Italian Pavilion in the 55^th International Art Exposition of the Venice Biennale

vice versa

Curator Bartolomeo Pietromarchi
Commissioner Maddalena Ragni

The Fundraising Campaign

Funds gathered through crowdfunding will be designated, in agreement with the Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities, for the financing of various initiatives for the exhibition vice versa at the Italian Pavilion at the 55^th International Art Exposition, including:

• Additional funding for artists’ works and productions
• Cultural mediation and educational activities geared towards schools, universities and visitors
• Promotional and communications activities, including a vice versa exhibition App
• Organization of encounters with artists and opinion leaders and a concluding conference on the themes of the Italian Pavilion

The 90-day fundraising period will be inaugurated with events in Rome, Milan, London and New York, and will continue on the web (www.vicecersa2013.org).

The Exhibition

Vice versa picks up on a concept introduced by Giorgio Agamben in his book Categorie italiane. Studi di Poetica (1996), in which the philosopher maintained that in order to interpret Italian culture, we must identify a “series of diametrically linked concepts” capable of describing its underlying characteristics – binomials like tragedy/comedy, architecture/vagueness and speed/lightness thus become original keys for reading the fundamental works and artists of our cultural history.

This reflective and dialectical approach, and in particular the dimension of duality, is one of the most profoundly characteristic aspects of Italian contemporary art. We need only cite the poetics of artists like Alighiero Boetti, Giulio Paolini, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Luigi Ontani and Gino De Dominicis, whose experimentation is based on opposing polarities: order and disorder, image and reflection, visible and invisible, and the boundaries between reality and fiction, original and copy, tragedy and comedy that tend to dissolve. The antithetical nature of our culture thus produces works that turn reality into fiction and fiction into reality, in which, playing the game of vice versa, landscape becomes stage, history becomes performance, artwork becomes theater and pop imagery becomes personal history.

Inspired by this vision, vice versa proposes an exposition made up of seven rooms, seven spaces, each of which hosts two artists in dialogue with one another, in which the works shown reveal the profound sense of this dialectical approach.

The artists

Francesco Arena, Massimo Bartolini, Gianfranco Baruchello, Elisabetta Benassi, Flavio Favelli, Luigi Ghirri, Piero Golia, Francesca Grilli, Marcello Maloberti, Fabio Mauri, Giulio Paolini, Marco Tirelli, Luca Vitone, Sislej Xhafa.