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In his artistic practice, Cezary Poniatowski transforms everyday objects and materials into sculptural compositions. Drawing inspiration from the histories, emotions, and memories linked to material culture, he creates works that feel both familiar and unsettling. “Poniatowski’s research reflects the ways perception shapes meaning—how we recognize familiar forms in abstract compositions and how materials tied to domestic or utilitarian functions carry cultural and emotional significance. This approach positions him among the most compelling voices in sculpture and spatial practice in Central Europe today” – affirms Jakub Gawkowski, co-curator of this edition of the Premio Ermanno Casoli.

In the words of Marcello Smarrelli, Artistic Director of Fondazione Ermanno Casoli, “The Premio Ermanno Casoli has always aimed to foster dialogue between art and business, using the universal language of art to inspire new perspectives and ways of thinking. We do this across all the countries where Elica operates, promoting its values globally and reinforcing the deep connection between creativity and innovation. Thanks to his artistic practice, which explores crucial issues such as the human condition and its relationship with technology and the environment, we are confident that Cezary Poniatowski’s contribution will have a profound and lasting impact on the company and its employees.”

Following this approach, Cezary Poniatowski has been invited to conceive a site-specific project for the Elica Group Polska plant. As is typical of the Premio Ermanno Casoli, employees will be directly involved in the creation of a permanent artwork. Poniatowski’s intervention will explore breath and inhalation—both as physiological processes and as metaphors for circulation, flow, and transformation. Engaging with Elica’s advanced technologies that regulate and enhance air saturation, the project will link those processes to the broader metabolic exchanges within individual and collective bodies.

The work will be inaugurated in June 2025 at the Elica Group Polska plant in Jelcz-Laskowice, Poland.

Read the press release.

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The project, curated by Marcello Smarrelli, promoted by the Municipality of Fabriano and conceived in collaboration with Fondazione Ermanno Casoli, is supported by PAC2022-2023 – Piano per l’Arte Contemporanea, promoted by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture. 

Born in Turin (1936), Paolo Icaro is a key figure in the artistic researches of the 1960s. Closely connected to the Arte Povera movement, since the beginning he has experimented with the evolving nature of sculptural action in relation to form and space, using elemental and flexible materials such as concrete, clay, paper, wood, and plaster.  

Artificio naturale, created in 2011, perfectly reflects this ongoing research and experimentation. The installation consists of five stone boulders, simply laid on the ground. The sculptor first modeled an “ideal” stone in clay, smoothing it to resemble a perfect pebble, as if it had been shaped by the waters of a stream. From this original form, five plaster casts were created, then cast in cement, and finally, thanks to 3D scanning, sculpted in Matraia stone, a gray-blue material of exceptional compactness and durability. Although identical in shape, the five boulders appear different as they are placed in five unique positions where they achieve balance.

The project is accompanied by a series of public talks, educational workshops for children, and a book published by Chimera Editore, with texts by Marcello Smarrelli and Simone Ciglia.

INFO AND BOOKING:
0732.250658 | pinacoteca.molajoli@comune.fabriano.an.it

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Can you please introduce yourself and the story of we+?
we+ is a contemporary design studio founded in 2013 in Tokyo by Toshiya Hayashi and Hokuto Ando. Our mission is to create new perspectives and values through research and experimentation. Our projects stem from constant research both in Japan and abroad. Thanks to these experiences, we’ve had the privilege of collaborating with various companies and organizations, contributing to research and development projects, commissioned installations, branding, product ideation, spatial design, and art direction.

What distinguishes your daily work?
We value research and experimentation. We integrate logical thinking, such as analyzing the client’s history and social context, with a hands-on approach to fieldwork and material experimentation. Our goal is to explore new expressions and possibilities to achieve alternative designs.

Can you explain more about “Straordinaria”, the installation that you are exhibiting at Fuori Salone at Palazzo Litta?
“Straordinaria” is inspired by the delicate formation of ‘clouds’ caused by the collision of warm and cold air. The installation consists of countless translucent mesh fabric cylinders suspended from above, creating an ethereal flow of subtle shades in space. These cylinders, slightly colored in some sections, evoke sensations of ‘air’ and ‘heat.’ The experience will be akin to strolling through the clouds, inviting viewers to harmoniously merge with the surrounding environment and immerse themselves in the elegant interaction of ‘air’ and ‘heat,’ discovering a world of unique sensations.

How will the public be engaged in the installation?
This installation offers the public an engaging experience where colors surprisingly change depending on the viewing angle, location, and distance to the artwork. By altering these factors, viewers can appreciate a variety of expressions. Stepping into the pathway within the installation, surrounded by the artwork from all directions, will be like taking a walk through a vibrant cloud of colors.

What do you expect from this experience in Milan with Elica and Fondazione Ermano Casoli?
Through the immersive experience we’ve created, we aim for the rebranded concept of Elica to intuitively resonate with visitors. Furthermore, we are delighted that this collaboration serves as an opportunity to deepen our relationship with Fondazione Ermano Casoli too. 

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Elica, a key player in kitchens worldwide for over 50 years, in collaboration with Fondazione Ermanno Casoli, – which has been promoting exchange between contemporary art and businesses since its establishment -, presents Straordinaria, a poetic site-specific installation envisaged by the experimental Japanese design studio ‘we+’, founded by Toshiya Hayashi and Hokuto Ando in 2013, curated by Marcello Smarrelli. 

The project – expressing its ‘thinking outside the box’ aptitude, a pioneering approach in which creativity and innovation combine in the pursuit of beauty – invites the audience to immerse in an unexpected and magical ethereal space, by evoking the lightness of air and warmth, two distinctive natural elements of Elica world.

Straordinaria
Palazzo Litta – Cortile d’onore
Corso Magenta 24, Milano
Open to visitors: from Monday 15 to Sunday 21 April, 10.00 am  – 7.30 pm 

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In his artistic practice, Agostino Iacurci uses painting, sculpture, drawing, light and sound, heterogeneously combining various media to create immersive installations that intimately dialogue with places – visionary spaces in which stories, personal memories, literary references and vernacular tales freely converge. His large-scale pictorial interventions, which have earned him international fame, take the form of large painting interventions – an original reinterpretation of what is known as ‘talking architecture’.  

Starting from those considerations, Agostino Iacurci was invited to conceive a project for AIRFORCE’s new plant, which, as is typical of the Premio Ermanno Casoli, stems from a training need identified within the company in collaboration with the Human Resources department. After being acquired by Elica and seeing its headquarters transferred from Fabriano to Cerreto D’Esi, AIRFORCE needed to recreate the cohesion, energy and spirit of sharing that have always characterised it, but also to offer a welcoming and familiar place for its workers.  

The intervention will be the result of a series of actions that will start in May and will involve the entire company population – around 100 managers, employees and workers – without any hierarchical distinction, with the aim of transforming a large portion of the plant, which is currently used as a transit area, into a place for employees to rest and meet.  

With this message, which gets straight to the essence of things, Fondazione Ermanno Casoli together with the artist Claire Fontaine wishes a Merry Christmas.

The exhortation is to contrast the madness of the world by opposing it with the transformative gaze of children.

The drawings were realized by the children of Elica employees as part of the workshop “Gli animali scappati” (Runaway Animals), conceived for the ninth edition of E-STRAORDINARIO for Kids by Claire Fontaine, curated by Marcello Smarrelli.

The young participants were asked to draw their favorite animals, whether real or fantastic, imagining a daring escape from the illustrated books to the large white sheet passing through the heads of the artists “always open, like a door without key”.

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Claire Fontaine’s new luminous installation entitled IL PERSONALE was conceived for the most iconic location of Elica’s Fabriano headquarters, stemming from the reflections generated during the workshop Lavoro femminile visibile e invisibile, attended by a group of 30 women who hold managerial roles within the company. In the light of some fundamental concepts of feminism –that the artistic duo has been exploring since its beginnings – the participants were asked to express themselves on the theme of female empowerment, with the aim of highlighting their difficulties in reconciling work and family.

The artwork thus becomes a reflection on the status of women in the professional and social context, bringing to light their value and emphasizing the importance of a broader political vision to promote equality and respect for women’s rights as transformative agents of society. 

Project supported by Regione Marche – Assessorato alla Cultura

[Read the press release]

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An event promoted by the Ermanno Casoli Foundation will be held at the Italian Cultural Institute in Tokyo on Thursday 24 November at 11.30 to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of Ariafina, a joint venture between Elica and Fuji Industrial, one of the longest running relationships, from a trade point of view, between Italy and Japan.

To seal this relationship, which goes beyond business, Elica and the Ermanno Casoli Foundation have commissioned a work to the artist Gianluca Malgeri, bearing witness to how contemporary art is increasingly a founding value for the Fabriano company and how the Foundation manages to develop successful cultural paths to promote our artists even beyond national borders.

This is how Iride was born, a diptych consisting of two geographical maps on whose surface a double path is outlined, uniting Italy and Japan. The first route retraces the itinerary of the Rome-Tokyo Raid, the flight made in 1920 by two young Italian pilots that became part of aviation history; the second route traces the link between Fabriano and Tokyo, celebrating the twenty-year collaboration between Elica and Fuji Industrial.
“When Francesco Casoli called me to discuss the contents of the artwork to be realized – says Malgeri – he told to me more than about the professional relationship, about the emotional and esteem bond that exists with the Kashimura family. For this reason, since the first research, my goal was to create an artwork that above all reflected this emotional involvement”.

The composition ideally recalls two eyes, a double vision,  a common and shared goal that becomes the metaphor for this professional and emotional bond.

During the event, Francesco Casoli will donate a part of the diptych to Kosuke Kashimura, Chairman of Fuji Industrial. The two parts that compose the work, in fact, have been conceived so that, united or separated, they can always be in relationship with each other, regardless of the distance and the place where they will be once divided.

The venue chosen to celebrate this important anniversary was not accidental: The Italian Culture Institute in Tokyo is an institution committed to spreading our country’s history and culture, as well as promoting Italian creativity in Japan. The building where the Institute is based, designed by Gae Aulenti, is one of the most significant symbols of the strong relationship between the two nations. Moreover, the Ariafina joint venture, combining the beauty of Italian design with the flawless functionality of Japanese industrial tradition, is an excellent example of how two seemingly distant worlds are able to communicate, also thanks to the universal language of art.

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Due to his interest in the dialectic that occurs between industrial and artistic production, in this project Satorre reflects about the nature of traces left by workers on the products they help to create. Unlike works of art, objects made on production lines are standardized and follow strict criteria linked to functionality and design. The artist focused on the contrasts between personal expression and rules, instinct and quality assurance, subjective proposals and functional standards. The name of the project, “Pelusa” (‘fluff’ in English), underlines Satorre’s interest in the involuntary yet unavoidable personal residue present in any production process, a surplus that, as much as one tries to eradicate it, keeps occurring.

ZONA CONCE opens in Fabriano on 3 July 2021: the new cultural hub born out of the requalification of the former tannery buildings will host artists, exhibitions, workshops and guests from all over Italy for an opening event that will also enable people to meet and interact.

