The Italian Cultural Institute of Oslo is pleased to participate in the XVII Giornata del Contemporaneo by inviting to perform in its seat Francesco Urbano Ragazzi, the duo in charge of curating the next edition of LIAF – Lofoten International Art Festival, Scandinavia’s longest-running biennial. Performance and performativity are in fact the focus of the program proposed by the Institute on this occasion: two elements which also strongly mark Francesco Urbano Ragazzi’s practice.

Starting from its own double identity, Francesco Urbano Ragazzi reflects on narratives and temporality in which art crosses the spaces of media representation and everyday reality. On the occasion of the Giornata del Contemporaneo, the collective will offer the public some anticipations about the next edition of LIAF, that will open in September 2022 and that will be developed in a ubiquitous way between the Lofoten Islands and several other contexts: the city of Venice, a vessel loaded with biologists on an expedition to the Arctic, the social channels of the institutions involved and a series of temporary locations around Norway, perhaps the city of Oslo itself.
For the Giornata del Contemporaneo the collective will also involve two artists of Italian origin who will take part in LIAF 2022: Tomaso De Luca and Raffaela Naldi Rossano.

Their participation insists on the performative and ritual nature of moving images, and will be manifested for the occasion through two poetic interventions.
The first is entitled “Ballad of the Lights”, a six-handed lecture-performance, in which artist Tomaso De Luca and the two curators stage their dialogue in a chat that takes the form of a vjing: stories, reflections, notes, links and fragments of an open discourse are composed live on the screen making the personal flow a space of collective vision.
Raffaela Naldi Rossano instead presents the first chapter of a journey that from her hometown, Naples, will take her to lap the coasts of Greece and Norway to finally land to the Lofoten Islands. It is a rite of initiation in the form of a video, “From History to US / Litany for Sirens”: a veritable litany performed by the artist together with a group of travel companions. This female chorus crosses the coastal space and penetrates it, finding its own common frequency: a new form of communication with the terrestrial and marine ecosystem.