The project ESSERE è AMBIGUO. Corpi, parole, vibrazioni (BEING IS AMBIGUOUS. Bodies, words, vibrations) was created as part of the FUTURO FESTIVAL, inaugurating its contemporary art section, curated by qwatz. It is being held in collaboration with Palazzo Merulana and involves the artists Elena Bellantoni, Silvia Giambrone, and Viola Pantano. The artists will perform three pieces, each in dialogue with a work from the Cerasi collection selected by them; they will then create three installations that illustrate certain aspects of their research.

The central element of the project is the body, understood as an active subject in the constant dialectical movement between oneself and the outside world. Crossing a space, observing faces and scenes populated by bodies that move, act, interact, and look at us: the Elena and Claudio Cerasi collection at Palazzo Merulana allows us to enter the cultural atmosphere of the early decades of the 20th century, providing a formal reading and a political and social interpretation of it. A historical period rich in fears, research, propaganda, great ideals, and conveniences that experienced the acceleration of technological progress, two wars, mass culture and its populist drifts, and social battles aimed at radically changing certain perspectives on identity.

These elements, incredibly present then as now, require the mark of a humanity capable of questioning itself from a formal, anthropological, and cultural point of view on the pivotal relationship between the living and its ambiguous, often suspended, deadly, silenced representation.

BEING IS AMBIGUOUS. Bodies, words, vibrations was created within FUTURO FESTIVAL, in collaboration with Art Site Fest.

The ART section of Futuro Festival is part of the “Insieme Siamo Arte” (Together We Are Art) project created by the Metropolitan City of Rome Capital and Atcl.

With technical support from PROMU.