The FEC is happy to make its contribution with a series of activities curated by our artistic director Marcello Smarrelli: WORKSHOP FOLDING COMET by Leonardo Petrucci Saturday 3 July 2021 |10 am – Fabriano Free of charge with compulsory reservation at this link: https://www.eventbrite.it/…/biglietti-folding-comet-di… 20 persons maximum

4:45 pm OPENING OF THE WORK

OPENING WALL PAINTING made by TELLAS on the wall opposite the entrance to the new ZONA CONCE cultural hub in Via Le Conce 76

Saturday 3 July 2021 | 12 pm – Fabriano

Free streaming; reservations for in-person attendance can be made here: https://zonaconce.it/programma/index.html TALK MATTEO FATO, ETTORE FAVINI, LEONARDO PETRUCCI, PIETRO RUFFO AND SISSI COME TOGETHER ON THE OCCASION OF A SPECIAL THINK TANK to share their ideas on how FILIGREE could be used in the future.

Saturday 3 July 2021 | 5 pm – Fabriano Free streaming; reservations for in-person attendance can be made here: https://zonaconce.it/programma/index.html

The full day’s programme is available at www.zonaconce.it

We would like to remind you that the event will be held in full compliance with the safety regulations and all the health and prevention provisions defined by the competent authorities to combat the Covid-19 pandemic. A specific safety protocol will be put in place by the organisation to further reduce any kind of risk with reference to the guidelines for the resumption of economic and social activities, Italian Decree-Law No. 65 of 18 May 2021, Italian Decree Law No. 52 of 21 April 2021

This volume recounts the story of a company seen through the eyes of Fabrizio Crisà, the designer who, through his work, was able to interpret the vision of his admiral, setting unexplored routes in a constant search for the wind of innovation and change. It shows products that are the result of the work of all those who have made them possible, from those who imagined them from the very beginning to those who designed and manufactured them. It speaks of people, of the passion of those who put themselves out there, but also of all those who, over the course of 50 years of activity, have contributed with thoughts, enthusiasm and dedication, but also with efforts, doubts, criticisms and sometimes even disagreements, which have served to review seemingly final stances and open up to different points of view in order to navigate towards distant horizons.

This book is dedicated to all of them.

Thanks to Domitilla Dardi and Etaoin shrdlu studio for helping us to make this project reality. A very special thanks to Fabrizio Crisà, Elica designer, for his precious and indefatigable work.

Matteo Fato, Cosa Naturale, 2020 (approx.)

The mind is in the likeness of a pine cone, which we carry as a representation of our pineal gland. Drawing a pine cone is a cerebral self-portrait, with the scales of all memories and all notions. It is our intimate, fatal compatibility with Nature. The wooden structure that houses the seeds of the pine cone in our internal ramification is commensurate with the natural destiny of our memory. Just as the spirals of a rose are equivalent to the limited revolutions of thoughts, so the whole of a pine cone resembles the congenital arrangement of fixed ideas. Every natural mystery teaches the mind to vegetate and not to be brilliant. Gianni Garrera

Fondazione Ermanno Casoli presents Matteo Fato for the day of the contemporary. An exclusive content donated by the artist, winner of the XVIII edition of the Ermanno Casoli Prize, to FEC on the occasion of the contemporary day organized by AMACI.

Matteo Fato, “The beauty of the world, in its landscape, burns the eyes; (you have to surrender, waving a white flag dirty with the ashes falling from the eyes, having it cleaned by the wind, to be able to cure them); before painting again “, 2020 (approximately) Brush cleaning on flag from landscape paintings, 130 x 80cm

The human body proceeds from the earth, everything that did not become human remained pure earth. The whole earth is matter not transformed into humanity. A flower is a stage of the earth of the terrestrial garden in which the human maturation of all Nature was interrupted.

Extract from the text by Gianni Garrera for: Flame of Love Viva (heaven and earth do not belong to the word), edited by Adele Cappelli, hired Gianni Garrera. Acquaviva Picena, Medieval Fortress / Church of San Rocco (A mouthful of art, Elpis Foundation & Galleria Continua)

Courtesy of the Artist & Monitor , Rome – Lisbon – Pereto (AQ)

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Matteo Fato won the 18^th edition of the Ermanno Casoli Award with “Gentile come un ritratto”, curated by Marcello Smarrelli, a project chosen for the sensitivity and effectiveness with which it has been able to deal with this particularly difficult time in which even the relational dimension of work is being put to the test by the pandemic. The artist has indeed decided to open his authorship to a collective operation, translating the pictorial gesture, namely the distinctive feature of his work, into a “collective act”, thereby recreating a sense of closeness and interaction with others. The work produced is the result of a temporary painting workshop set up for a week in Elica – a leading manufacturer of cooker hoods for kitchens – and headed by Matteo Fato, with the participation of 159 employees from the Fabriano, Mergo and Castelfidardo offices (FIMEMotors).

The title Gentile come un ritratto (Gentle as a portrait) deliberately recalls the alleged self-portrait of painter Gentile da Fabriano (Fabriano 1370 approx., Rome 1427), which appears in the Adoration of the Magi painting (1423), now preserved in the Uffizi. Matteo Fato’s challenge was multifaceted: starting from a masterpiece of the past closely linked to the talent and beauty of the region to collectively conceive a work in the present, and, in this leap in time, moving from Gentile’s self-portrait to a relevant portrait: that of a company based in Fabriano that, driven by the passion of its founder Ermanno Casoli, has distinguished itself in the field of design on a worldwide level, in an ideal connection with Gentile’s Renaissance workshop.

The participants had the opportunity to interact with the artist personally, though always in complete safety, reflecting together on the nature of the portrait as a form of expression that represents not only an individuality, but the era that characterises it. In order to portray a subject, it is necessary to be able to achieve “familiarity” with the historical, cultural and social context that surrounds them. Keeping this in mind, each of the participants received from the artist the key to leave their mark, in search of a similarity based on their own experience and everyday life. The result is a work that, in its plurality and abstraction, is capable of representing all those who have contributed to its realization.

The portrait, as is customary in Matteo Fato’s painting, is part of a larger installation entitled Gentili come un ritratto (Gentles as a portrait) made up of other works linked to his work process: indeed, other paintings have been extracted from this collective operation, produced from the cloths used to clean the brushes at every change of hand and colour, in turn placed and framed inside their transport crates.

The project is part of the celebrations for the 50^th anniversary of the birth of Elica and follows the methodology of E-STRAORDINARIO – the training programme featuring contemporary art that has distinguished FEC’s activities for over a decade. The installation will become part of the Elica Corporate Collection, which can be visited upon reservation.

Participation in the inauguration is subject to the limitations due to the current health situation; it will be possible to participate only and exclusively upon reservation and up to full capacity.

Information and reservations
segreteria@fondazionecasoli.org

From Monday 21 September and for the whole week the artist Matteo Fato will be in Elica to create, together with all the people who work there, “Gentile as a portrait”, curated by Marcello Smarrelli.

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Matteo Fato was born in 1979 in Pescara, city where he lives and works. He has been teaching at the Academy of Fine Arts of Urbino since 2009. He partook in many exhibitions in private galleries and public museums in Italy and abroad. In 2012 he completed his residency at the Dena Foundation for Contemporary Art (Paris), with the participation in the exhibition The collection Giuliana Thomas et Setari, retour à l’intime (La maison rouge, Fondation Antoine de Galbert); in July 2017 he took part in the OPEN20 exhibition at the Mostyn Museum in Wales. He took part in numerous artists’ residencies, such as: the Spinola Banna Foundation (Turin, 2008); ArtOmi, (New York); and in Norway within the Nordic Artists’ Centre Dalsåsen – NKD (2015). In 2016, he partook in the 16^th Art Quadrennial of Rome. In March 2018 opened a solo exhibition titled Heresy (of the) Anthology at Galleria Nazionale delle Marche (Palazzo Ducale, Urbino, Italy); in June 2019 he opened a solo show entitled Night Scene by the Sea at the Visual Arts Center – Pescheria (Pesaro). His works are included in many private and public collections in Italy and abroad.

Gentile come un ritratto – As gentle as a portrait revolves around two traditional pillars of artistic practice: painting and portrait. Its production is composed of various phases and will culminate in September, when Matteo Fato will work in the company. Fato will invite the employees to reflect on their nature through the figure of Gentile da Fabriano, a protagonist and interpreter of the Renaissance period who, thanks to his genius and ideas, made the city where he was born famous. Together with the artist, following in the footsteps of Gentile, the people of Elica will produce a choral portrait of the company, which, thanks to the determination of its founder and the contribution of all those who work there, has become an international reference point.

A temporal short circuit will be created which will combine two stories and two desires to achieve the same goal: to follow one’s passions, to excel in one’s work, to make one’s land great.

The activity, scheduled for the last week of September and which will be held in Fabriano from 21 to 23 September and in Castelfidardo in FIMEMotors, from 23 to 24 September, was presented by Elica and FEC throught a webinar with the artist Matteo Fato.

The 8th of July, at 3 pm, Mauro Saccchetto- CEO Elica, Alessandro Innocenti – Group Chief HR Officer, Viviana Cattelan – FEC Director, Marcello Smarrelli – FEC Artistic Director discussed the workshop with Matteo Fato who closed the meeting anticipating the sending of a personal letter as an invitation to participate numerous.

It is possible to see the recording of the webinar HERE

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Mass age, message, mess age (Elica 2018) is the project that Elena Mazzi carried out together with Elica employees following the invitation she received by Fondazione Ermanno Casoli as the winner of its annual award. The title is inspired by the famous essay by Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage, which saw the author decide to keep the misprint present in the title (massage instead of message) to confirm his thesis on the non-neutrality of the media. The Elica company, to which this theme is very dear, required a training session on communication among employees, and thus provided an opportunity for the artist to develop a sort of “method”.

Indeed, the project proposes a reflection on communication techniques and strategies, stressing the possibility of making mistakes during the transmission of a message and the way this affects the course of subsequent events. By analysing the Elica context and starting from the word “change”, which is widely used within the company environment, the artist experimented with various communication techniques, thereby revealing its proximity to the word “revolution”, understood in the most scientific sense of the term, namely movement, rotation and therefore change.

Texts: Elena Mazzi, Marcello Smarrelli
Graphic design: Elena Mazzi
Translation: Matteo Bugiolacchi
Proofreading: Cristina Terzoni
Photo credits: Daniele Alef Grillo, Michela Curti, Elena Mazzi
Language: Italian, English
Pages: 52 + 12
Dimensions: book 22.5 x 16 cm; insert 16 x 11 cm

The artist’s book is not for sale and has been produced by Boîte in a limited edition of 200 copies.

We always associate our desires with the stars, contemplate them and ask them to know whether, how and when we will get what is most dear to us; the sky is where we look for our constellation, namely the astral lines that represent us and guide our lives.

Ursa Minor, also known as the Little Dipper, is formed by seven main stars arranged in the shape of a cart with a rudder, the last of which is the North Star, which is called this way because it is only about 1° from the North Pole of the celestial sphere.

The book can be found in all the best bookstores or HERE

ENJOY THE READING!

On Friday, the 13th of September, the usual appointment with Elica employees children will be held in its seventh edition, organized by the Ermanno Casoli Foundation. This year the Bianco-Valente artist duo will be the protagonist and for the occasion they have created the workshop entitled “The palce where I live”, curated by our artistic director Marcello Smarrelli, which will focus on the function that places exercise within us.

Artists and participants will re-read and reinterpret the automotive, tourist, geographical maps and photos that the children will have gathered, during the summer, together with their families. With the maps cut and gathered randomly, new ones will be built, testifying to the individual stories of each participant, from which it will clearly emerge that the story of the life of each of us consists of the interweaving of places and experiences made during our journey, which in turn intertwine with the places and experiences of many other people.

