Talk — Un incontro tra memoria e non memoria

On March 13th at 6pm in the Recontemporary headquarters the catalogs of two public art projects dedicated to monuments and monumentality will be presented.
Cosimo Veneziano with Patrimonio Dissidente (2024) and Irene Pittatore with Monumenta Italia (2024), starting from public statuary, questioned the complex issues that accompany statues and monuments that design contemporary cities.
With the two artists and Iole Pellion di Persano, director of Recontemporary, Anna Detheridge, president of Connecting Cultures and Lisa Parola, author of Down the monuments? An open question (Einaudi, 2022).
How do monuments communicate with history? The research of Cosimo Veneziano and Irene Pittatore, distant in terms of path and formalization, starts from this same question.
The Dissident Heritage project of the artist Cosimo Veneziano curated by the Connecting Cultures Foundation in collaboration with the MAC Contemporary Art Museum of Lissone (MB) and with the qwatz – contemporary art platform association is among the winners of the 2023 Photography Strategy, promoted by the General Directorate of Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture.
Cosimo Veneziano’s 14 photographic works refer not so much to eras or places, but to different categories of “problematicity”: protested monuments. An archive of images document and rework a varied memory that is not only uncomfortable but sometimes even embarrassing. Mainly Italian monuments, architecture and landscapes, commissioned by different clients and for different reasons which have provoked protests or created confusion; often vandalized or even removed throughout the twentieth century up to the present day.

Monumenta Italia, curated by Lisa Parola and Tea Taramino, already hosted in the Recontemporary space last year, addresses the themes of the presence of women’s history in public space and its narration. The artistic heritage in public space is in fact still and only male. The statues of women have no name, they do not document a fact and are most often presented as archetypes, symbols, muses: prosperity, homeland, justice, often represented reclining or kneeling at the hero’s feet, are symbols, almost never women protagonists of facts or actions. Starting from these premises, Monumenta Italia questions, investigates and researches with the aim of undermining the idea of ​​monumentality in favor of an in-depth reflection on the public presence of women.
The works, a poster campaign, a banner and a video series, by Irene Pittatore are intended as tools for reflection on the research themes and will be the starting point for workshops and meetings open to schools, universities and a heterogeneous public.
In the meeting on March 13, particular attention will be paid to the publications that accompany both projects and which explore, with the interventions of scholars, the theme of monumentality which in recent years has been present in much contemporary artistic research at an international level.