On 5 December 2020, the XVI edition of the Contemporary Art Day is back, promoted by the Associazione Musei d’Arte Contemporanea Italiani (AMACI) engaging museums, foundations, public and private institutions to illustrate the vitality of contemporary art in our country. There will be a series of initiatives throughout the day, mainly in digital form, and the works of nineteen artists will be presented, selected from nineteen different museums.
From 5 to 11 December, the foreign network of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs participates for the third year in the Contemporary Art Day – Giornata del Contemporaneo, presenting a rich programme of mainly digital activities involving Italian contemporary art. These include:
- three webinars, organized by the Italian Cultural Institutes of Prague, Abu Dhabi and Toronto, in which Lorenzo Balbi from MAMbo, Elisabetta Barisoni from the Civic Museums of Venice and Cristiana Perrella from the ‘Luigi Pecci’ Contemporary Art Centre will discuss with the directors of foreign museums the Italian art scene in relation to the wider international context;
- four webinars, conceived by the Institutes of Amsterdam, Washington, San Francisco and Vienna, centred on the theme of Art and new technologies, with the scholars Cesare Biasini Selvaggi and Valentino Catricalà, authors of the second issue of the series “I Quaderni della Collezione Farnesina”, and with the artists Formafantasma and Jeroean Junte, Danilo Correale, Elisa Giardina Papa and Martina Menegon.
The programme also includes initiatives organized by the Farnesina Collection:
- a virtual tour of the Collection through ten video bites subtitled in English on different rooms in the Farnesina building and with detailed descriptions of some works, created in collaboration with Touring Club Italiano (TCI). The video bites will be available on the Farnesina and TCI sites and YouTube channels.
- the presentation of the second issue of the series ‘I Quaderni della Collezione Farnesina’, entitled ‘Arte e tecnologia del terzo millennio. Scenari e protagonisti‘ (Art and technology of the third millennium: scenarios and protagonists), edited by Cesare Biasini Selvaggi and Valentino Catricalà, published by Electa. The book offers an original overview of the relationship between art and new technologies from the last decades of the twentieth century to the most recent experiments and ends with a detailed look at over eighty Italian artists currently operating in this sector in Italy and abroad. The book is available on the Farnesina Collection website.
- a new web series ‘Spazi d’artista’ (Artist Spaces), created in collaboration with Artribune magazine and dedicated to ten artists from the Farnesina Collection who talk about their careers and the relationship with the studios in which they work, from a perspective of particular interest in the current lockdown period: ten short films, broadcast once a month from 5 December on the Artribune website and social networks and the Farnesina YouTube channel. The first film is about Luca Pozzi.
- the presentation scheduled for Friday 11 December of another important collaboration with Lucca Comics&Games and an original, innovative and entertaining tool to promote Italian art and creativity.