PRESS RELEASE

Through this specific outdoor activity and faithful to its primary objective of creating and encouraging dialogue between both the artistic-cultural sphere and the industrial one, the FEC promotes an in-depth knowledge of the Italian and international cultural heritage, allowing, through the language of art, to strengthen creativity and lateral thinking. Guided by Marcello Smarrelli, the group will visit the Pesaro Civic Museums, the exhibition “Agostino Iacurci Tracing Vitruvio. Dream journey between the pages of De Architectura and the spaces of the Pescheria Visual Arts Center where the personal exhibition of the artist Matteo Fato entitled “Night Scene On The Sea” is hosted. Finally, the artist Luigi Carboni will open his atelier to tell about his experience with art, both as a professor at the Urbino Academy of Fine Arts, and as an artista as well.

The initiative also represents an important opportunity for socializing and building a group identity based on the sharing of social and cultural experiences and values. Making art an ethical model of behavior thus becomes a goal that is not only educational but socially responsible.

Smarrelli’s intervention will focus on the benefits of art for the company, its ability to become an instrument of innovation of personal identity and activator of more effective behaviors; Art as a way to renew learning and knowledge creation, a means to innovate physical space, products and business processes; Art as a new perspective to conceive competitive advantage.

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On Tuesday, 14th of May, our artistic director Marcello Smarrelli will be a guest of Urbino Fine Arts Academy leading the talk intitled “The form of error” with the artist Nicola Samorì, in continuity with his personal exhibition held at the Pescheria Pesaro Visual Arts Center in the summer of 2017.
At the meeting, organized by prof. Sebastiano Guerrera as part of his painting techniques course, the artist Matteo Fato and the art critic Alberto Zanchetta will participate. A working class for selected students will follow on May the 15th.
The event is organized in collaboration with Fondazione Pescheria – Centro Arti Visive and it is reserved for students of the Urbino Fine Arts Academy.

FEC artistic director Smarrelli will present the activities that characterize the Foundation, contextualizing them within the history of art in a targeted, exhaustive path, which highlighted, through significant examples, how art can no longer be identified with a material product, but it becomes a place of meeting, dialogue and comparison managed by the artist according to his own methodologies.

The Ermanno Casoli Foundation continues the collaboration with the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart of Milan with a classic that is now in its fourth edition: HAND, the workshop by Francesca Grilli, which offers to the Master’s students in Arts Management the opportunity to live a training experience already tried and tested in the corporate environment, addressing and analyzing their contents and methods. The novelty: it will be all in English.

HAND # 4, curated by Marcello Smarrelli, is part of the course directed by Prof. Francesco Tedeschi and coordinated by Prof. Chiara Paolino, Business Organization researcher and author, together with Marcello Smarrelli and Deborah Carè, of the book “Innovare l’impresa con l’arte. Il metodo della Fondazione Ermanno Casoli” (Innovating enterprises through art. The Fondazione Ermanno Casoli method), published in 2018 by the EGEA Publishing House.

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The Premio Ermanno Casoli is celebrating its 20^th anniversary: the Fondazione Ermanno Casoli foundation is inaugurating a special edition of the Prize on Saturday 13^th April at 5:00 pm with the site-specific artwork The Relay, by artist Patrick Tuttofuoco.

Tuttofuoco’s large neon light installation revolves around the most important themes that characterise the artist’s research: family relationships and generational exchanges, the mechanisms and bonds that characterise and bring together communities and the study of territories. The title makes explicit reference to the relay race: the act of receiving something and being able to pass it on to another human being becomes a metaphor for exchange, generosity and recognition, but also the changing of generations and life itself. The simple gesture of holding an object in one’s hands is expanded upon and shown in all its stages, thereby giving a spatial dimension to the notion of time.

The Relay will be donated to the Museo Premio Ermanno Casoli 1998-2007, which will be inaugurated on the same day within the Santa Lucia monumental complex of Serra San Quirico (Ancona).

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Invited by the Rotary Club of Alba, Wednesday, February the 27th, at the Palazzo Banca D’Alba (Cuneo province), the FEC decennial experience was told by the three guests through practical examples of artistic interventions in companies ispired on the book “Innovare l’impresa con l’arte. Il metodo della Fondazione Ermanno Casoli”, which they presented showing each one the issues related to their professional environment. President Elica Francesco Casoli told about the benefits that the presence of the Foundation and its activities have brought to the company, highlighting the need, in the business world, to conceive competitive advantage through art in a new way; Professor and Researcher Chiara Paolino highlighted the ability of art to become an instrument of personal identity innovation and activator of more effective behaviors as well as a way to renew learning, creation of knowledge and to innovate the working space ; finally, the art historian and FEC artistic director Marcello Smarrelli highlighted how the curator’s role is crucial to project and implement the artistic interventions inside the company, looking at art as a system of knowledge transmissions, democratic and circular, recognizing in this a very powerful means of formation.

Friday the 1st of February 2019, at 4 pm, at the Delloiacono’s COMUNICA headquarters in Pescara, will be held When to collect are the companies, the last meeting of the project Start your collection promoted by Fondazione Aria, conceived and organized by Deliacono COMUNICA in collaboration with Collezione da Tiffany / Collection at Tiffany’s. With the aim of providing the basic tools to learn about the art market through a series of workshops, meetings and guided tours, the project investigated the issues inherent in starting a collection: from market dynamics to the first purchase up to the creation of a private or corporate contemporary art collection.

On the same occasion, given the meeting’s topic dedicated to corporate collecting, with case-history on private and corporate collection, on Friday 1st February 2019 the Ermanno Casoli Foundation presents the book I Innovare l’impresa con l’arte. Il metodo della Fondazione Ermanno Casoli | Innovating the company with art. The method of the Ermanno Casoli Foundation, published by Egea in 2018.

The comparison, opened by the institutional greetings of the Minister for Cultural Heritage and Activities Professor Alberto Bonisoli, will focus not only on what currently the art, in the broadest sense of the term, is able to generate, but also on the designs and synergies that this sector is able to guarantee.

The 17 educational institutions Cians (Academy of Fine Arts “Aldo Galli” of Como, Academy of Fine Arts and Design Poliarte of Ancona, Academy of Fine Arts “GB Tiepolo” of Udine, Academy of Costume and Fashion of Rome, Italian Academy of Art, Fashion and Design of Florence, Accademy of Fine Arts, SantaGiulia of Brescia, IAAD – the Italian University of Design, IED – European Institute of Design of Milan, Istituto Marangoni of Milan, Istituto Modartech of Pontedera (PI), IUAD – Academy of Fashion in Naples, LABA – Free Academy of Fine Arts in Brescia, LABA – Free Academy of Fine Arts in Florence, NABA – New Academy of Fine Arts in Milan, RUFA – Rome University of Fine Arts in Rome, Sae Institute in Milan, Saint Louis College of Music of Rome) will bring to the discussion table the requests of a population of over twenty thousand users that includes first of all Italian and foreign students and to follow, teachers and employees.

The works, opened by the artistic director of Macro Asilo Giorgio de Finis, introduced by the president Cians arch. Fabio Mongelli and moderated by the philosopher Nicolas Martino, will be anticipated by the report of a representative of the Ministry of Education, University and Research, in view of the assembly of the States General Afam (High artistic and musical training) scheduled for next February. Following the reports of the lawyer. Anna Rita Fioroni, president of Confcommercio Professioni (Professional designer: skills and qualification of the changing market), of the arch. Dario Curatolo, member of the Adi Steering Committee (outline of the project, the Italian way), of dr. Marco Tortoioli Ricci, president of Aiap (The pedagogy of the project), of Dr. Sofia Gnoli, journalist and fashion expert (Marketing and fashion: the heritage and the brand), by dr. Marcello Smarrelli, Ermanno Casoli Foundation artistic director (Innovating the company with art), by dr. Cesare Biasini Selvaggi, Exibart editorial director (New professional opportunities for those leaving the creativity factories). The conclusion will be preceded by a space dedicated to the contributions of Miur / Afam representatives and Cians Institutions.

In this particular occasion the official website Cians will be presented: www.ciansedu.it.

On Thursday 22nd November 2018 from 10:30 am to 12:30 pm, the artwork Mass age, message, mess age (Elica 2018), produced by artist Elena Mazzi for the 17th edition of the Ermanno Casoli Prize, one of the most important Italian prizes in the field of contemporary art, will be inaugurated in the Fabriano headquarters of Elica.

The workshop that was held in Fabriano last June saw Diego Agostini (a trainer specialised in management training from the company Commitment) work with 20 Elica employees, who had been asked by the artist to select words taken from everyday management jargon. The aim was to draft a glossary to be used in a specifically modified version of the game of Chinese whispers, thereby providing a practical example of the interruptions and distractions that can occur when a message is to be transmitted from a sender to a recipient. The participants created devices aimed at facilitating or encouraging verbal communication by assembling original, albeit functional objects with materials typical of the production of Elica.

The objects and words were used to produce an environmental installation entitled Mass age, message, mess age (Elica 2018), a sculpture composed of two cast aluminium elements, namely the sum of the ten communication devices produced during the training activity, and a wall painting containing the words selected and “played with” during the game of Chinese whispers.

The book Innovare l’impresa con l’arte. Il metodo della Fondazione Ermanno Casoli by Deborah Carè, Chiara Paolino and Marcello Smarrelli, with preface by Pier Luigi Celli, will be presented on Friday, 2nd November 2018, from 4 to 5 pm, in Turin, within the framework of the 25th edition of ARTISSIMA.

The book, published by the Egea publishing house, aims at promoting good practices in the organisation of art events within enterprises by discussing the most recent theoretical approaches regarding the relationship between art and business while analysing the implementation of the very “method” devised by the Fondazione Ermanno Casoli foundation, based on its ten-year experience with important Italian companies, and similar methods adopted at an international level.

The presentation, which will take place at the Book Corner of the fair, will feature authors Chiara Paolino – Company Organisation researcher at the Cattolica University of Milan, Marcello Smarrelli – Artistic Director of FEC and artist Marinella Senatore.

Use the entry ticket to the Fair to access the presentation

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Marcello Smarrelli – FEC artistic director –  participates at the What’s Art for? What is the purpose of art today ? talk. The research-action path, conceived and curated by Catterina Seia, started at ArtVerona 2016 with Anna Somers Cocks,  The Art Newspaper director,  ends with this appointment in which it will be discuss how art plays an important role in everyday life and in the construction of the new generations’ thinking. The results of this survey will be shared with exponents of the art world, of the enterprise and scholars, together with the students of the Academy of Fine Arts of Verona, coordinated by Professor Elena Ciresola.

www.artverona.it

Thursday 13^th September 2018 will see the Fondazione Ermanno Casoli (FEC) foundation present, at the headquarters of the 24 Ore Business School of Milan, a new event belonging to the E-STRAORDINARIO cycle of workshops, curated by Marcello Smarrelli, which will focus on Elena Mazzi, winner of the 17^th edition of the Premio Ermanno Casoli prize. On this occasion, the FEC – which has been a partner of the 24 Ore Business School since 2012 – will propose to the students of the Master’s Degree in Economy and Management of Art and Cultural Heritage the Mass age, message, mess age project by artist Elena Mazzi, with the help of Diego Agostini, a trainer specialising in management training.

