In Spazio San Sebastiano the exhibition “Damarita”

The opening of the new exhibition held on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception will take place on space San Sebastian. The exhibition entitled “Damareta: carnet de voyage for an ideal city” contains the travel notebooks of Claudio Pattani for his associative and group work project. Opening Thursdays at 5 p.m. The space is not just a gallery, but a cultural center born at the foot of the imposing staircase of the UNESCO World Heritage Cathedral of the Palazzolo Acreide, the result of the synergy between the Diocese of San Sebastiano and the Mediblei cooperative, with a contribution from the Fondosvillupo, the Italian Cooperation Joint Fund.

Damarita, Works of Pattani

Damareta: carnet de voyage for an ideal city features the travel notebooks of artist and illustrator Claudio Pattani. It will be a starting point for creating unpublished artwork through visitor input. “The exhibition that will take us to the new general – Mediblei members say – It starts from the desire to be community builders and put the needs and desires of those who live in places at the heart of collective thinking. The encounter with Claudio Patané’s carnet de voyage and his imaginative horizons allows us to undertake one of the most ambitious projects, born in these years of community collaboration.

In 2020, during the pandemic, through our social channels, we asked the residents of Palazzolo Acreide to imagine with us the ideal country of the future – a post-pandemic country aware of its fragility – through a multi-stakeholder process that develops citizens’ ideas, accompanied by the keywords we kept In our travel book for those two years. The form is named after Damareta, the name given to the exhibition that we are going to open and which preserves in its spirit the will of the relationship between people as an engine to provoke reflections, planning and change.

The ideal city project “Dmarita”

In fact, on the evening of vernissage, there will be an impromptu painting show. During this, the artist in the exhibition will draw the beginning of a city that will be completed, during the months of continuation of the works, with the interventions of the users themselves, whether it be drawings, words or signs left on the paper. The collective artwork will remain on permanent display within the Spazio San Sebastiano as a return to the process of collective creativity. The exhibition will be open until March 25, 2023.

Author

Claudio Pattani, in parallel with his activity as a painter, is an architect and currently collaborates as a scholarship holder at the Syracuse Special Education Structure in Architecture and Cultural Heritage at the University of Catania. For a research project on the city of Savoca (ME), as well as being a PLUS teacher for the company DOMĔSTIKA!

exhibition

Damarita is a desire, a project and a journey. Fair only if you will only have the sense of sight to pass it. In fact, it all starts with touching and flipping your hands through the pages that keep notes on imagined cities. Far from the expertise of cartographers, because in Claudio Pattani’s travel notebooks, cities are built with the echo that places vacations in the artist’s memory. Cities lived in, dreamed of, or dreamed about and reappear on the surface of paper as fragments of memories that can be inhabited far away, rather than within or nearby. The intimacy of representation does not make cities out of reach for the observer, on the contrary.

Browsing through the travel notebooks is an invitation to enter the artist’s vision, to live in the pages, and to direct one’s gaze toward one’s own horizon where the infinite is fulfilled through the relationship with the spectator. And in confrontation with the other, the designed city changes its intimate nature into a space of sharing and welcoming. An evangelical celebration of the Word made flesh and coming to inhabit humanity, prefiguring a new world where we are all called to cooperate for its salvation. And this is where we want to take you, Damarita, the city of words and desires that know no borders but horizons of possibilities; where no one is a guest but all the citizens travel along converging paths; Where pollution is a source, not a threat at all. Where we celebrate life, which is the art of meeting.