://www.premiosuzzara.it

This video showcases the 2001 Lo spirito del lago (The spirit of the Lake). It's a collective exhibition, each year developing a theme and now ceased, after reaching the 20th edition. It was held in Stresa and on the Isola Bella, at the heart of Lago Maggiore in northern Italy. The organisers (with an international scope) are Giampiero Zanzi, Milo Sacchi, the late Peter Gilles and Birgit Kahle and aim to promote "a pure and liberating art, with no boundaries, upholding
the l’universal thinking of the man-artist shaman-sorcerer, in such a landscape wonderland". About the given theme, the artists coming from northern and southern europe will be confronted.
Here are the titles of the 21 editions: 1997 L'occhio nudo (The Naked Eye), 1998 Amore e dolore (Love and Pain), 1999 Il mistero delle donne (Women's Mistery), 2000 Dov'è la passione (Where Passion Is), 2001 Lo voglio diverso (I want it to be different), 2002 Hic sunt leones!, 2003 Le tentazioni di Sant'Antonio (Saint Antony's Temptations , Ale Guzzetti's video, has been filmed at this edition), 2004 È bella la bestia? (Is the Beast Beautiful?), 2005 Il ponte del diavolo (The Devils' Bridge), 2006 Humilitas, 2007 Il disgelo (The Thaw), 2008 Tabula rasa, 2009 Paradiso - il tredicesimo canto (Paradise -The Thirteenth Chant), 2010 Il sogno segreto (The secret Dream), 2011 Solo i pesci morti seguono la corrente (Only Dead Fishes Go With The Flow), 2012 Lust for Life, 2013 Kangaroo - non ti capisco (Kangaroo - I Don't Understand You), 2014 Spiriti evocati (Evoked Spirits), 2015 Il Pelo nell’uovo (Splitting Hairs), 2016 My Way (My Way).

I WANT IT DIFFERENT (2001)
Looking at the names of the first four exhibitions as a continuum, this flow seems to suddenly stop. I want it to be different!! It's about the individual ego of each artist. Though everybody work at the same project, each artist has to find his own path. The community allows such a great project, but only very different individual positions can create this fascinating exhibition as a poliphonic dialogue.
At’Isola Bella the installationsi stay from july to the end of october, and you can't view them in other galleries or museums, which increasingly look like withe cubes. For the first time in 2001 Lo spirito del lago is invited to Cologne Fine Art in spring. The concept of the stand is handed to one artist and this will continue in the years to come. Here are the artists on display: Peter Gilles (D), Horst Gläsker (D), Yvonne Goulbier (D), Ferdinando Greco (I), Ale Guzzetti (I), Birgit Kahle (D), Karen Kuballa (D), Ingeborg Lüscher (CH), Apostolos Palavrakis (GR), Milo Sacchi (I), Adrian Schoormans (NL).