The first festival dedicated to international contemporary art and its protagonists. Let's discover the art of the future together.
Contemporary art needs cheerfulness and reflection.
The festival, and everything festive that it involves, aims to be a place where people can regain their train of thought without interruptions, where they can reflect and understand contemporary art, and then go and see the works of art with awareness. Today it is necessary to think about art in order to see it better.
The works of art are thoughts. They are visualised thoughts. As such, thoughts are always critical. We cannot think of contemporary art merely in terms of glamour and business. Not that I have anything against these elements, but we should not give up the theoretical foundations.
When faced with a paralysed macro system, which does not work, a polycentric structure emerges, not from satellites, but from centres of expertise that contemporary art has relied on for quality proposals: Faenza is one of these.
Angela Vettese
Relationships with works of art are becoming increasingly quick and superficial, like a type of induced artistic bulimia. There is hardly time to look at a work of art before another one comes along demanding our attention [...] This is the purpose of the festival of Faenza. For once, there will be time to meet and talk, without any pressure, in a small, splendid and welcoming urban centre, in the middle of a sunny region which is full of natural and artistic beauty, where the food and drink are fantastic.
Of course the works of art will be missing, but that could be a stimulus rather than a limitation. Then later we can go back and look at the works of art with more attention and curiosity.
The formula of the festival is an exception to the rule. There is no particular theory to illustrate or confirm. The festival is open to many different points of view, in order to account for all the diversity and the geographical, cultural and disciplinary wealth of art today.
Pier Luigi Sacco
The festival in Faenza has to be understood as a discursive platform, as it has been structured to amplify and broadcast a large sampling of the current discourses around contemporary art and its institutions, both in Italy and abroad. As such, it should truly complement the event-based nature of a manifestation such as the Venice Biennial with much needed reflection and analysis. Besides aspiring to become a meeting place for artists, students, curators and critics -not to the exclusion of dealers and collectors-, the potential that the festival in Faenza may ultimately have is that of becoming an occasion for the audience of contemporary art in Italy to represent itself, meaning to become present to the larger context of cultural production in the country. In a context that is mostly oriented towards the conservation and study of its part, this constitutes both a crucial challenge and a fundamental task.
Carlos Basualdo
