The Fondazione Donnaregina per le arti contemporanee presents MontesantoArte, the first artist residency program realized with Q.I.-Quartiere Intelligente under the call of SIAE Sillumina (2016 edition), a project that promotes from September 2017 to March 2018 six months of residency for four emergent Italian artists at Quartiere Intelligente, a multi-project urban regeneration platform founded in 2013 in the historical center of Naples along the monumental stairway of Montesanto.
The MontesantoArte program is curated by Adriana Rispoli and aims to promote the most experimental contemporary art on the territory. Quartiere Intelligente’s spaces will become a place of artistic and intellectual contamination, with a direct face to face with the artists and the professionals in the cultural fields. Coherently with Quartiere Intelligente’s philosophy and dynamics designs, the artists are invited to focus their works on the relationship between nature and culture by using cross languages between visual arts (video or performance), architecture, design, gardening and self-construction. The goal is to create ceilings between disciplines, able to show influence that, by reaching the community, mange to achieve a respectful way of living, exportable and experimental arts applicable in other contexts as well. During their stay, the artists will follow a program of PR and Networking about their work through a series of public gatherings and workshops. In March 2018, there will be a public exhibition of the finished works that the artists produced during their stay.
Mariangela Bruno (Bari, 1986; lives in Bari) is an architect, graduated from the “Città Arti Architettura” and has a master at the University of Rome Tre. In 2011 she co-founded the LAN_laboratory natural architecture association which experiments with bio-architectures with natural materials and in 2012 she set up Metriquali aps, an association that promotes and experiments with processes from low re-activation of abandoned urban spaces. Since 2013 she has collaborated with landscape painter-philosopher Gilles Clement and the cultural center Manifatture Knos of Lecce in the setting of “The Encounters of the Third Place”. Since 2016 she has been a partner of Experience and collaborates with cultural centers (Ex Fadda, Rigenera) and informal research centers (The School of Boiling Spirits, The Open Source School). Her research activity in the field of art and temporary architecture is embodied in situ installations and propulsive devices of social processes that can transform and mark the landscape in urban and rural contexts.
Francesca Borrelli (Naples, 1986; lives in Paris) is an architect and landscaper, formed in Italy and abroad spending time in Lisbon, Rio De Janeiro and Paris. In 2016 she attended the École de Botanique at the Musée National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris. Her artistic production applies to marginal spaces where spontaneous landscapes arise. Winner of “Un’opera per il castello”, with the work Le Jardin (2013) and of the “Concorso di idee per la riqualificazione di dieci aree urbane periferiche ” for the Salinella Park in Marsala. Co-Curator of the Radicepura Garden Festival 2017, the first Mediterranean Gardens Festival that took place in Giarre (CT), she also collaborates with the collective Coloco of Paris.
Elena Mazzi (Reggio Emilia, 1984; lives in Venice) studied Art History at the University of Siena. In 2011 she graduated in Visual Arts at IUAV in Venice. She spent time studying abroad, at the Royal Academy of Art (Konsthogskolan) in Stockholm. Her works have been exhibited in personal and collective exhibitions, including: 16th Quadriennale of Rome, GAM in Turin, 14th Istanbul Biennale. She has participated in various programs of residence in Italy and abroad. She is the winner of the Thalie Art Foundation grant 2017, VISIO Young Talent Acquisition Prize, EneganArt Prize, nctm and art 2016, m-cult media and technology program 2016. She is also a tutor artist for 2016-2017 at Fondazione Spinola Banna for art, in collaboration with GAM, Turin. Her poetry investigates the relationship between man and the surrounding environment, in which she lives and she deals each day.
Valentina Miorandi (Trento, 1982; lives in London) is an artist and exhibition designer born in 1982 in Trento, Italy, living and working between London and Palermo. She has a B.A. in Theory and Practice of Theatre, University of Bologna (2005). She has won two fellowships for attending the M.A. in Filmmaking at the New York Film Academy (2006) and the M.A in Director of Photography at the ESCAC University (2007) and in 2016 she had a M.F.A at the DAI – Dutch Art Institute in Arnhem (NL). She has been a Visiting Professor at the Universidad Complutense of Madrid (2007) and Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha of Cuenca (2007) and currently she is Professor at the University of Palermo. Since 2008 she has created numerous multi-media projects at various cultural institutions in Italy and abroad. Valentina’s participatory ongoing projects (Turning Tables, Portraits, Bread) have involved communities in order to create new forms of art production based on the common good. In 2014 she founded with Sandrine Nicoletta Chatelain the DRIFTERS project in London.