The Italian Cultural Institute in Addis Ababa has started in 2013 a residing artist program,
in order to enable Italian visual artists to develop an own project which arose from the relation with
the local reality, in Ethiopia, particularly in Addis Ababa.
The idea of programming a series of residing Italian artists in Addis Ababa, comes out after having
noticed the complexity and elusiveness of the social reality of this African metropolis , specially if
compared with the stereotyped and simple image common in Europe and in Italy. Enable an artist to observe, to explain and enter in relationship and dialogue with the urban reality of Addis Ababa, will be a kind of getting a new image and interpretation, free from stereotype and able to consider in a poetic way to project to the future, that even if disorderly convulsive way, create the basic aspects of Africa and her metropolis in the contemporary times.
The historical relation between Ethiopia and Italy gives other means of possible meditations to the
artists that are going to find here many traces, differently transformed of a cultural inheritance
left by the short Italian occupancy , 1936-1941, in a number and ambit sometime astonishing.
The first invited artist is Gea Casolaro, she based her work on the image making the main point of her
research on places characteristically highly tied (Buenos Aires, Sarajevo, Paris). In each of her work the
interpretation of the reality and of the social contest she creates considerations which reaches universal
subjects as memory and repression of past times, communication and media, the displacement of the
point of view against the stereotyped image and the silent reality.
The project, furthermore, will develop in collaboration with Alle School of Fine Arts and Design of the Addis Ababa University, in the frame of the international exchanges launched by the school in these last years, like the workshop held last year by the artist Olafur Eliasson.
Gea Casolaro will held an open talk to the public on March 1st , for the presentation of the workshop which she is going to realize subsequently in the following weeks with the last year students. Finally an exhibition of collective works will be held at the Contemporary Art Museum in Addis Ababa.