March 29, 2019 at 6:00 PM
Mondadori Bookstore, Piazza 11 settembre di Cosenza

ISLANDS OF INSTANTS

To the origins of the MAON

texts by Nicola Sicliani de Cumis and Tonino Sicoli

On Friday 29 March 2019 at 6 pm the book “Isole d'istanti will be presented in Cosenza at the Mondadori bookshop, in Piazza 11 Settembre. At the roots of the MAON”, with texts by Nicola Siciliani de Cumis, former professor of General Pedagogy at the University La Sapienza in Rome, and Tonino Sicoli, artistic director of the MAON, with photographs from forty years of activity.

Speakers: Sandro Principe, founder of the Capizzano/MAON Center, Tonino Sicoli, director of the MAON and Pino Sassano, of the Libreria Mondadori.

Reconstructing the history of a territory and identifying its cultural heritage is the first step towards acquiring its own identity.

For a long time, Calabria has not only been penalized by intellectual emigration and the absence of significant phenomena on site, but historiography has also ignored what has happened, in difficult and marginalized situations. At the end of the 70s, the first signs of cultural redemption flourished in Calabria, young artists began to question what was happening in the art world, undertaking journeys and living experiences in other realities.

In the early 80s, Calabrian artists demonstrated that they were no longer tied to cultural models of the past, but were in line with the most current artistic declinations. The so-called post-southernism is born... Filiberto Menna, Enrico Crispolti and Tonino Sicoli organize an exhibition in Rome at the Luigi Di Sarro Center with emerging Calabrian artists.

For the post-southerners this experience represents the end of every inferiority complex and a new identity path begins. An art system is gradually formed in which training, communication, structures, information, a cultural policy increasingly integrated with external models create the conditions for a qualified and widespread activity.

In 1997 the Center for Art and Culture "A. Capizzano" was founded on the initiative of Sandro Principe, former member of parliament and mayor of Rende. After seven years of intense exhibition activity, the MAON, or Museum of 19th and 20th Century Art (2004), was established, born from a project by the art critic Tonino Sicoli.

The museum is located in Palazzo Vitari (18th century), in the historic center of the Calabrian town, granted on loan for use by the municipal administration.

It is the only museum that has a collection of artists born and linked to Calabria in the last two centuries. Contacts and comparisons with the national and international art scene have been created around it, with events and artists who are protagonists of the history of modern and contemporary art. «A twenty-year period then, from 1997 to 2017, of the Museum's commendable existence in life, in the hundred and more full moons spent in the belly of the "Capizzano".

All the other birthdays in the flesh and bones of the prestigious sequence of catalogs mostly edited by Tonino Sicoli, with the tireless initiatives of the MAON, starting from the Around Rotella of 2006, to arrive at the Theater of Photography of 2017, and beyond. And therefore, zigzagging along the entire eternalizable goodness of the Museum, as well as in the context of "Traces of the Twentieth Century", in the other four imposing sections of the MAON: "Art in Calabria", "The Achille Capizzano collection", "The Luigi Ladaga collection", "The Carmine Domenico Rizzo Foundation collection". Aside, the possible other artistic-educational activities of the Museum. In addition to the relevant bibliography.

This is why it is appropriate to historicize critically, contextualize by decontextualizing and decontextualize by contextualizing. And go to the roots of the MAON.» (Nicola Siciliani de Cumis) «Twenty years of the Capizzano Center/MAON have been, for better or worse, accomplished between strategies and actions, in a crescendo of events, which have intertwined personal stories of many traveling companions, with the history of the territory. A territory with previous delays and hardships, which have, however, contextualized, giving and receiving contributions, in a progressive proactive action and i cultural politics. Many people, intellectuals, friends, artists, scholars and students, "actors" or users, passing through or permanent, have accompanied the story of an experiment that started from afar, amidst uncertainties and difficulties but with a shared and, at times, divided enthusiasm, which has written an open book, with chapters already written and others to be written. Forerunners of a design, which has affected the events of a radical cultural project and gradually rooted in a difficult terrain, in a map of different islands, some contiguous and others distant.» (Tonino Sicoli)