Luca Vitone
Romanistan
On the occasion of the Giornata del Contemporaneo (an annual event dedicated to contemporary art), the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, in collaboration with the Italian Consulate in Geneva, welcomes artist Luca Vitone for a screening of his film Romanistan (2019, 73′) at Cinema Dynamo on Thursday October 12 at 6.30pm.
Romanistan (2019, 73′) tells the story of the artist’s journey from Bologna to Chandigarh, the route taken by Roma and Sinti from northwest India to Italy. Following in the footsteps of a migration that took place between the 8th and 14th centuries, Luca Vitone deepens his interest in Roma culture, which has been present in his work since the 1990s. The story of the Roma’s migratory itinerary and nomadism, of the marginalization and segregation they have suffered over the centuries, becomes a tool for broader reflection on the idea of place and travel, community, tradition, the perpetuation of clichés and social stigmatization. The title Romanistan comes from the words of Manush Romanov, a Roma representative from Bulgaria, who imagined the possibility of creating a Roma country.
The artistic practice of Luca Vitone (b.1964, Genoa), began in the second half of the 1980s. It focuses on the idea of the place, inviting us to re-cognize something we already know, defying the conventions of mutable, faded memory that characterize the present. His work explores the way places are identified through cultural production: art, cartography, music, cuisine, political associations, ethnic minorities. Vitone bridges the gap between the sense of loss of place characteristic of the postmodern and the ways in which feelings of belonging arise in the intersection of personal and collective memory. He reconstructs and invents forgotten paths to reconfigurate his own personal geography.
He has won several national and international awards and residencies. In 2018, with the project entitled Romanistan, he was among the winners of the fourth edition of the Italian Council, a call for proposals launched by the Directorate General for Contemporary Creati-vity of Mibact. In 2019, in collaboration with Stefano Boeri Architects, he won the call for the realization of the project Il Parco del Polcevera e il Cerchio Rosso (The Polcevera’s Park and the Red Circle) which includes, waiting for its final installation, the temporary work La radura della memoria (The clearing of memory) dedicated to the victims of the collapse of the Morandi bridge. Since 2006 he has been teaching at the Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti in Milan. He currently collaborates with Galerie Nagel Draxler, Berlin/Köln/München; Galerie Michel Rein, Paris/Brussels; Galleria Rolando Anselmi, Rome/Berlin.
