REWILD is a social and artistic project dedicated to the themes of Climate Change which, over the course of a year, will tell a story divided into six chapters through as many artistic installations. Six different themes on which an artist or a group of artists will be asked each time to create their own aesthetic synthesis in a fluid and immersive exchange between figurative and plastic composition and digital art.
The idea of REWILD was born through the exchange of ideas and experiences of five distinct personalities and professionals who gave life to the collective The Curators Milan, formed by the director and photographer Frankie Caradonna, by the director Tomaso Cariboni, by the artist Lucia Emanuela Curzi, by the gallery owner Stefano Gagliardi and the founder of Bonsaininja Dario Spinelli, with the collaboration of the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart of Milan.
The goal of The Curators Milan through REWILD is to reflect on the concept of empathy through which we can stimulate the preservation of the planet’s biodiversity and with it our very existence. The project, which involves professionals and creatives from different sectors from fine arts & crafts to digital arts & technologies, in a historical moment that sees the pandemic and its health, moral, social and economic consequences dominate the scene and communication worldwide , wants to be a flywheel of social and cultural resilience.
REWILD takes its name from the concept of rewilding, a term that appeared in the 1990s in reference to the protection and reintroduction of predators and native plants, the creation of no fishing zones, and in general to all those processes and projects aimed at the conservation, restoration of native ecosystems and the fight against the loss of biodiversity. REWILD is in fact a holistic and collaborative concept, which has the ambition to produce a renewed energy, favoring the genesis of an artistic and social movement based on the inevitable search for a new balance.
The headquarters of the project is the Galleria d’Arte il Vicolo in Milan which will be transformed into a TAAZ (Temporary Autonomous Artistic Zone), in which the artists involved will be asked to create together an experience that is both a physical installation – intended as an exhibition of artistic artefacts – and movement – understood as collective and multisensory thinking that reflects on the concept of empathy. So the events will be available both live but also through a virtual platform www.thecuratorsmilan.com.
The first of the six events, which will start on January 19, 2021, is entitled PROLOGUE: DIATOMS IN THE MULTIVERSE, a real background whose narrative focus is represented by the Diatom. What is a diatom and why was it chosen as the first thematic subject by REWILD? Every three breaths of a human being, one and a half is due to diatoms: unique unicellular organisms, algae that live in a glass and silicon house, phytoplankton at the base of the marine fauna food chain.
By inhaling carbon dioxide and exhaling oxygen, diatoms are responsible for 50% of all the oxygen necessary for the biochemical balance of the planet. Their skeletons from the desert travel on the transoceanic winds to the Amazon and once there they feed and fertilize it. Diatoms are destined to disappear due to acidification and overheating of the oceans with potential catastrophic consequences for humans.
“Hold your breath: this is the world without diatoms. With Rewild we bring to Milan not only a new dialogue between sculptural and digital arts that reflects on the role of empathy, but a movement that breaks the anthropocentric vision of the Universe “, explains Frankie Caradonna, Co-Founder of The CURATORS MILAN. The creative collective worked on the analogy between the blatant evocation of a ghost by an illusionist of the late nineteenth century and the evocation of the ghost of diatoms, using the evolution of a hologramatic technique used in the nineteenth century.
The artist Ludovico Bomben was involved and in particular his work by him Dardo, an iron sculpture that represents an arrow stretched in equilibrium pointing towards the hologram of a diatom, revealing both its fragile microscopic presence and its decisive importance. The installation thus becomes a dialogue between Bomben’s physical work and a 3D sculpture, between real and virtual, showing the intermittent vision of an evanescence to be enjoyed not only through sight, but also through sounds.
The technique used for the installation itself represents a point of balance, in this case not between man and nature, but between past and present. On the one hand, the creation of a hologram, an element that is born through 3D animation, speaks of modernity and digital. But everything acquires its ethereal substance through an ancient technique, that of the “Pepper’s ghost”, already used by illusionists in the 19th century.
In this case, however, the reflective surface that projects the image into space is not hidden, but revealed, like a window through which we can see a different reality. A real immersive and synaesthetic experience to be experienced with all the senses, which wants to cause a short circuit, a change of perspective that through empathy can lead to an epochal change.
