La Ginestra Award 2023 to Michelangelo Pistoletto

The award ceremony will be held on September 13th at Villa delle Ginestre in Torre del Greco.

The LA GINESTRA 2023 Award, a prestigious national literary recognition dedicated to Leopardi that enjoys the patronage of the Ministry of Culture, will be awarded to Maestro MICHELANGELO PISTOLETTO.

“Words and categories dear to Giacomo Leopardi, such as infinite and beautiful, find in the works of Michelangelo Pistoletto an original and fruitful reinvention. The “La Ginestra” prize, awarded to Michelangelo Pistoletto, intends to recognize the meaning of an extraordinary aesthetic adventure, which tries to re-establish life and community in the midst of the lacerations of our history”.

The ninety-year-old artist from Biella - one of the most beloved protagonists of Italian culture and international contemporary art - will be awarded the prize on WEDNESDAY 13 SEPTEMBER 2023 (start/event at 19.30:XNUMX pm) in the spaces of the Teatro di Verzura of the Villa delle Ginestre in Torre del Greco (NA), the Campania residence of the last season of Giacomo Leopardi's life.

The event on September 13th – hosted by journalist Donatella Trotta, always an excellent 'voice' of the La Ginestra Award ceremony – will be attended by the members of the authoritative Scientific Committee of the Award itself: Matteo Lorito, Arturo de Vivo, Matteo Palumbo, Fabiana Cacciapuoti, Paola Villani and Andrea Mazzucchi.

The evening will be introduced by the greeting of the Mayor of Torre del Greco, Luigi Mennella, and will see the presence of the organizers of the event: Gennaro Miranda (President of the Fondazione Ville Vesuviane), Ugo Oliviero (Governor of Rotary – district 2101) and Luigi Torrese (President of the Rotary Club of Torre del Greco and Vesuvian Municipalities).

The event will be enriched by readings by the author, proposed by the actor and director Massimiliano Foà.

It is one of the most beloved and eagerly awaited Leopardi literary awards in Italy and Europe: now in its sixteenth edition, the La Ginestra Award has always celebrated the figure of Giacomo Leopardi and the places in Campania that are deeply linked to the great poet from Recanati. The award is given every year - at the discretion of the Scientific Committee - to personalities from the cultural world who have distinguished themselves in the analysis and study of Leopardi's thought and work.

After two editions held in the prestigious Villa Campolieto in Ercolano, the Award returns to its natural home, Villa delle Ginestre, and to its 'privileged date', in the second week of September: "The beauty of the place, suspended between Vesuvius and the Gulf of Naples, gives the evening of the award of the La Ginestra Award an emotional content that cannot be described in words but is well perceived, from edition to edition, by the public present, testifying to the perennial relevance of the poet from Recanati" explain the organizers of the award.

La Ginestra Award 2023 to Michelangelo Pistoletto – the Motivation

“Michelangelo Pistoletto, in a long journey from the post-war period to the present, has transformed into art the changes that have occurred in individual psychology and the collective imagination. The perception of the world outside of us, the fleeting feeling of the instant, the variable idea of ​​beauty, the incessant change of phenomena and the points of view that observe them have become the heart of his work.

Nourished by pop art, Pistoletto confronted the myths of today and made representations of them. The photographic fragments, transferred onto reflective metal plates, become the site of a mental experience, in which all observers are implicated. The observer continually alters the form of the representation, to the point that "the image we see reflected in the mirror did not exist a moment before that moment and no longer exists an instant after."

The very idea of ​​beauty undergoes a profound transformation in her works, which connects her to the imagery of other times. The Venere degli Stracci, the work revived over the years until the recent Piazza Municipio disaster, constitutes, in her conception, the exemplary testimony of the loss of an ancient sacredness. Multi-colored rags contrast and coexist with an ancient bust. The prose of life intertwines with the classical idea of ​​beauty and contaminates it forever.

Pistoletto seeks a synthesis, aesthetic and social, that creates a renewed balance between artifice and nature: like the regenerated Apple, designed by him in 2007, in which the bitten apple, the emblem of Apple and the ultimate symbol of technology, finds the form of a new synthesis between separate needs and experiences.

In the manner of Leopardi, Pistoletto could repeat that, "like most things and truths that we believe to be absolute, beauty is relative" and "we do not have (as of good) an absolute idea of ​​it, but we form it through habituation, comparison, experience, with the development of our more or less delicate sensory organs".

Words and categories dear to Leopardi, such as infinite and beautiful, find in Pistoletto's works an original and fruitful reinvention. The "La Ginestra" prize, awarded to Michelangelo Pistoletto, intends to recognize the meaning of an extraordinary aesthetic adventure, which tries to re-establish life and community in the midst of the lacerations of our history".