XNL Piacenza announced the extension of the exhibition “Francesco Simeti – Like a Moon Lemon”, curated by artistic director Paola Nicolin, until Sunday, March 19, 2023. Francesco Simeti has created for the galleries dedicated to contemporary arts at XNL Piacenza a scenic, welcoming and immersive machine – made by collecting images from digital databases for the sale of òphotographic content – that offers the public a reflection on Nature and what drives the purchase of its images. The artist has created a setting, a deliberately rudimentary contraption that moves glossy images, representations of Nature that are extremely real, like a blade of grass, but at the same time artificial because they are presented in the form of a photograph.
Simeti’s first solo exhibition chronicling his 20-year journey has, in recent months, been the focus of an exciting educational activity conceived by the artist himself and led by Enrica Carini and director Paola Nicolin.
This series of ateliers, which saw 482 pupils together with 56 elementary school teachers from Piacenza and the surrounding area come together around the stories of the works and artistic practice, was joined by two other ateliers curated by EN Laboratorio Collettivo: the first, led by Cecilia Ramieri involved 79 pupils and 9 primary school teachers; the second, dedicated to secondary schools and curated by LudoSofici saw 86 pupils and 11 teachers participate.
The exhibition was also flanked by a public program on the theme of landscape and monument as indices of a discourse on the complexity of the territory, with meetings moderated by artist Claudia Losi that saw former archaeologist and cultural manager Emmanuele Curti, art historian Lisa Parola, art historian Alessandra Pioselli, and artists Andrea Caretto and Raffaella Spagna take turns in the exhibition spaces.
XNL was also the venue for book presentations and workshops for adults, with the artist duo Invernomuto and artist, musician and collector Michele Lombardelli, and art history lectures led by Adrian Paci for the project “Le (mie) storie dell’arte”, an initiative that stems from the desire to involve international artists in a journey of research and discovery of the many stories that a single work of art can tell. The artist, the subject of a story and the author of the tale, is invited to enhance through his or her experience the work of other “fellow travelers” from the past and present in a series of five lectures and subsequent in-depth discussions.
From such assumptions of great participation comes the decision to extend the dates of the exhibition and together enrich the proposed public program so that this habit with the encounter with the work of art and its questions can be transformed into an increasingly rich and structured opportunity for social inclusiveness.
The living community that has begun to attend XNL Piacenza is a tangible sign of an institution that wishes to behave like a living organism, to be a place of meeting and exchange for artists and a space of growth for the public.
