festivalfilosofia sapere;2008

Childhood is not an age but a way of looking at the world. This sentence sums up the poetics of Antonio Catalano, artist/craftsman of rare talent who has agreed to create a site-specific installation for festivalfilosofia which includes parts of Modena's Delfini library. The work is formed of six sections, corresponding to six stops in a fantasy tour for visitors of all ages:  
- Mermaid grandmas: grandmothers in a rest home are transformed into splendid mermaids by means of pictorial reworking of enlarged photos;
- Art nature: framed like works of art, fruit and vegetables reveal form and colour you have to see to believe;
- The pavilion of great dreamers: ten "speaking" beds, arranged as in a dormitory, tell their secret dreams to children who lend an ear;  
- The little shop of sentiments: pictures containing stones, feathers, roots, plants, traces of nature's energy;
- Bread museum: simple loaves or edible works of white art? A tribute to those unnamed geniuses who have given a thousand forms to our daily bread;
- Armadi sensibili: ordinary wardrobes conceal little worlds within where disused objects combine to create audio-visual stimuli. Visitors can enter the wardrobes, close the door behind them and leave evidence of the fact they were here.

Antonio Catalano was born in Potenza in 1950. Poet, painter, sculptor, he is a leading figure in children's theatre. After his debut as a mime, he founded the theatre collective Magopovero with Luciano Nattino in 1971, leading to the research group Casa degli Alfieri with which Catalano lives and works in the heart of the Monferrato area. In recent years he has abandoned traditional forms of theatre to devote himself to a hybrid form combining drama and the visual arts. His gallery of Universi sensibili thus came about (www.universisensibili.it): intriguing installations - wardrobes, dens, cubicles, pavilions of wonders - which are produced with the help of set builder Maurizio Agostinetto and have featured at international events like the Venice Biennale, the Parc de la Villette, Expo '02 and the Piccolo Teatro, Milan. Strange and poetic worlds where everyday or disused objects are reinvented and transformed into works of art, accompanied by extempore narration by the artist himself.


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