Biagiotti Progetto Arte Foundation presents disUmanesimi, an exhibition realized by the second year students of the Masters in Visual Arts and Curatorial Studies at the Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti di Milano.

disUmanesimi reveals the dynamics according to which history constructs and reconstructs the meaning of Humanism and its negation, overcoming the dialectic structured by two opposing terms. Realizing a discourse, which is philosophical by nature and formation, it does not mean to deny it, but rather to contextualize and connect it to a practice, an artistic one.

In order to develop an exhibition purely linked to its host city, the curators and artists, during the embryonic stage of the research, focused on the work of Lara-Vinca Masini, particularly her exhibition organized and inaugurated in the capital city of Tuscany on September 20, 1980, entitled Umanesimo, Disumanesimo nell'Arte Europea 1890/1980. By integrating a historical perspective with contemporary works installed in the urban fabric, the exhibition "aims at being both a test and a hypothesis for the key in which to read the multiple components of a history which finds indirect and ambiguous terms of comparison in the present, though capable, I believe, of provoking and stimulating reaction and of bringing out those relationships."

Lara-Vinca Masini approaches the representation of 'in-humanismus' in a comprehensive way, going beyond the scope of artistic production, by including in the catalog a broad range of extracts of philosophical texts which provide a further key to understanding this concept, which can hardly be simplified to a single point of view. Reading them, it shines even as this same irreducibility is a constitutive elements of the discourse on 'in-humanismus'.

"We are so filled with 'logic' that anything that disturbs the habitual somnolence of prevailing opinion is automatically registered as a desbicable contradiction. We pitch everything that does not stay close to the familiar and beloved positive into the previously excavated pit of pure negation, which negates everything, ends in nothing, and so consummates nihilism. Following this logical course we let everything expire in a nihilism we invented for ourselves with the aid of logic. "

These words of Martin Heidegger (four in the catalog) nevertheless help us to understand a fraction of the fundamental impulse that underlies the need to place themselves outside of the humanist discourse, the critique of metaphysics that appears more and more dishonest and deceptive.

It is not the scope and extent of Masini's Florentine show (which included seventy artists spanning four generations, located in eleven places in the city) which has grabbed the attention the curators and artists, but rather the total absence of visual documentation, after the event, apart from the show's official catalog. Hence, the desire to reveal the lack of a historical memory.

After thirty-three years, the exhibition proposed by the curators, comes from this absence and interacts with it, inserting itself in the perspective of the possible reactions and relationships advocated by Lara-Vinca Masini.

The issues arising from this reasoning are incorporated in the reflections of the eighteen artists in the exhibition: there is an overcoming of mankind at the center of the cultural terrain, translated in un a territory of lived space. Here, the aesthetic hierarchies and rational control of man over his manifestations are subverted and canceled in favor of the creation and reconstruction of imaginary and new images, using the tools of memory and the decoding of found languages.

Works presented by: Claudia Antelli, Emre Baloglu, Chiara Balsamo, Ruth Beraha, Filippo Bisagni, Claudia Caldara, Marco Ceroni, Irene Coppola, Gaetano Cunsolo, David Michel Fauyek, Roberta Garieri/Marco Ornella/Gaia Valentino, Cecilie Hjelvik Andersen, John Quintana, Daniele Marzorati, Orestis Mavroudis, Jacopo Rinaldi, Stefano Serretta, Camilla Topuntoli.

Biagiotti Progetto Arte Gallery
Via delle Belle Donne, 39/r
Florence 50123 Italy
Ph. +39 055 214757
galleria@florenceartbiagiotti.com
www.artbiagiotti.com

Opening hours
Tuesday - Saturday
From 2pm to 7pm