The Mass age, message, mess age workshop, launched by the artist in 2015 as a work in progress to shed light on the dynamics underlying communication strategies, analyses in depth the transmission, reception, distortion and processing of messages.

The students will be asked to pinpoint the words belonging to the everyday language of management in order to compile a glossary and create elements that can facilitate or hinder verbal communication through the creative, albeit functional assembly of objects made of various materials. The chosen words and the resulting devices will be used in a performance inspired by the game of Chinese whispers.

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Patrick Tuttofuoco will be the protagonist of the 6th edition of E-STRAORDINARIO for Kids, the project by Fondazione Ermanno Casoli dedicated to the children aged between 6 and 10 of Elica employees and curated by Marcello Smarrelli, which will take place on Thursday 6th September at the Elica Headquarters in Fabriano.

The Family Feeling project will see Tuttofuoco analyse, together with 50 children, the concept of family, namely the first form of social organisation understood as a group of individuals bound by kinship ties or a sense of belonging (to the school, the workplace, a group of friends, etc.), and the role it plays in the definition of one’s identity, thereby leading to a reflection on the importance of interpersonal relationships and the growth processes that transcend the mere biological family.

The artist will build upon the analysis of one of the most popular devices of Art History, namely the portrait, and will invite the participants to experience the many forms of this artistic genre by experimenting with its different approaches, media and techniques.

Moreover, Tuttofuoco will select a series of drawings made during the workshop, which will be reproduced on the body of a model of cooker hood produced by Elica. The resulting sculptures will thus make part of a large choral artwork symbolising the great Elica family, which is composed of the people who work there and their children.

Create amazing photos able to subvert the laws of physics by playing with objects, people, space and gravity. However, the real challenge is being creative from the standpoint of vision, overturning the usual understanding of things by exploring new, hidden and original realities.

How can I participate?
Take a picture of reality while upsetting the perspective, give a name to it and share it on your Instagram profile with #SwitchTheRules and the mention to the dedicated official page @elicarianuova.

A panel composed of Cristina Casoli (President of Fondazione Ermanno Casoli), Francesco Casoli (President of Elica), Maria Claudia Clemente (architect, Studio Labics), Fabrizio Crisà (designer), Alessandro Dandini de Sylva (Artistic Director of Fondazione Malaspina), Rä Di Martino (artist) and Marcello Smarrelli (Artistic Director of Fondazione Ermanno Casoli) will select the best photos, which will be included in an exhibition curated by Alessandro Dandini de Sylva and taking place in Rome from 25^th to 27^th October 2018, in the rooms of Pastificio Cerere.

All photos with #SwitchTheRules and mention @elicarianuova will have to be published on their (public) Instagram profile no later than 16^th September. The users whose work will be selected for the exhibition will be contacted by the organisers, for their photos to be sent via email.

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On Wednesday 25^th July 2018, Fondazione Ermanno Casoli (FEC) will present, at the headquarters of ISTUD (Istituto Studi Direzionali) in Milan, Asap Hub, a new E-STRAORDINARIO event that will focus on artist Alessandro Dandini de Sylva, curated by Marcello Smarrelli.

Dandini de Sylva will work with a group of teachers, researchers and project managers of ISTUD, the most relevant private Business School of Italy, founded in 1970 by Confindustria and a group of large Italian and multinational companies that included Olivetti, Pirelli and IBM. The workshop, which builds upon a study on photographic mistakes, is entitled Accidenti. By use of a series of experiments carried out with the avail of instant film, the participants will delve into the topics of control, randomness, abstraction and the representation of landscapes. The activities will revolve around the simplicity of visual perception and a quasi-artisanal printing technique, which will underlie a deep reflection on the nature of photography.

At the end, the produced photographs will be featured in a exhibition at the headquarters of ISTUD, and will make part of a single, multifaceted artwork that will remind participants of the importance of working together without forgetting one’s individual background, which is paramount in a highly professional and intellectual organisation such as ISTUD.

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Visionair is a small architecture, a mysterious object that invites the visitors to enter. The interior is an enveloping space: a large video on the floor, reflected on the side walls, immerses the visitor in a surreal and upside-down dimension of reality.

The idea of Visionair comes from a reflection on the meaning of the inversion of the point of view, which is the concept underlying the recent researches carried out by Elica.

The installation, curated by Marcello Smarrelli, completely independent from the context in terms of language and materials, finds a strong dialectic relationship with the portico of Cà Granda, from which it mutates its own geometric and spatial matrix.

Visionair is part of a research that Labics has been carrying out since some years on the relationship between structure and space.

Watch the video

16^th-22^nd april h. 10:00-24:00
23^rd-27^th april h. 10:00-22:00
28^th april h. 10:00-18:00

Innovare l’impresa con l’arte. Il metodo della Fondazione Ermanno Casoli is the book’s title; it is published by Egea, and will be presented on Tuesday, April 10th 2018, at 16.30, in Milan. The venue will be Sala San Paolo G.129, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore.

The presentation will be introduced by Prof. Domenico Bodega, Dean of the Department of Economics of Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, and the moderator will be Marco Carminati, art historian and Sole 24 Ore journalist. Besides the authors, Francesco Casoli, Elica President and artista Ettore Favini will take part to the meeting.

During an informal meeting and open to participants, the authors will talk about the main topics of the book: how businesses are benefited by art, the art ability to be a tool for personal identity innovation and a trigger of more effective behaviors; art as a way to renew learning and knowledge creation, as a way to innovate the physical space, the products and the enterprise processes, that is a new way to conceive the competitive advantage through art.

Free entry on a first come first served basis

Sissi enriches 10x10xFEC, the album celebrating  the 10^th anniversary of Fondazione Ermanno Casoli, composed by the images of 10 artists –  Francesco Arena, Francesco Barocco, Chiara Camoni, Danilo Correale, Ettore Favini, Anna Franceschini, Francesca Grilli, Diego Marcon, Andrea Mastrovito, and Sissi as well –  who personally interpret the number 10.

“The poster’s image announcing the project was one of our 2003 works entitled After Love, inspired by Buster Keaton’s short movie One Week, which narrates the surreal and comic vicissitudes related to the construction of a prefabricated house. We made a scale clay model of the house and set it in the characteristic winter climate recalling Christmas.”  Vedovamazzei

The five sound tracks forming the sound pièce content produced by the students in collaboration with the artist, will be installed in the Gallery of the Academy of Fine Arts space located in Urbino, from 4 to 15 December 2017 with the following opening hours: Monday – Friday from 10 am to 6 pm and Saturdays from 9 am to 12 am.

Dispayed participants:

Laura Affatato, Marco Almonti, Lorenzo Bartolucci, Vladimir Bertozzi, Andrea Betti, Elena Buttinelli, Chiara Cairone, Carolina Campanelli, Emanuela Caponi, Eva Rebecca Cucchi, Luana D’Alfonso, Elisa del Pero, Francesca del Nio, Emilio Giacomelli, Vito Jon Bove, Lorenzo Lembo, Marco Lombardi, Alex David Luchetti, Anita Lonzi, Domiziana Luzii, Davide Magrini, Silvia Mantellini, Amedeo Mencarini, Katherine Mercedes, Matilde Morri, Maria Grazia Mortilla, Laura Nardin, Cristina Palmisani, Valentina Sammaciccia, Laura Tiberi, Nadia Tritarelli, Hannah von Call.

The new image created by the artist Anna Franceschini in two different versions enriches the 10x10xFEC album that celebrates 10 years of the Ermanno Casoli Foundation (2007-2017).

During the year, the homepage will host the invited artists’ images: Francesco Arena, Francesco Barocco, Chiara Camoni, Danilo Correale, Ettore Favini, Anna Franceschini, Francesca Grilli, Diego Marcon, Andrea Mastrovito, and Sissi.

30^th and 31^st October 2017 will see the Ermanno Casoli Foundation and the Academy of Fine Arts of Urbino present Francesca Grilli’s HAND, curated by Marcello Smarrelli, at the Academy headquarters. HAND, which is a working class for the students of the Academy, was developed within the framework of the Arte, tra antropologia e orientamento sinestetico (Art at the crossroads of anthropology and synesthetic orientation) project, launched in May 2016 by the Visual Arts Department and conceived by professor Massimo Vitangeli. This peculiar educational programme has seen the cooperation of curators and artists such as Filippo Berta, Angel Moya Garcia, Andrea Nacciarriti and Eugenio Viola, who worked on a series of activities aimed at involving participants.

Two public events will take in Urbino, at the Academy headquarters in via dei Maceri 2:

Monday 30^th October 2017, from 10.00 a.m. to 12.00 a.m.
A conference entitled Innovare l’impresa con l’arte. Il metodo della Fondazione Ermanno Casoli (Modernising businesses by use of art. The Ermanno Casoli Foundation method)

with the following speakers:
Marcello Smarrelli, Ermanni Casoli Foundation Artistic Director
Umberto Palestini, Director of the Academy
Massimo Vitangeli, Visual Arts Professor

Tuesday 31^st October 2017, at 6.00 p.m.
The inauguration of Francesca Grilli’s Faster than Light video installation (2015)

which will be shown until 30^th November during the opening times of the Academy, namely from Monday to Friday from 10.00 a.m. to 6.00 p.m., and Saturday from 9.00 a.m. to 12.00 a.m.

Organized by AXA ART Italia, in collaboration with UNICATT and Intesa San Paolo, the conference represents an important moment for discussion about the importance of corporate collections, an increasingly interesting phenomenon for creating learning and innovation both in managerial and artistic contexts.

With:

Nicola Maccanico, Vice President of CIVITA Association
Italo Carli, General Manager AXA ART
Chiara Paolino, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore
Laura Feliciotti,  Intesa Sanpaolo Cultural Activity
Lucia Tremonte, Lungarotti Foundation
Daniela Brignone, Historical Archive and Peroni Beer Museum
Cristina Remains, Senior Art Expert AXA ART

More info

Ermanno Casoli Foundation invites all Contemporary Art lovers to visit the Corporate Collection of Elica – its main supporter – that represents a way in which art enters the workplaces improving the working environment and getting the community used to the signs of contemporary.
Elica Corporate Collection results from the interaction between employees and internationally renowned artists. The artworks are fully realised during FEC’s workshops, in which contemporary art turns into an educational and methodological tool, contributing to improve working places and innovation.
Elica Corporate Collection is included into Global Corporate Collection (2015), a volume dedicated to the 100 best artistic corporate collection worldwide.

Guided tours will be available at 10 am, 11 am and 12 am on October 14th, for groups of  10 people maximum.  Reservation required no later than Wednesday 11th October by writing to: segreteria@fondazionecasoli.org

More info:
Cristina Terzoni
Production
+39 0732 6104257 | +39 345 6420254

On 28 and 29 September, the last stage of ArtLab 17 will be held in Mantua, under the title Laboratori Culturali: the two planned days will be a laboratory, a real shared design exercise with the most qualified experts and industry professionals in view of the European Year of Cultural Heritage and its presentation at the Forum of Culture in December 2017 in Milan.

This year, as usual, ArtLab’s program will also be complemented with FattidiCultura, a promotional event at the 4th edition sponsored by Consortium Pantacon, which hosts reflections, comparisons and experiences related to the regeneration of physical and immaterial spaces in urban and non-urban contexts through languages of culture.

The Ermanno Casoli Foundation participates in the prestigious international contest Corporate Art Awards, 2017 edition, prize which identifies, values and promotes the best collaborations between both worlds, business and art.

