Curating art, narrating reality.
A place where creativity and research meet.
Here are our projects:
La Diseducazione al Reale is an installation by Andrea Mastrovito designed for Cinema Arena – Spazio Culturale, on the occasion of FestivalFilosofia 2025.
The artist recreates the physical environment of a school class with a teacher’s desk and desks, each decorated with allegorical designs that recall the twelve elementary subjects. The desks thus become reworked images, conceptual and symbolic representations that stimulate reflection on the theme of art linked to teaching and education.
The big screen of cinema is transformed into the blackboard protagonist of this ideal lesson between visual arts, history, literature, music and geography. Project Nysferatu (2018), an animated film entirely designed by Mastrovito that reinterprets the famous Nosferatu, setting it in a modern New York. This work becomes the manifesto of a ”mis-education”, understood as an experience which – just like adversities or the joys of life – profoundly questions those who observe, stimulates personal growth and incites us to never stop learning.
The traditional image of the class, rich in presences and materials, is subverted: in its place, the artist proposes a progressive emptying of space. That void takes shape through erased or cropped visual parts and through overlapping signs that at the same time eliminate and rewrite. In this way, new possibilities open up for reading and interpreting reality.
Andrea Mastrovito (Bergamo, 1978), artist, director and book author, trained in Italy and lives between Bergamo and New York.
His path focuses on drawing, alternating studio work with installation and performance interventions.
He won the New York Prize in 2007, the Moroso Prize in 2012, the Ermanno Casoli Prize in 2016, the Italian Council in 2019 and in 2022 he won the PAC – Plan for Contemporary Art, awarded by the General Directorate for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities, with Villa Adriana and Villa d’Este, Rome.
Press Kit: link
La Diseducazione al Reale
Curated by Marcella Manni
At Cinema Arena – Spazio Culturale (Modena) in collaboration with Galleria Michela Rizzo (Venezia).
September 19-20-21 2025
Arena – Spazio Culturale | Viale A. Tassoni 8 | 41124 Modena
The Exhibition Il linguaggio delle immagini. Fotografia in Italia tra gli anni ’80 e ’90 is hosted at Castello Campori in Soliera (MO) and is open to visitors from October 7, 2023, to January 7, 2024.
Photography is a medium profoundly shaped by technological advancements. The period spanning the late 1980s and early 1990s marked a significant acceleration in technical development, first with the proliferation of computers and the internet, and subsequently with digital support. These years also saw artists and researchers engaging with the cultural legacy of Luigi Ghirri—who passed away in 1992—and exploring practices and ideas beyond national borders, initiatives that had already begun in the late ’80s.
This exhibition is dedicated to that era of experimentation, the search for a personal visual language, political activism, and artistic militancy. Through a selection of works drawn from prominent public and private collections, the show features notable artists such as Gabriele Basilico, Paola di Bello, Luigi Ghirri, Luigi Ontani, Giulio Paolini, Marco Signorini, and Alessandra Spranzi.
Accompanying the exhibition is a publication by Metronom Books, which includes an extensive iconographic archive and interviews with key figures of the scene—artists, collectors, curators, and cultural protagonists—such as Olivo Barbieri, Matteo Balduzzi, Vittoria Ciolini, Ettore Molinario, Mario Trevisan, and Silvio Wolf.
Il linguaggio delle immagini. Fotografia in Italia tra gli anni ’80 e ’90
From 7 October 2023 to January 7 2024
Castello Campori,Piazza Fratelli Sassi 2, 41019, Soliera (MO)
Giochi di Verità. Rappresentazione, ritratto, documento. Opere della Collezione Donata Pizzi is an exhibition held from October 8, 2022, to January 15, 2023, at Castello Campori in Soliera (Modena).
The exhibition features over eighty photographs by renowned artists including Paola Agosti, Tomaso Binga, Lisetta Carmi, Silvia Camporesi, Libera Mazzoleni, Marinella Senatore, Silvia Rosi, Elisabetta Catalano, Liliana Barchiesi, Betty Bee, Luisa Lambri, Ottonella Mocellin, among others.This curated selection traces significant moments in Italian photography over the past fifty years, illuminating the conceptual, aesthetic, and technological evolutions that have shaped the medium in recent decades. Central themes such as the exploration of the body, the interplay between private and collective memory, and the rituals and dynamics of family life serve as foundational elements—transcending individual artistic voices and historical contexts to reveal shared cultural identities.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalog published by Metronom Books. Curated by Marcella Manni, the volume includes an interview with Donata Pizzi and reproductions of all exhibited works.
Giochi di Verità. Rappresentazione, ritratto, documento. Opere della Collezione Donata Pizzi
From 8 Ottobre 2022 to 15 Gennaio 2023
Castello Campori,Piazza Fratelli Sassi,41019, Soliera (MO)
On the occasion of festivalfilosofia 2024, the project I don’t care (about football) will be presented at Arena – Spazio Culturale in Modena in a new, site-specific installation designed for the reopening of the cinema after a restoration and recovery intervention.
Marking the centenary of Franco Basaglia’s birth, Giulia Iacolutti revisits and reactivates his thought, citing him as an ethical and political guide: “in order to truly confront illness, we must be able to encounter it outside of institutions.” From this premise, the Marangoni 105 project—described by the artist as artistic and participatory—was born and developed over three years together with the players of the namesake football team, founded within a rehabilitation facility of the Mental Health Department of Udine.
The team is composed of patients, caregivers, supporters, and staff: a heterogeneous collective that disrupts the idea of psychiatric identity as a fixed and institutionalized role. Through workshops focused on the dynamics of the game, Iacolutti builds a parallel between football strategies and processes of self-awareness and social interaction. The body becomes the field of inquiry and recomposition: in the photographic collages, new postures emerge from a collective act of cutting and pasting, while the missing parts remain white, evoking absence and the therapeutic space of emptiness.
For festivalfilosofia, the project takes the form of a site-specific installation within the newly restored Cinema Arena in Modena, in dialogue with sound artist Nicola Di Croce. The installation is conceived around the idea of “play as a supplement to reality,” drawing a parallel between cinematic time and game time. The sound piece merges real environments with instrumental distortions, expanding the perceptual field of the work across body, image, and sound.
Giulia Iacolutti is a visual artist with a degree in Art Economics. She trained in Photography at the Accademia del Teatro alla Scala and in Visual Storytelling at the Mayer Foundation. Her work investigates human relationships through participatory art practices and unfolds across photography, performance, and moving image.
Nicola Di Croce is a sound artist and researcher. His work focuses on qualitative, participatory, and creative approaches aimed at exploring urban transformations and developing urban policies through emerging methodologies in sound and relational art.
Press Kit: link
I don’t care (about football)
13-14-15 settembre 2024
Arena ‒ Spazio Culturale | Viale A. Tassoni 8 | 41124 Modena
