Francesco Urbano Ragazzi
Io Tu Lui Lei
Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, Venice
Mars 6 - April 15, 2012
Curated by Francesco Urbano Ragazzi
Designed for the rooms of the Bevilacqua La Masa Foundation, Io, Tu, Lui, Lei shows the extraordinary meeting between six young artists and a group of eight homosexual women and men from Venice, all born in between the 1930s and 40s. This inter-generational dialogue was inspired by the need for permanent, creative actions that could contrast with homophobia, isolation and social exclusion.
At first the encounters were kept private as part of A Special Day: an artistic workshop about queer memories and cultures, that from May 2011 is active in the city of Venice thanks to the Osservatorio LGBT (Venice City Hall Young Politics department) and to the UNAR (National anti-racism discrimination office, part of the Equal Opportunities department).
From the 6th of March until the 15th of April in Palazzetto Tito, home of the Bevilacqua La Masa Foundation, the initiated process has been morphed into an exhibition aimed at challenging the way the queer cultures are conveyed outside of identity borders: Io, Tu, Lui, Lei is a heterosexual exhibition curated by Francesco Ragazzi and Francesco Urbano.
Antonio Bigini and Rachele Maistrello, Tomaso De Luca, Sabina Grasso, Andrea Romano and Annatina Caprez created their own projects inspired by reflections during the residency program in Venice and during the meetings with the LGBT group. The six artists haven’t been selected due to any strong adherence to homosexual and queer themes, so much as their varying degrees of recognition of such sensitivities: from love for fragments to the monumentality of the ephemeral, from illusionism to delegation of the authority of the artist. To these interventions were then added the contributions of Antonio Barletta, Dafne Boggeri, Chiara Fumai, Margherita Morgantin, Daniele Pezzi, Claudia Rossini, Arin Rungjang: artists whose research fits in an innovative way into the thinking about gender and identity.
Thanks to the adopted selection criteria, the exhibition isn’t a refresher course for experts in the sphere, but a happily experimental immersion into a still undiscovered, never-ending universe.