The aim is to promote the best practices that link the business world and art, and to emphasize the importance of art as a profound expression of corporate social responsibility.

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For the fifth E-STRAORDINARIO for Kids edition, artists Perino & Vele have conceived The Big Archive, a workshop that aims at building a temporary archive by overlapping wooden boxes, which are usually used to collect, ship, and deposit various items, from farming products to archeological finds.

By leveraging the symbolic value of these boxes, the kids taking part to the workshop – to which, with Elica employees’ children, will participate children from the Fabriano bilingual kindergarten Iris Garden – will be encouraged to create papier-maché objects, an old artistic technique that Perino & Vele re-processed; later, the objects will be arranged in the boxes, which will be piled and will compose a big archive, The Big Archive. On the front of the piled boxes, kids will draw an iconic papier-maché image, and will be aided by the artists.

The project has a preliminary step of cooperation between parents and children: they will have to collect any kind of paper material useful to build an archive: from newspapers to magazines, from medical prescriptions to ice-cream paper, from train tickets to shopping tickets, from comics to old exercise books. The idea is melting different materials that tell our life, which is made both of habits and daily gestures, and of reports or historical events, which often intertwine with our experiences, in a wider choral tale.

The workshop will finish with the installation and public opening  of the artwork The Big Archive.

A new image by Ettore Favini, entitled “Project for a Carpet”,  enriches the album 10x10xFEC. The artist explains:

“I combined, as in a carpet’s weaving project, all the artists who worked with FEC in these 10 years, everyone is represented by a colour and intertwined in the warp of the 52 year’s weeks.”

10x10xFEC is the album celebrating  the 10^th anniversary of Fondazione Ermanno Casoli (2007-2017). It is composed by the images of 10 artists, who personally interpret the number 10.

During the year, the homepage will host the invited artists’ images: Francesco Arena, Francesco Barocco, Chiara Camoni, Danilo Correale, Ettore Favini, Anna Franceschini, Francesca Grilli, Diego Marcon, Andrea Mastrovito, and Sissi.

To celebrate Fondazione Ermanno Casoli’s tenth anniversary (2007 – 2017), we asked 10 artists to personally interpret the number 10.

The delicate and intimate image by Francesco Arena is illustrated by the artist: 10 as the fingers of our hands. My hand and my daughter Anna’s one. 10 fingers grasp and do. 10 fingers give a high 5. 10 fingers to learn to count.

During the year, the homepage will host the invited artists’ images: Francesco Arena, Francesco Barocco, Chiara Camoni, Danilo Correale, Ettore Favini, Anna Franceschini, Francesca Grilli, Diego Marcon, Andrea Mastrovito, and Sissi.

To celebrate Fondazione Ermanno Casoli’s tenth anniversary (2007 – 2017), we asked 10 artists to personally interpret the number 10.

During the year, the homepage will host the invited artists’ images: Francesco Arena, Francesco Barocco, Chiara Camoni, Danilo Correale, Ettore Favini, Anna Franceschini, Francesca Grilli, Diego Marcon, Andrea Mastrovito, and Sissi.

To celebrate Fondazione Ermanno Casoli’s tenth anniversary (2007 – 2017), we asked 10 artists to personally interpret the number 10.

The image that Chiara Camoni came up with arises from one of the pictures that were taken to document Il Grande Baccano (Big Bang). Ovvero 763 strumenti per 763 bambini; this was a project that was carried out last year with kindergarten children and students from first and second grade from the three Fabriano primary schools. The project engaged 763 children.

The artist declared:
I observed the images from Il Grande Baccano, and lingered on a series of portraits of the post-performance resting instruments.
Every child, before leaving, placed their instruments on the square cobblestones. This generated spontaneous agglomerates, some of them were put in order, some others were randomly arranged: they created a bizarre and fluorescent still life.
One of these, a rounded instrument, reminded me of a zero. All I had to do was adding a one before it.

During the year, the homepage will host the invited artists’ images: Francesco Arena, Francesco Barocco, Chiara Camoni, Danilo Correale, Ettore Favini, Anna Franceschini, Francesca Grilli, Diego Marcon, Andrea Mastrovito, and Sissi.

To celebrate Fondazione Ermanno Casoli 10^th Anniversary, we asked 10 artists to interpret the number 10 in a personal fashion.

During the year, images of invited artists will be posted in the homepage: Francesco Arena, Francesco Barocco, Chiara Camoni, Danilo Correale, Ettore Favini, Anna Franceschini, Francesca Grilli, Diego Marcon, Andrea Mastrovito, and Sissi.

CERTAIN THINGS is the book that collects and analizes Chiara Camoni’s works, from her beginning till now. The book was presented during the third edition of GRANPALAZZO 2017, an exclusive exhibition-event  taking place outside the usual contemporary art contexts, intended to encourage an authentic dialogue between artists, the audience and art professionals.

The book could not miss the project IL GRANDE BACCANO (Big Bang), commissioned by FEC and curated by Marcello Smarrelli, that was realised with  kindergarten, firt-grade and second-grade school students of Fabriano: a total of 763 children.

More info: Il Grande Baccano (Big Bang) – E-STRAORDINARIO FOR KIDS 2016

On Wednesday, May 24^th, 2017 in Milan, at MUDEC – Museo delle Culture, a new event from the E-STRAORDINARIO workshop cycle curated by Marcello Smarrelli will take place; its protagonist will be Francesca Grilli, an internationally known first-level artist.

On this occasion, FEC proposes to the Master in Economics and Art and Culture Management students a project entitled Hand, which was already carried out in 2015 with a group of entrepreneurs and designed by Piero Tucci, M&D Senior Partner and trainer specialized in HR education and development. Since 2012, FEC has been partner to Sole 24 Ore Business School.

The project aims at giving an educational experience to students within a business environment, by analyzing its contents and modalities.

More info:  E-STRAORDINARIO – HAND di Francesca Grilli | 2015

5×1000 for contemporary art C.F.91029340428

The Game is the movie that artist Danilo Correale realized as he won the Ermanno Casoli Award XIV edition, curated by Marcello Smarrelli; the protagonists were more than eighty employees of three Tuscany-based companies – ColleVilca srl, PR Industrial Srl, and Trigano Spa. They played a three-goal football match, which is an unusual tool to overcome the competition mood featuring traditional football, by fostering participants to adopt a cooperative and aggregative approach. The projection will be replayed on May 4, 5, and 6 from 10.00 am at 9.00 pm; the entry is free.

On May 3^rd, at 6.00 pm at Museo Omero’s Conference Room, Deborah Carè and Marcello Smarrelli, FEC’s art and organizational directors, will participate in a conference on the issue “ART FOR BUSINESS: arte e imprese per un Nuovo Rinascimento” (Art and business for a New Renaissance). Sebastiano Di Diego – economist and Network Advisory CEO, Alessia Tripaldi – Sineglossa Creative Ground art&business supervisor, Raimondo Orsetti –Regione Marche’s Tourism, Culture and Productive Activity Responsible will take part to the meeting. During the meeting, models and good practices will be used to explain the way in which competitiveness and innovation potential within companies can be increased thanks to artistic contributions.

Fondazionecasoli.org  | www.abfestival.it
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To celebrate Fondazione Ermanno Casoli 10^th Anniversary (2007 – 2017), we asked 10 artists close to the Foundation to interpret the number 10 in a personal fashion.

Francesca Grilli launches the new Website, with the first image from the album 10x10xFEC.

Once every 10 days, images of invited artists will be posted in the homepage: Francesco Arena, Francesco Barocco, Chiara Camoni, Danilo Correale, Ettore Favini, Anna Franceschini, Francesca Grilli, Diego Marcon, Andrea Mastrovito, and Sissi.

Fondazione Ermanno Casoli (FEC) expresses its deepest grief for its own President and founder’s demise, Ms. Gianna Pieralisi Casoli.

FEC members and Elica employees liked calling her Signora Gianna. During her lifetime, which was scarred by her husband’s early passing, she turned her commitment and dedication to work into her distinctive features.
In 2007 she founded FEC, which since the very beginning has given insights and steps forward to foster projects that make contemporary art and the enterprise sector meet, by leveraging Ermanno’s strong spiritual legacy. In a very short time, it became a global reference for the topics it deals with.
During the years, thanks to her generosity, several artists have shared FEC’s values and participated in its countless initiatives.

Our art director Marcello Smarrelli was appointed Culture Consultant; he will be working side by side with council member Daniele Vimini, in Pesaro’s Mayor staff. They will organize and coordinate cultural activities in the Pesaro province, as Fondazione Olivieri Pesaro Cultura will be established.

Thursday, November 10th, 2016, Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan

Fondazione Ermanno Casoli (FEC) and Sole 24 Ore Business School confirm their collaboration for the fifth year in a row, through a new E-STRAORDINARIO educational program event. This will take place on Thursday, November 10th with the workshop Esercizi di stile#2 by artist Diego Marcon – curated by FEC art director Marcello Smarrelli – in collaboration with the education and human resources development specialist Luca Varvelli.

The workshop is directed to 34 students from the Sole 24 Ore Master in Economics and Art and Culture Management. It will be held in Milan at Pirelli HangarBicocca, which is an international reference institution for contemporary art. The shared goal is fostering contemporary art as a valuable educational and methodological tool for new professionals that can develop and add value to the Italian art “system”.

Artist Diego Marcon will be the main character of Esercizi di stile#2, which is the workshop title. This is a writing experiment that follows the one carried out in Fabriano in 2015 with a group of entrepreneurs from the Marche region. Participants will be inspired by the homonymous book by and they will be provided with a “basic anecdote” starting from which the will develop three variations related to the linguistic register, the literary genre and the text support. Participants – all Master’s students – will be working in groups; once the work is finished, every contribution will be included in an eBook, an artist book that will be handed out to participants. This project is perfectly in line with Diego Marcon’s poetics, which constantly questions the notions of reality and realism, and investigates the image and language status in the mass media era.

The work that the artist created for the Ermanno Casoli Award XV edition has been selected for the XI Shanghai Biennale

We proudly announce that Disguise, the work that artist Yang Zhenzhong created for the Ermanno Casoli Award XV edition, has been selected for the XI Shanghai Biennale, which will be held from November 12th, 2016 to March 12th, 2017 at the Power Station of Art in Shanghai, and is curated by Raqs Media Collective.

The Award is a commission that Fondazione Ermanno Casoli (FEC) gives to an artist to creating an artwork for a company, with the active participation of employees.
Yang Zhenzhong, as Ermanno Casoli Award winner, has been invited for a two month residency at Elica – a global leader in the production of hoods for household use –Shengzhou (China) plant. There, he held a workshop cycle that involved more than fifty employees, who created the installation that was presented during the Elica Show Room in Shanghai in May 2015.
The project title is Disguise and introduces its audience in a theatrical atmosphere, which is highlighted by a series of masks reproducing the involved employees, and was created by 3D scanning. Each mask was later worn by the very employees in a performance that took place within the company; the relevant documentation was later used to create a video installation.

“I asked employees to wear the mask they had created during the workshop first step through their faces scanning, during their working shift” – the artist tells. “The video shows the employees working and, simultaneously, staging the productive process. They express a kind of performative dynamic action despite they have to respect their roles’ rules within the company. With their faces covered by masks, their movements are always connected to the assembly line but, thanks to this metamorphosis, they acquire the grace of a freedom dance. Differently from what could be thought, the atmosphere during the workshop did not change the daily production potentiality; though, it turned it into a sort of theatre and added spirituality. Personally, this whole practice and creative procedure was a new extraordinary experience”.
We are cheerful that an international event such as the Shanghai Biennale, curated for this edition by a social-issue-sensitive artist collective, has chosen to present the work created by a group of employees within the E-Straordinario program, which is the educational path that FEC created to bring contemporary art into the business sector.

