Starting on 13 January 2008 the Madre Museum is hosting N.EST with N.EST 2.0. The making of the city – Disegna la tua città in its Project Room. This is a project whose objective is to document urban transformations through art, creativity and the new media, curated by Gigiotto Del Vecchio and Stefania Palumbo.
From 13 January to February 25, 2008, the space located in the museum’s inner courtyard will be occupied for seven weeks by N.EST, a work in the form of an online database edited and directed by Danilo Capasso and Giovanni Ferrarelli with Massimiliano Rianna and Diana Marrone, which takes its name from the Eastern Zone of Naples which it has been actively dealing with since 2004. The project has the objective of recording the transformations and drafting proposals for urban regeneration through the eyes and observations of artists, architects and creatives of all nationalities, called on to devise works and site specific projects through a map of the places which they refer to or from which they derive inspiration. Freely accessible online on www.nestube.com, N.EST delves into the recesses of the representation of a real territory, the eastern periphery of Naples, with the aim of rendering it a project scheme shared with other artists, architects, urban planners, citizens and stakeholder.
On the occasion of N.EST 2.0. Design Your City, understood as a true collective and projectual performance, the spaces of the Project Room will be equipped as a true studio/workshop, always active for the presentation of contents. The members of the project will use it day by day for the organization and performance of the planned activities during the museum’s opening hours. It is a simple and convivial space, where project and its objectives can be related to the public of observers and active participants, who will be able to stop and compare their ideas with those of the artists or to be in their turn the source of ideas for them.
On Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, from 2.00 pm to 8.00 pm, starting from the first week and for the whole duration of the exhibition, within the Project Room, together with the artists who are the authors of N.EST, a chosen public of 8 people will be able to participate in the workshops. To participate in the workshops it will be necessary to reply to the public call for entries, using the application form published on www.nestube.com, which should be forwarded to callx@napoliest.it. Those who do not wish to take part in the workshops but desire to insert their works and projects, may forward them in read-only format during the exhibition. The continuous assembly and editing of materials for the database will be curated directly by the N.EST artists.
The works of artists and architects will be extended to the territory which is the object of the work, namely Gianturco, Barra, Ponticelli and San Giovanni a Peduccio, through guided tours CitySightSeeing buses every Saturday starting from January 19, leaving at 12.00 am from the Madre Museum. Seats can be booked at walk@napoliest.org.
In addition, starting from 20 January, every Sunday during the duration of the project, lectures and meetings to explore the relevant topics will be organized with internationally known guest speakers, from the French Exyzt Collective to the architectural reviews Volume Magazine and Domus, the entrepreneurs and collectors Mariano Pichler and Federico De Giuli (responsible for the regeneration of Eastern Milan and Turin), and the Inward observatory, to mention only a few. They will all visit Naples to study its Eastern sector, and will present one or more project visions of it and will share with the public the activities carried out in the cities they represent. The talks will be held in the church of Donnaregina from the 6.00 pm to 8.00 pm.
N.EST. In its four years of activity, N.EST has taken part in exhibitions and events of international importance, such as the Venice Biennale (Sensi Contemporanei, 2004, the collective exhibition Incursione Vesuviana, curated by Gigiotto Del Vecchio), Fabbrica Europa (Florence, 2005). It participated in the Festival della Creatività (Florence 2007), supported by the Tuscan Regional Authority, where it premiered the new N. ESTube section. It participated in the Annali dell’Architettura, in the section 20.07 in Forum Versus, on display at the Royal Palace in Naples. Awards received include Palinsesto Italia (Bologna, 2005); was consequently a guest at the COM.PA 2006 (Rome) with a dedicated stand (National Fair devoted to the communication of the Public Administration). N.EST was also a finalist in the eighth edition of the Festival Internazionale Videopolis with the documentary 24 a Napoli Est. N.EST has participated at various conferences in the sector (Media and Urban Space, Bauhaus Universitaat, Weimar, Germania, November, 2006; Università di Architettura di Napoli, Giornata nazionale dell’Istituto Nazionale di Urbanisitica 2005 and 2006) and live media events (such as the most recent Dancing with Domus, as a guest of the prestigious e review Domus on the occasion of the presentation of its new line of publications in May 2007). Articles have been published in Cluster, Il Sole 24 Ore/Nova, RaiTV e Radio.