The volume documents the exhibitions and activities of the 2014 PAV Art Program: Show Food, Sic Vos Non Vobis and Vegetation as a Political Agent.
“The 2014 PAV program followed a precise line that, on several levels, investigated the relationship between political ecology and artistic practices. Through the well-established development of our internal seminars (moments of theoretical reflection conducted at the PAV in which we compare ourselves with different professionals on the theme that, year after year, characterizes the exhibitions and workshops), we have tried to put the question of common goods and the relational experiences of Bioart at the center.
In the first place, after the referendum successes against the privatization of water and the construction of nuclear power plants in Italy (1987 and 2011), it seemed to us that the discourse on common goods, compared to that heated and shared period, appeared to be problematic . The common good is in any case something that changes over time, therefore a flexible concept. At the same time, following the thought of the sociologist Guido Viale (Virtues that change the world, 2013), even the concept of value cannot be determined a priori. It is therefore possible to widen the mesh of the so-called commons. By extending the boundaries of what we can consider “good”, we are surprised to find elements and concepts, as real as they are abstract, which in the past we would not have questioned in their being inalienable. In the exhibitions and in the conduct of the workshops during 2014, the PAV thus traced a sort of map with respect to this semantic expansion, that is to say an extension and an opening full of meaning rather than an exclusive reflection on issues of lexical type. In this way, an attempt was made to identify those assets which, following the referendum of three years ago, had a close relationship with contemporary attitudes, phenomena or countertendencies. In addition to water, investigated in the Sic Vos Non Vobis exhibition curated by Claudio Cravero, the cultural and social dynamics of some foods and certain communities were analyzed, in particular those that traditionally share a food good in its intrinsic values. In the Show Food exhibition, curated by Orietta Brombin, elements such as rice, coffee and wheat have, as it were, redesigned a geography of the movements of those vegetables that historically accompanied the colonial thrusts in the conquest of new territories. In this direction, the investigation of common goods also took into consideration the plant world. Plants, in addition to constituting the organic matter for which we mobilize for the purposes of environmental protection and the preservation of biodiversity, have however been analyzed in their biological, social and political aspects. In fact, the exhibition Vegetation as a political agent, curated by Marco Scotini, made it possible to trace a social history of plants from the point of view of “disobedience”. Vegetation has had, and in fact still has, a political and social role within the biome in which we live and throughout the history of human civilization. For example, cereals and legumes were the protagonists of the Neolithic civilization whose structure of substantial power did not change until modernity. In more recent times, plants have been the protagonists of colonial oppression, with the black page of slavery and today, in the postcolonial phase, agricultural multinationals resort to genetic engineering to exercise control of seeds and, consequently, exploit agricultural populations. from all over the world. ” (from the introduction by Piero Gilardi)

What is more human than the fragility applied to the uncertainty of the present, the lack of shared security? In these years the artistic creations that approach the lack of solidity, given by the fear of a future that has changed due to the economic crisis, multiply. We often surround ourselves with objects that show the world our mental state, our sensations; this happens above all for artists, who know how to convey emotions into something physically visible for everyone. At this point the material becomes decisive, it is the true manifestation of fragility.
Paper, fabric, thread, video, natural elements that will disappear in a short time; all this is transformed into a disturbing manifestation of the limit of the object which, as the title of the Viola Invernizzi exhibition well summarized, “is fragile to the eyes”, because its delicacy appears immediately to the eye. Like the sensations that we experience and that in a short time change and are lost, sometimes forever, often for a limited time that we do not know. Fragility is a protagonist of the beginning of the Millennium. (Alessio Moitre)

The 5 di Cinque exhibition was organized by the Moitre Gallery with the aim of presenting the research of five emerging artists, all born shortly before or shortly after 1989, the year of publication of the famous Due di Due, the Bildungsroman of Andrea De Carlo from which the title was inspired.
If the young age unites all the artists, they are distinguished by the expressive means used: the installation.
The variety of means used offers a wide panorama through which it is possible to compare different ways of conceiving artistic experimentation and contemporaneity.

4 young photographers, in collaboration with a graphic designer, during the contemporary art fair The Others, which was held in Turin in the former Le Nuove prison from 4 to 6 November 2011, created a live book / event, in an editorial desk / editorial staff (stand A13 – Prinp Editoria d’Arte 2.0) that worked in progress on the live production of an art book. The images taken by Andrea D’Angelo, Davide De Martis, Vanessa Vettorello and Sara Vindrola are a personal interpretation of the place and the people who animated The Others during the 4 days of the fair. The book, laid out in situ by the young designer Andrea Azzarita, documents the encounter between photography, architecture and the history of the particular location of the Ex Carceri Le Nuove, a future testimony of the first edition of an important art fair event.

Vittorio Amadio | Gabriella Arduino | Filippo Armenise | Carlo Barbero | Martha Belbusti | Simone Butturini | Paola Calcatelli | Lilian Rita Callegari | Francesco Capello | Gaetano Carboni | Silvestro Castellani | Marco Castorio | Paola Chiama e Massimo Giovara | Tina Ciravegna | Maria Crocco | Francesco Di Lernia | Paolo Durandetto | Marica Fasoli | Paola Gandini | Carlo Giaccone | Mario Gramaglia | Paolo Jins Gillone | Attilio Lauricella | Sandro Lobalzo | Marco Longo | Paolo Marazzi | Marisa Marconi | Ada Mascolo | Elio Mazzella | Luigi Mazzella | Rosario Mazzella | Marco Memeo | Maria Micozzi | Maria Antonietta Onida | Rarefatti Amplificati (Ivan Fassio e Diego Razza | Egle Scroppo | Elena Sevi | Magda Tardon | Elio Torrieri | Anna Torriero | Elisabetta Viarengo Miniotti | Alessia Zuccarello

The world has changed rapidly in recent years, posing new dilemmas: our Mother Earth is running out of resources; water and oil are scarce and more: the crisis we are experiencing is not only economic as they want us to believe, but it concerns every aspect of our way of life. We are used to hearing some “pills of wisdom” that come to us from the mass media and that we swallow saying “thank goodness!”. Someone notices that we are running out. We believe it is no longer enough just to talk. Now is the time to act by informing as many people as possible about the seriousness of the situation, forming working groups among sensitive volunteers, exchanges and mutual aid aimed at the survival of the elements necessary for life as well as the preservation of history, art, culture, of the nature and landscape left to us by the generations that preceded us. There is no future without memory. Without the knowledge and awareness of the heritage inherited from previous generations. A question arises: will we be able to leave a livable planet for future generations? We believe it is necessary and urgent to develop a new culture in defense of the environment and human values. The damage caused in the last fifty years by a culture of the “new at all costs”, colonizing the collective imagination, too often at the expense of beauty and individual expressive poetics, have had a heavy impact on the world of art. In all eras, artists and the world of culture have united forming groups of denunciation.