WATCH THE TEASER
More info on Biennial Shangai website

Thursday, September 29th, 2016

On Thursday, September 29th, our Director Deborah Carè participated in ArtLab16 Mantua and joined an interesting roundtable in which different public and private institutions representatives discussed on the relation between Culture and Welfare. They talked about their visions and experiences on the issue Culture and Healthcare aiming at triggering new cultural policies, creating strategic and multidisciplinary alliances to fostering welfare through a bio-psycho-social approach that deems the human development as part of prevention and care strategies. During this meeting, the Director spoke about the Fondazione Ermanno Casoli experience and about the benefits of contemporary art on the business sector.

ArtLab is an event organized by Fondazione Fitzcarraldo. It has reached its eleventh edition and become the main platform for cultural practices and policies innovation, through a structured debate with the creativity and culture system stakeholders. This year, ArtLab16 has developed through various events in Milan, Macerata, Mantua, and Lecce. In Mantua, the Italian Capital of Culture 2016, the ArtLab program was included into the FattidiCultura one, which is a similar cultural event for issues and audiences.

Friday, September 16th, 5:00 pm at Angelini A.C.R.A.F, Ancona headquarters

Artist Andrea Mastrovito (Bergamo, 1978) won the Ermanno Casoli Award, curated by Marcello Smarrelli, which has reached its XVI edition. This award has always symbolized the contamination between art and enterprise. The artist has been awarded with several prizes and is an important voice in both domestic and international contermporary art scene, due to his ground-breaking research, in line with FEC’s values.

The Ermanno Casoli Award XVI edition introduces a new aspect: the activities will be thoroughly carried out in the Ancona Angelini pharmaceutical plant and are included within an educational project arisen from the collaboration between the Foundation and M&D Company, which have worked together for years in different initiatives.

For this occasion, Andrea Mastrovito has conceived a path through art and education that he entitled Vitriol: this term – which is a Latin acronym whose meaning is well known to alchemists: Visita Interiora Terrae Rectificando Invenies Occultum Lapidem namely “Visit the interior of the earth and purifying you will find the hidden stone” – has inspired the artist for the creation of a seven wall-work cycles within the company spaces.

More than 100 Angelini employees were involved in this educational path in which the employees were divided into groups and have contributed to Vitriol making, supported by the artist. This permanent artwork was specifically conceived for their work space. Artist, employees, trainer and curator developed their team work by discussing every step of the project – from its conception to its implementation. They worked side by side during the whole making process.

Mastrovito and more than 100 employees have made 7 wall paintings, by engraving the walls of 7 selected spots inside the plant; they have created a series of figures that were shaped through the pre-existing colors within the wall layers. A real space archeology was unveiled within the layers and in the passage of time.

For the work concept, the artist was inspired by medicine and pharmaceutics; particularly, he focused on the chemical process that turns an active principle into a powder to be used in the pharmaceutical industry. The project hint arises from the artist observing the chemical processes observation – complex and rich in steps – through which active principles powders are obtained. Finally, for this reason, the powders from the engravings were collected and exhibited together with the artwork, as if they were the “soul” of the wall-engraved figure, its “active principle” –, reconnecting to Angelini’s activity.

Vitriol will be presented to the audience, the press and the institution representatives on September 16th, at 5:00pm at Angelini A.C.R.A.F. Ancona, as a further testimony of the advantages brought by the art-enterprise interaction.

On the occasion of Vitriol opening, a whole process documented publication will be presented, with texts by Gianna Pieralisi (FEC President), Deborah Carè (FEC Director), Piero Tucci (M&D Senior partner), Marcello Smarrelli (FEC Art director) and Francesco Nucci (neurosurgeon and Fondazione VOLUME! President).

Entrance upon invitation or subscription at: segreteria@fondazionecasoli.org

Watch the TEASER

Andrea Mastrovito and 100 Angelini’s employees, Vitriol, 2016

Photo credit: Marco Tedeschi and Fabrizio Carotti

A new E-STRAORDINARIO for Kids event with Vedovamazzei, curated by Marcello Smarrelli

Thursday, September 8th, 2016 at Elica’s headquarter in Fabriano

Elica and Fondazione Ermanno Casoli (FEC) have been promoting a new E-STRAORDINARIO for Kids event – an educational workshop cycle dedicated to Elica’s employees’ children. This has become a classic appointment before schools reopening. The project has reached its fourth edition and inspires to E-STRAORDINARIO, the educational program that FEC conceived to bring contemporary art into the business sector. It was successfully experimented in several companies and it revealed to be a valuable educational and methodological tool that is addressed to employee. Thanks to this project, FEC obtained several acknowledgments, including the sponsorship of the Italian Ministry for Arts and Culture and the Cultura+Impresa Award 2014.
One of the most famous couple in the art sector, the duo Vedovamazzei (Stella Scala and Simeone Crispino), will be the main characters of this new highly creative event. This will be held on Thursday, September 8th at the ELICA plant of Fabriano. Vedovamazzei has conceived a workshop entitled SHAPING THE WORLD – Plasmare il mondo, curated by Marcello Smarrelli. Seventy kids, aged 6 to 10, will be asked to reinvent their parents’ working place as an ideal creative space.

The workshop will be divided into three steps: firstly, a preparatory step during which participants will familiarize with the topics of working day and the material that will be used: clay. Secondly, kids will be involved into planning and creating their ideal factory and the relevant most suitable uniform; finally, a conclusive step will be dedicated to arranging the exhibition of their works.

Play, fantasy and dream will be shaped by handling clay, the most classic “artistic” material that art and craft share.
The workshop will develop in this lucid yet highly educational context; it will be carried out in the Elica headquarter of Fabriano, which is the company core and was chosen as ideal observatory to allow kids to familiarizing with their parents’ working place, by participating in their daily activities.

Tuesday and Wednesday, July 19th-20th, 2016 at La Borghesiana (Rome) sport village

Fondazione Ermanno Casoli presents a new E-STRAORDINARIO event, a project curated by Marcello Smarrelli that has been bringing contemporary art to the business sector for years and has been using art as a methodological and educational tool for corporate training.
The new E-STRAORDINARIO event is entitled The Wishfull Map #4 and features artist Pietro Ruffo. It follows the one carried out for Angelini group’s pharmaceutical subsidiary (2015), the one for the students of Master in Art and Culture Economics and Management, held by Sole 24 Ore Business School (2015) and the latest one, for Bellegra (Rome) Banca di Credito Cooperativo, last June. These collective artworks are created with the company employees or students and are included in a wider program that was originated by the collaboration between Fondazione Ermanno Casoli and Piero Tucci, M&D Senior Partner. Such program aims at creating a series of conceptual maps that reflect the values and the vision of businesses through their employees’ activities.

The workshop will involve about 30 employees among officials and managers from the Distribution department of Euler Hermes Italia, a Rome-based trade credit insurance company of the Allianz group. The goal is to strengthen the cooperation and integration spirit among co-workers and to stimulate knowledge contamination through the creation of a collective artwork.
The artist will begin from a very peculiar Earth projection inspired to De L’Isle Equidistant Conic one, which was sketched out by the French astronomer Joseph Nicolas De L’Isle for the first time in 1745.
The Earth projection will be divided into 24 wedges and each participant will be asked to work on a world’s portion and to choose a Country that they will analyze on the basis of the risk evaluation studies five main factors: economic risk, financial risk, commercial risk, political risk and business environmental risk. Every participant will transcript its analysis on the relevant world section by using colors. At the base of each portion, the emblematic characters of the chosen Country currency will be drawn.
During the two-day workshop, Pietro Ruffo and Euler Hermes Italia employees will create a map that will artistically revisit, in their shape and colors, the most common risk maps in which every color will match a Country’s stability level.

The final result will be a collective artwork, an artistic synthesis of Euler Hermes Italia Universe that simulates the conic shape of the Euler Hermes Roman headquarter entrance layout.

On Thursday, July 7th, at Treia (MC) City Theatre, a meeting has been held with the public and private institutions stakeholders operating in the Apennines territory. They discussed the new territorial development dynamics and showed good practices examples. Deborah Carè, as Brand Communication Manager of Elica Group and FEC Director, presented the Fondazione’s activities and their benefits on Elica – a leader company that produces hoods for household use and is the main FEC sponsor.

Fondazione Symbola has committed for years to fostering a quality- and Italian excellence-oriented development model, through several activities that include the Soft Economy Festival; this fourth edition has been organized in collaboration with Consorzio Aaster, Comune di Macerata and the Universities of Camerino and Macerata; more than 120 speakers from the economics, academy, politics and association sectors have taken the floor during subject-specific roundtables, conferences and demonstrative moments. The Festival main topics were the strength of culture and creativity as development factors, the digital factor potentiality as innovation trigger and the Apennines as labs to discuss about the role of mountains in the Mediterranean region.

More info: www.symbola.net

Our director Deborah Carè joined ContemporaneaMarche, an event that took place on Friday, June 24th, 2016 at Centro Arti Visive Pescheria in Pesaro and was organized by Regione Marche – Culture Department with the purpose of promoting a dialog with institutions and contemporary art stakeholders operating in the Marche area; this has triggered a shared process for creating a network of the most interesting contexts that leads to building a precise contemporary identity of Marche.

By identifying ten sectorial categories, the Region authorities invited the relevant spokespeople to summarize a project proposal. FEC director, Deborah Carè, as the Foundations spokesperson, asked the Regional authorities to act as a bridge to fill the regional-international gap, and to turn into a reference for the different (public and private) stakeholders operating on the local level; this would allow them to interacting with the Italian Culture Institutes network abroad. Our art director, Marcello Smarrelli, coordinated the meeting.

More info: ContemporaneaMarche|10 proposte

Fondazione Ermanno Casoli presents a new E-STRAORDINARIO event, a project curated by Marcello Smarrelli that has been bringing contemporary art to the enterprise world for years, by using it as an educational and methodological tool for enterprise training.

On Saturday and Sunday, June 11th and 12th, 2016 E-STRAORDINARIO will be held at Convento di San Francesco, in Bellegra (Rome), with artist Pietro Ruffo, who is holding a workshop entitled The Wishfull Map #3; this is directed to 35 employees of Bellegra’s Banca di Credito Cooperativo and will aim at strengthening the essential values representing BCC culture, by creating an artwork. The project is triggered by the collaboration between Fondazione Ermanno Casoli and Piero Tucci, M&D Senior Partner, who is a trainer specialized in human resources training and development.

The artist will take a Fifties 10.000 Lire note and participants will redesign and magnify it. The resulting note will be turned into a map, upon which they will set, on verso and recto sides, several chromatic items: projections, analyses, forecasts and calculations from a hypothetical financial planning that the bank employees will hypothesize for a local business’ development and growth plan. Furthermore, this note has a strong symbolic value to Bellegra’s BCC: its thirty-two founding partners founded the Bellegra Rural Credit Cooperative back in 1959 by depositing 10.000 Liras each. This is how a pioneer company was established; one that laid the foundations of a modern bank that has been able to boost the economies of the high Sacco Valley towns, and has never neglected the related human and social aspects.

