The MAN Museum is pleased to announce the opening of the exhibition Emisferi Sud by Michele Ciacciofera

The MAN Museum is pleased to announce the opening of the exhibition Emisferi Sud by #micheleciacciofera, curated by Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung.

Beginning with an anthropological approach, Ciacciofera's artistic research revolves around the universe of the Mediterranean and focuses on themes referring to his places of origin - Sardinia and Sicily in particular – which the artist reinterprets in their historical, cultural, political and social perspectives, through the use of different artistic media that vary from painting to sculpture, design to installations and sound.

The project created for the MAN has as its basic theme the social, cultural, historical and contemporary dimensions. The Mediterranean is a sea whose peoples have always woven relations of all kinds, giving life to an amalgamation of ethnic groups, languages, flavours, legends and traditions. The cradle of millenarian civilizations, a crossroads, a place of commercial and cultural exchanges, but also of wars and struggles, of migrations and shipwrecks, in the artist's vision it becomes a metaphor of a new humanism leading to the creation of social, political and cultural alternatives.

In particular, Emisferi Sud is the synthesis of two projects, “Janas Code” and The Density of the Transparent Wind, recently presented at the 57th Biennial of Venice, and Documenta 14 in Kassel and Athens. The former, in which the archaic and contemporary dimensions blend, is the fruit of research on the Domus de Janas, neolithic rock-cut graves made legendary in Sardinian folk traditions and literature, which the artist synthesizes and reinterprets conceptually.

The latter, a sonorous installation created for Documenta 14, recalls the activity of Sicilian fishers, their relationship with nature and most of all the togetherness that characterizes their lives, also with reference to the critical situation of the contemporary world and the Mediterranean in particular. In this work, his reflections on the sea and human activities relating to it are analysed through an anthropological prism by means of recordings of voices, noises and sounds, which are digitally and rhythmically manipulated to produce an abstract composition capable of recounting the complex experience of the sea and coexistence through toil.

At the MAN, Ciacciofera will present two new installations that were a part of the ones mentioned above. They synthesize and bring together on the same interpretive plane the two different projects, with the intention of unveiling an overall reflection on the history of the Mediterranean and its boundaries.

A third installation will be added. It is entitled Life Swing, conceived especially for the exhibition Emisferi Sud and in particular for the vertical space which, with the staircase, separates the floors of the museum. The swing holding the book La questione sarda by Antonio Gramsci, represents a metaphor of the oscillation in time and space of human thought, a magical interplay that contemplates the relationship between life and death, between the origins, the present, and the future.

Michele Ciacciofera (Nuoro, Sardinia, 1969) now lives and works in Paris after completing his studies in political science, anthropology and sociology at Palermo and frequenting the studio of the artist Giovanni Antonio Sulas in #nuoro. Many are his national and international exhibitions, both group and one-man, among which Janas Code, 57° Biennial of Art of Venice, “Viva #arte Viva”, 2017, The Density of the Transparent Wind, Documenta 14 Kassel/Athens 2017, Enchanted Nature, Revisited, CAFA Museum, Beijing 2016, Nel Mezzo del Mezzo, Museo Riso, Palermo 2015, What We Call Love – From Surrealism to Now, IMMA Museum, Dublin 2015, I Hate the Indifferent, Summerhall, Edinburgh 2014, Odio gli indifferenti, Palazzo Montalto, Siracuse 2014.

Michele Ciacciofera
Southern Hemispheres

01.12.2017 - 25.02.2018