Capri Air, VI edition of the Landscape Festival

Aria di Capri, VI edition of the Landscape Festival: from September 9th to October 10th at Villa San Michele

The sixth edition of the Landscape Festival, curated by Arianna Rosica and Gianluca Riccio, celebrates the figure of Edwin Cerio on the occasion of the centenary of the famous "Conference on Landscape" (1922 - 2022), organized on the island by the then mayor in the summer of 1922. Aria di Capri, the title chosen for this new edition of the Festival, is the name of a book by Cerio published in 1927, in which the Capri writer and intellectual imagines the island as a place created and continually recreated by the words and images produced by the writers, poets, and artists who have inhabited this extraordinary place.

In the wake of this tradition, which sees the island as a place of artistic creation and – at the same time – as a space for designing a new idea of ​​reality, the guidelines for the new edition of the Festival are developed. Aria di Capri in fact, rather than exalting the most worn-out island stereotypes, is an invitation to observe the landscape that surrounds us from new perspectives and to inhabit reality outside of a rigidly anthropocentric perspective. Precisely this drive, so alive in Cerio's thought, to escape the clichés of landscape culture, to go beyond the usual parameters linked to the perception and representation of reality and to strengthen the bond between artistic creation and the natural world, is the common thread that runs through the various site-specific works created by the invited artists.

In a journey that winds through the spaces of Villa San Michele in Anacapri, from the external façade housing Patrick Tuttofuoco's large luminous sculpture, to the internal cloister inhabited by Valerie Krause's floor sculpture and Henrik Hakansson's large monochrome canvas – the latest chapter in the Swedish artist's Butterfly Painting series –, to the small chapel immersed in the Villa's garden that becomes the shell for the installation The Observer by two great Ukrainian artists Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, and to the spaces of the church where Marinella Senatore's video The School of Narrative Dance - Ongoing Documentary, 2013–2016 is screened, the Aria di Capri project is structured as a multifaceted observatory of the contemporary landscape.

Faced with a reality crossed by epochal conflicts and crises – environmental, social and political – the images that the various artists protagonists of this sixth edition of the Landscape Festival release to us appear governed by a change in approach towards the human and environmental landscape that surrounds us; bearers of another perspective that, to the heaviness of today's world, opposes not so much the drive to escape into the territories of the irrational and the dreamlike, but rather the sense of an inverted logic: such as that expressed in the lightness of the gesture of two intertwined hands that alludes to the flight of a bird in the work Bird by Patrick Tuttofuoco, or as the attempt to verify the possible relationship between artistic creation and natural dimension exercised by the great Butterfly painting by Henrik Hakansson, or again, as in the specular and inverted encounter between landscape forms and geometrically defined space that is established in the mirrored and cement sculptures OT 2022 by Valerie Krause, which allude to art as a language useful for recomposing in a new order what appears to us disintegrated and fragmented or as in the project of encounter between popular traditions, local communities and collective performative dimension that underpins Marinella Senatore's research.

Ultimately, as the work of Ilya and Emilia Kabakov seems to tell us, it is a question of still being able to trace, through a glimpse or a glance pointed from afar, the marvelous that dwells in everyday life and to return to the observer the miracle of the apparition.

Promoted by the Il Rosaio Association with the Municipality of Anacapri, organized in collaboration and with the support of the Axel Munthe Foundation \ Villa San Michele, realized thanks to the support of Seda and Capri Palace Hotel, with the participation of the Goethe Institut of Naples and with the contribution of the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany as part of the Year of the German Language in Italy, the 2022 Landscape Festival is enriched by the second edition of the public project Manifesto which this year sees Anna Franceschini as protagonist.