Fondazione Ermanno Casoli is pleased to announce that the winner of the 14th Ermanno Casoli Award is the young artist Danilo Correale. The initiative is curated by Marcello Smarrelli, artistic director of FEC, and is under the patronage of the Italian Ministry of Heritage and Cultural Activities.
The winning artist of the Ermanno Casoli Award is indicated by the artistic director and approved by the Board of Advisors. The Award entrusts the winner with a project that must relate to one or more companies and to its employees. Traditionally, the Award took place in Marche – where the Fondazione was born – involving the employees of the Elica Group in Fabriano, but this year’s edition will introduce a novelty: the Fondazione has in fact accepted the invitation to include the Award project in the series of activities supporting Siena’s candidacy to become the 2019 European Capital of Culture. The project thus covers an important role within a wide project whose aim is to “rebuild a new model of local development founded on culture, understood as a platform for social innovation, capable of deeply engaging the community on a path of change”, as explained by Pier Luigi Sacco, Director of the Candidacy and member of the FEC Board of Advisors.
In this context, the collaboration with Fondazione Ermanno Casoli, traditionally engaged in introducing art into the world of enterprises, was a natural development. With the Award, FEC in fact promotes the work of artists whose research is based on the interaction between different ambits, on the capacity of going beyond conventions and fixed behaviours, and on an understanding of art as an ethical model of behaviour, capable of fostering innovation in social and organizational ambits.
Danilo Correale’s project, entitled The Game, will involve the employees of three long-standing companies of the Siena territory: ColleVilca srl, specialized in the hand-crafted production and working of crystal by master-glaziers; PR Industrial Srl, a metalwork corporation, producing power generators and machineries for transportation of materials, and Trigano Spa, leader in Italy in the campervan sector.
Starting from a critical reflection on the dominant social model and on how the economic crisis is affecting every ambit of our society, from politics to culture, the artist’s research will focus on a form of aggregation capable of stimulating sincere affection and participation, beyond ideologies, competitiveness and rules to which we are usually subjected. Danilo Correale detects in sport, and in football in particular, a tension that has never ceased generating a sense of communion. He explains: “a football pitch is a metaphor for human relations. Pier Paolo Pasolini often referred to football as the last sacred representation of our times, understood as a ritual and an evasion. Football is performance, cinema, language; it requires improvisation, sensitivity and fair play, in an ongoing dialectics that flows throughout the ninety minutes of the game”. This project is part of a wider research path that started in 2011 in North Africa, where the artist studied the relation between rap music and revolution, and continued in Columbia, focusing on salsa dancing and protests.
The protagonists of The Game will be the employees of the three companies. The participants will be invited to give shape to the whole structure of the project – a football match with three different goals to score in – from the definition of the rules to the financial management of the event. This project will include a series of meetings with the artist inside a campervan with mobile office equipment, during which a number of aspects of the tournament will be discussed and defined: from the composition of the teams, to the game plans, to the choice of symbols and uniforms, to the organization of the supporter groups.
The idea of a football match with three goals derives from Asger Jorn’s theories. Jorn, a Danish painter connected to the Situationist movement, theorized a behavioural and linguistic model where a three-lectic confrontation would prevail, beyond the brutal two-pole antagonism, stimulating the cooperation and the formation of strategic and flexible alliances. The rules of the three-goal football game, necessarily played on a hexagonal pitch, will be open to being reinvented and improvised and there will be no offside nor unchangeable written rules.
The performative sports event will take place in December in the stadium of Colle di Val d’Elsa. The entire process will be filmed to become a medium-length film, which will be presented to the public in Colle di Val d’Elsa, in February 2014. The film will also be screened on the premises of the three companies involved in the project.