The final result will be the creation of a wide collective artwork, which expresses the work and the values of every employee of Bellegra’s BCC, as well as their territorial acting modalities. The artwork will be permanently exhibited in the San Vito Romano branch.

Artist Andrea Mastrovito (Bergamo, 1978) gains the eminent Ermanno Casoli Award, curated by Marcello Smarrelli; the prize has reached its XVI edition and has always been the symbol of the contamination between art and enterprise. The artist had already won the New York Prize back in 2007 and had been invited to exhibit in high profile museums, such as MAXXI in Rome, Museo del Novecento in Milan, Manchester Art Gallery and MAD in New York; thanks to his ground-breaking artistic research, he is known within the domestic and foreign contemporary art scene.

This Award edition introduces a new aspect: besides being included in the E-straordinario training program, the activities will be thoroughly carried out in the Ancona Angelini pharmaceutical plant. This is possible thanks to Fondazione Ermanno Casoli and M&D training company collaboration.

The aim is involving more than 100 Angelini workers, who will be asked to create a permanent artwork along with the artist. This artwork will be specifically conceived for their working place. Artist, employees, curator and trainer will collaborate during the different project steps – from its inception to its implementation – and will be working side by side as they create the artwork, which should be finished before the summer of 2016.

Mastrovito conceived this work by taking inspiration from medicine and pharmaceutics; he focused especially on the chemical process that turns active principles into the powders used for pharmaceutical goals.

The project hint arose from the artist observing the complex and long chemical processes through which active principle powders are obtained. Starting from a recent series of works, Mastrovito – together with more than one hundred employees – will engrave the walls of some specific places within the plant. A series of figures will be engraved through the pre-existing wall layers colors, unveiling a real space archeology in the stratification and in the passage of time. The powders that will be extracted from the walls will be collected and exhibited as a constitutive part of the final work. They will represent the “soul” of the engraved figures, their “active principle” and the strong relation with Angelini productive activity.

Starting from Mastrovito’s inputs, the employees will engrave the walls according to a FEC-consolidated methodology that includes the mediation of Piero Tucci, M&D Senior Partner; his role is an essential one to facilitate the relation between artist and employees and to turn the creative processes hints into behaviors useful to the enterprise activities. Every person involved in the educational activity will be an active part of a shared and collective artwork creation.

Here you are Il Grande Baccano (Big Bang), a Chiara Camoni’s project curated by Marcello Smarrelli and realized by Fondazione Ermanno Casoli with Confindustria Ancona and Comune di Fabriano. This project is included within E-straordinario for Kids program and is directed to kindergarten and primary school first and second class students. It aims at encouraging the reuse of industrial waste, by stimulating children’s creativity and fantasy.

With the imperfect materials that Fabriano territory companies provide, 763 children from I.C. zona est Aldo Moro, I.C. Fernanda Imondi Romagnoli and I.C. Marco Polo schools created 763 percussion instruments that, directed by Chiara Camoni, will be played in a gradual crescendo during the public performance that will take place on Wednesday, April 27th at 10.00am at Piazza del Comune in Fabriano. They will produce a real joy explosion: Il Grande Baccano (Big Bang).

The performance video documentation and the instruments will be included in a wide installation that will open on May 7th, at 10:30am, at Pinacoteca Civica Bruno Molajoli in Fabriano. Visitors will be able to see it until June 12th.

Our art director, Marcello Smarrelli, joined Contaminazioni. Manifattura, cultura e turismo verso una nuova sinergia (Contaminations. Manufacture, culture and tourism toward a new synergy), an event that took place on Thursday, April 14th, 2016 at Sala Caldart in Palazzo Doglioni Calmas, Belluno.

This meeting was organized by Confindustria Belluno Dolomiti and aimed at fostering and developing contamination paths between manufacturing companies and the culture stakeholders, as well as preserving and enhancing the landscape and artistic heritage.

Marcello Smarrelli participated in the roundtable about international art-enterprise synergy and spoke about the FEC experience and its relevant activities, which turn contemporary art into an educational and methodological tool improving working places and innovation.

On the occasion of end-of-year festivities, Elica and Fondazione Ermanno Casoli present Elica Love(s) Difference: this project was conceived by artist Michelangelo Pistoletto and the cultural association he founded, Love Difference, and is curated by Marcello Smarrelli, FEC art director.

On Thursday, December 17th, at 5pm, the installation will open. Elica’s employees and institutional representatives will participate. The neon writings composing the installation will be lighting up the Fabriano company’s headquarter façade for more than one year. The neon writing will be one: “Love Difference”, an invitation to respect and mutual understanding among cultures, a principle and an ideal upon which our societies should be founded. The writing will be translated into 12 languages: French, Arabic, Portuguese, Japanese, Creole, Italian, English, Spanish, Polish, Romanian, Croatian, and Hebrew.

This project strengthens and highlights the strong collaboration between Elica/Fondazione Ermanno Casoli and Michelangelo Pistoletto/Love Difference, which was successfully started on the occasion of the Breathe Difference program, an initiative cycle that took place at the company Showroom during Milan Expo 2015.

Fondazione Ermanno Casoli’s director Deborah Carè will join the training course “Cultura, creatività, innovazione – Creare valore con le industrie culturali e creative” (Culture, creativity, innovation – Creating value with the cultural and creative industries) which is sponsored by Regione Marche and Fondazione Symbola, in collaboration with PlayMarche Srl and Progetto DCE PlayMarche. The meeting will take place on Friday, October 9th at the University.

The course deals with issues related to knowledge acquisition and skill development for activating and strengthening innovation processes in communication, territory relation, planning, attraction and funding ability within the culture and creative industries.

On this occasion, Deborah Carè will speak about FEC latest year experience of bringing contemporary art to Elica, with the purpose of fostering remarkable innovation and research processes. Collaboration and work sharing among artists and employees enhance classic thinking schemes disruption and trigger mind flexibility, which is essential for developing new ideas that generate cultural and economic growth within the enterprise.

More info:  studiumanistici.unimc.it

For the fourth year in a row, this workshop is curated by Marcello Smarrelli and is directed to the Sole 24 Ore’s Business School Master in Culture and Arts Economics and Management students. This year protagonist will be artist Pietro Ruffo.

The enterprise trainer Piero Tucci will attend the activity day, which will develop starting from the changes implemented by Italian Culture Minister, Dario Franceschini. As a result of these changes, directors and supervisors for the new Ministry mandate have been appointed. The workshop participants –the Master’s students – will receive an Italian Province capital city map each; students shall then identify a museum in that territory – a contemporary art one, preferably – and imagine they are their directors. Participants will have to choose the five guidelines for the museums they are directing; once they identify their “mandate” principles, students will draw on the city map the museum logo or outline, so as the city map overlaps the territory map, ideally embracing it. This image will then be finished through a highly symbolic coloring process: each color will match one of the five guidelines for managing the museum. In this way, the museum “values” will be visually defined. It will be possible to visualize and establish relations among museums, and offer a hypothetical mapping of how museums should be managed in the future.

On the occasion of EXPO 2015, Elica and Fondazione Ermanno Casoli chose to support Save the Children activities on education and food security. They did it by presenting Sillage, a project by artist Ettore Favini curated by Marcello Smarrelli, in the Save The Children pavilion. The project title comes from the perfume terminology: it describes the scent that perfumes leave all around us, which can overcome boundaries and spread to the surrounding environment. In line with this definition, Sillage is a four-step, constantly changing work in progress that gradually transforms and becomes abstract, until it turns into a perfume scent.

Firstly, Favini created some sculptures by using Elica’s hoods shells (Edith, Seashell, Audrey); secondly, 5 kinds of crops have been planted (barley, oat, almond, fennel, anise) inside the sculptures, which have been turned into “vases”; thirdly, the essences that had been growing for months thanks to experts’ knowledge, became a new scent for Marie, the Elica scent diffusor. As the final project step, Ettore Favini designed a special cover for the above mentioned diffusor: a still life deconstructed image obtained by taking a picture of the composition made of the plants that had been growing for the Expo six months. Therefore, Sillage is a complex project: a ground-breaking design product, an artwork, a tool to connect with the Save The Children issues and, generally, to EXPO 2015’s – Feed the Planet, Energy for Life.

The Sillage culminating point will be the launch scheduled for Wednesday, September 30th in Milan, at Palazzo Visconti: a fancy location where more than 150 Elica’s international customers, journalists and several other guests will be present; artist Ettore Favini and Save the Children representatives will participate, as well. Based on the inputs and state passages multiplicity that Sillage proposes, the event will re-create a multisensorial, multiform, and emotional environment.

The third edition of E-STRAORDINARIO for Kids event will be held.

On September 10th, Elisabetta Benassi will lead children to a highly creative workshop. Benassi is an international known Italian artist.
Prototipi (Prototypes) is the workshop title, curated by Marcello Smarrelli: the event will take place at the Elica Headquarter in Fabriano, which is the company core center and an ideal observatory to allow children to getting to know their parents’ work place, by participating in their daily activities. The artist and her mini team will use the Elica prototype experts and designers’ “technical advice”. They will re-use the hoods produced in the company in an imaginary fashion. Children will be “prototype experts” for one day, and will provide the company with a new viewpoint on models, functionalities and possible use of the Elica’s products.

On the occasion of Milan EXPO 2015, on Thursday, June 8th at 6.30pm, at Elica Showroom of via Pontaccio 8 Milan, Elica and Fondazione Ermanno Casoli will present Breathe Difference – Aria Nuova dal Terzo Paradiso (New Air from the Third Heaven), a project by artist Michelangelo Pistoletto and the cultural association he founded, Love Difference. The project is curated by Marcello Smarrelli, FEC art director.

Michelangelo Pistoletto, who is a protagonist of the “impoverished art” movement, in 2003 wrote the “Third Heaven” manifesto and designed its symbol, the Nuovo Segno di Infinito (New Infinite Sign), which is a representation of the infinite mathematical sign. Between the two opposed circles, representations of nature and artifice, a central circle is inserted, representing the Third Heaven generative womb. This is the ideal overcoming of the conflict in which nature and artifice are opposed in the modern society. On the occasion of the exhibition, Pistoletto created a new version of Nuovo Segno di Infinito in mirroring steel, which will be hung inside Elica’s showroom, creating a reflection trick. The work, as the artist explains, “represents the Third Heaven generation, coming after the first heaven, nature, and the second one, artifice. The Third Heaven open project leads science, technology, art, and culture to bring life back to the Earth”.

Pistoletto’s work ideally introduces the issues that will be tackled during the rich program of workshops and meetings that will follow the opening, on June 19th-27th. They will investigate on the relation of mankind, environment, and natural resource exploitation, the EXPO’s core issues. The workshops activities result will be a collective artwork that visitors will be able to see from June 29th to July 4th from 10am to 10pm.

Elica’s space will be turned into a highly involving venue that invites visitors to make a special journey around the topic Breathe Difference – different feeding types. Elica has always been committed to Fondazione Ermanno Casoli in conceiving and promoting initiatives that bring contemporary art to the enterprise sector. Once again, it offers its contribution as a virtuous entrepreneurial stakeholder that is an example of how resources and skills can gain value thanks to the willing to grow.

Breathe Difference – Diverse forme di nutrimento (Different feeding types) is the program title and it will last one week, turning the Showroom into an environment for reflecting on topics such as food and the relation with the other; these topics are dear to Elica, which is a global leader in the production of hoods and in the treatment of household air. Due to this shared vision, Elica decided to make its showroom available to Michelangelo Pistoletto and Love Difference.

The program:

‘Aria Nuova dal Terzo Paradiso’
Opening: Thursday, June 18th, 6.30pm
Dialogue with Michelangelo Pistoletto. The artist will be chatting with Francesco Casoli and Marcello Smarrelli, and will explain the Third Heaven manifesto. Participants will be able to taste the Love Difference ice-cream, which was conceived by the artist and specifically prepared by Osteria la Villetta.

‘Aria di casa’
Friday and Saturday, June 19th- 20th 10.00am/5.00pm
led by Love Difference and snark – space making
This is an experiential workshop that investigates and co-generates the common features of household life, in their different components: welcome, care, creation, and memory. Participants will be asked to observe their own house from different points of view and to share their experiences of home living with the group. This workshop will be based on the co-creation methodology and will be open to 12 participants.

‘Cibo per essere’
Tuesday, June 23rd 6.00pm/9.30pm
in collaboration with Istituto Hoffman.
This is a meeting based on a study method that considers individuals as the totality of four parts: emotions, thoughts, body, and essence. Taste will be used to metaphorically anchor every experience; each part will be matched to a guided tasting. Max participants: 15 people.

‘MAKE+ responsive building for smarter living’
Thursday, June 25th 6.00pm/8.30pm
In collaboration with artway of thinking, Globarch, Open Quadra, KOOBOO Managment, and Xlam Dolomiti.
For the first time in Milan, MAKE+ is presented: this is a system that, based on X-LAM technology, de-composes and re-composes the living space and the building process, to meet the current demand of a truly sustainable construction industry: ecologic, cheap, evolutionary. MAKE+ explains its formula through a graphic narration performance, along an 8 meter wall, inside Elica showroom. Limited entries, reservation required.

‘Frattali e frattaglie’
Saturday, June 27th 4.30pm/6.30pm
This is an experiential workshop that was developed in collaboration with Ludosofici. The path is dedicated to children (3+ years old) and parents, max participants 25. The experience digresses on the topic of the creative evolution of the Universe and will produce an installation that will be exhibited until the project end. Limited entries, reservation required.

Download the Breathe Difference press kit here.

On the occasion of Milan EXPO 2015, Elica and Fondazione Ermanno Casoli presented Sillage, an Ettore Favini’s project curated by Marcello Smarrelli, inside the Save The Children pavilion; the project supports education and food security initiatives carried out by Save The Children.

The term “Sillage” comes from the perfume terminology: it identifies the scent that perfumes leave around us, which is able to overcome boundaries and spread to the surrounding environment. In line with this definition, Sillage is a four-step, constantly changing work in progress, gradually transforming and becoming abstract.

The installation is composed by a series of modular sculptures, which are inspired by the famous Endless column by sculptor Costantin Brancusi, and use three important Elica products (Edith, Seashell, Audrey).

Secondly, the kitchen hood shells are overlapped to create columns and will be used to grow food plants. Thus, constant state changes will take place inside the kitchen hoods: the metal modules will be turned into “vases” that will host a new life. The artist will put some plants inside them; these will be chosen in collaboration with architect Melania Bugiani, and used as a base for food such as barley, oat, almond, fennel, and anise. These are easily farmable plants, which relate to issues dear to Save The Children, and, generally, to EXPO 2015 theme: Feed the Planet, Energy for Life.

During the third step, the plants will be turned into scents by “expert noses”, which will create an essence specifically studied for Marie. As the project conclusive step, Ettore Favini will create a special cover for the above mentioned hood. A still life image, obtained by taking a picture of a composition of the plants that had been growing in the vases for the Expo six months, will be re-produced in a single colored strip that, as a colorful ribbon, will wrap the scent diffusor shell.

This version of Marie will be a limited edition for Save the Children with the new essence and will be presented during an event held in September in Milan.

Ermanno Casoli Award spreads worldwide. The XV edition winner is the Chinese artist Yang Zhenzhong with a project entitled Disguise, curated by Marcello Smarrelli. The award is a commission that the Foundation gives to an artist to create an artwork for a company, with the active participation of its employees. Yang Zhenzhong worked for more than two months to a project in the Shengzhou Elica plant, and engaged tens of employees; the exhibit project will be presented at Elica Showroom in Shanghai on Saturday, May 9th at 5.00pm.

The project title is Disguise and introduces its audience in a theatrical atmosphere, which is highlighted by a series of masks reproducing the involved employees, and was created by 3D scanning. Each mask was later worn by the very employees in a performance that took place within the company; the relevant documentation was later used to create a video installation.

“I asked employees to wear the mask they had created during the workshop first step through their faces scanning, during their working shift” – the artist tells. “The video shows the employees working and, simultaneously, staging the productive process. They express a kind of performative dynamic action despite they have to respect their roles’ rules within the company. With their faces covered by masks, their movements are always connected to the assembly line but, thanks to this metamorphosis, they acquire the grace of a freedom dance. Differently from what could be thought, the atmosphere during the workshop did not change the daily production potentiality; on the contrary, it turned it into a sort of theatre and added spirituality. Personally, this whole practice and creative procedure was a new extraordinary experience”.

Disguise is based on a Lacanian approach connected to deconstructing identities and, at the same time, triggers a process that awakes individual awareness within the collectivity. The mask, which is a perfect copy of the employees’ faces, adds drama to their emotions and reaches an extreme ostentation. The slow motion choreography of mechanical movements that they perform at the assembly line, which is displayed in the video, unveils another aspect of the work. What is more real, the role they play or their identities? What reaction does this video trigger in the workers involved when they see their own performance? Nothing is certain during the production and every forecast can be turned into a new possibility.

The project outcomes will be exhibited at Elica Showroom in Shanghai, where the video and the 50 masks used by the workers will be displayed. The arrangement will include Elica products as well and will re-create the industrial atmosphere in which the work was shaped.

Double event for FEC. Two initiatives have been scheduled in the Marche territory: the first one is taking place on Thursday, April 16th in Montefiore dell’Aso (AP), at Polo Museale di San Francesco; this is a workshop belonging to the E-STRAORDINARIO educational program curated by Marcello Smarrelli in collaboration with Piero Tucci, from the M&D Human Resources Training and Development department. Its protagonist will be Francesca Grilli, a high profile, internationally known artist that will lead a body reading workshop entitled Hand: starting from this suggestion, the workshop will focus on interpreting the lines of the hands, the body parts that are most used in communicating, creating bonds, working.

Firstly, participants will take a painting step, where they will learn, through colors, to draw the hand outline, in order to have an overall vision of every line. During the same day, the very hand will be studied: shape, color, softness, touch feeling, and elasticity. Later, the artist and a palmistry expert will coordinate a skill practice session, so as participants (entrepreneurs and start-uppers) can understand how a person’s personality can be represented by their body, by encouraging a more instinctive and free reading. During the workshop step, participants will tell their personal stories, as they create their handprints; every experience will be collected in a soundtrack that will represent the collective work that artist and participants created: this will be the workshop final outcome.

This initiative belongs to the CultLab activities – an Impresa Culturale spin-off managed by Urbino and Macerata Universities, as well as by Meccano spa in temporary association with scopo; it is promoted and sponsored by Marche’s local action groups (PSR 2007-2013 – Asse IV – Approccio LEADER – Misura 421 – Cooperazione interterritoriale e transazionale) consistently with the foundational principles of Marche Region’s “Distretto Culturale Evoluto”.

The second event relates to photography. On Friday, April 17th 6.00pm Terra di mezzo. Declinazione di una commissione fotografica (Middle Earth. Declination of a photographic commission) will take place at Grand Hotel Passetto in Ancona. This event belongs to “L’IMPRESA FA CULTURA” meeting program and is a conversation, curated by Marcello Smarrelli, Fondazione Ermanno Casoli art director, and Alessandro Dandini de Sylva, photographer and curator, with photographers Fabio Barile and Francesco Neri.

The event title is inspired by the Middle-Earth. A journey inside Elica project, which is a photo portrait of Elica that Barile and Neri produced in 2014. It was also presented on the occasion of that year Fuorisalone. Exactly 12 months later, the protagonists go back to the work they produced, as they talk about its main steps and focus on some of the most remarkable photo commissions by companies to authors such as Man Ray, Lewis W. Hine, Lee Friedlander, William Eggleston, Josef Koudelka, and Roe Ethridge.

Marcello Smarrelli, FEC art director, was invited at Florence LABA on the occasion of “Contaminazioni / Arte Contemporanea & Industria” (Contamination / Contemporary Art & Industry), a lecture cycle curated by Marco Montemaggi entitled “Scontri ed incontri fra Arte Contemporanea ed Industria” (Clashes and meetings between Contemporary Art and Industry). These lectures focus on the historical relation between contemporary art and enterprise, which has always dealt with the different approaches and topics that these meetings will tackle. Every lecture will be divided into two sections: during the first one, the subject matter will be defined, whereas during the second one, specific cases will be analyzed through “Case Histories” and “Best Practices”.

On Wednesday, April 1st will be introduced by curator Montemaggi, and will be held starting from 10.00am. Its title is “L’Arte prodotta dall’impresa” (The industry-produced art). Some industrial brands often produce either beautiful products, in which the artistic component is remarkable, or limited series that turn into exclusive items, and are often directed to collectors.

Marcello Smarrelli will be talking about the FEC for Factories experience, one of the activities which Fondazione Ermanno Casoli created an art-industry relation with; such thing introduces contemporary art into productive systems. Artists are invited to confront the creative projects that hide behind an industrial object realization, by sharing with designers, engineers, marketing staff, and specialized workers a project path to discover new languages and unexplored working methodologies. The artist’s intervention, actually, does not aim at creating a new product, but at leading a methodological innovation that could lead to conceiving new products, new procedures or original communication campaigns, according to interactions and contexts.

Specifically, Smarrelli will describe the project he carried out for Elica in 2012 with artist Sissi, which was presented that same year at Salone del Mobile. The idea, Aspiranti Aspiratori (Hoovers to be), was based on the company need of triggering new reflections on the air purification issue. The task of processing this concept was entrusted to the artist from Bologna, due to her courage, her endless creativity, her ability to transforming the things deepest structure. Sissi worked along with Elica’s employees and they created Aspiranti Aspiratori, ten ideas that participate in an audition for becoming air purifier someday. In 2012 Aspiranti Aspiratori gained an important acknowledgement, as it was selected by ADI Design Index within the “Ricerca per l’impresa” (pre-selection for the ADI Compasso d’oro). It was also the central portion of an exhibition and an educational workshop at MAMBO in Bologna: a double certification of the initiative value.

The E-STRAORDINARIO training program was awarded with the 1° prize in the section Cultural Sponsorships and Partnerships of the CULTURA+ IMPRESA Award 2014. Such program was conceived by Fondazione Ermanno Casoli to bring contemporary art to the enterprise sector.

On Friday, March 13th, 2015 the awarding ceremony will be held, from 09.15am to 1.00pm. Not only will this event be celebrating and acknowledging its protagonists, but it will also be a moment of information and confrontation on the dynamics that today allow Cultural Operators and Companies to effectively debating, through Sponsorships, Partnerships and Enterprise Cultural Productions.

Director Deborah Carè and art director Marcello Smarrelli will participate on behalf of the Foundation.