OMNEFEST 2018

“Describing the world is a more complicated exercise than is commonly thought, and yet necessary and vital. Describing the city, then, the places that you inhabit and where you live, is even more difficult. What should be the methodology to follow is not well known and usually everyone prepares it according to their character, their inspiration, implicitly adding their ideal visions, their projects, even their utopias.” (Eugenio Turri, La megalopoli padana)

OMNEFEST presents the results of the first workshop for artists-in-residence, which took place in 2016 in Castelfranco Veneto. Ten different visions, corresponding to ten artistic projects, intertwine memory and present interpreting the complexity of the landscape of the Northeast. On a common study ground, the Venetian landscape, were traced new intersections and produced information and visions useful to return the complexity of the contemporary dimension.

Between consolidated reality and clichés, for decades the territory of the Northeast consecrates its image to work. Thanks to the work a territory has been built, a landscape has been transformed, the future of a large geographical area has been decided. WORK represents the foundation of the social pact that holds a community together, that shapes a landscape, its productive spaces, the residual ones, re-designs its mobility, re-organizes the space of private and public life.

WORK as a constant movement, which becomes urban plan, infrastructure but also ritual, which produces new forms of being together.

Deepening the reading of the territory of Castelfranco Veneto the 10 artists in residence have investigated paths between the historic centre and the immediate suburbs, have crossed urban and rural landscapes exploring industrial areas specified within a thematic itinerary.

From the network of infrastructure, the investigation continued within some important companies of the castle where artists have had the opportunity to collect testimonies, images, sounds, information, to return them in personal projects presented in the form of photographic sequences, video processing, texts, visual and sound installations.

Apart from projects of Italians as well as international artists-in-residence, Mattia Balsamini (Italy), Christian Lange (Germany), Mårten Lange (Sweden), Massimo Mastrorillo (Italy), Brent Meistre (South Africa), Karin Apollonia Müller (Germany), Josef Schulz (Germany), Nigel Shafran (UK), Kirsti Taylor Bye (Norway), collettivo TFTF (Italy), OMNEFEST has exhibited three original works by invited artists: “Costruzione – Ricostruzione – Ristrutturazione – Riparazione – Revisione” by Dutch photographer Petra Stavast; “L’odore del sambuco”, poem in 22 stanzas composed by Stefano Raimondi; “LL.PP. 1996—1997” by Massimo Sordi.

Three prestigious venues host the OMNEFEST exhibitions: the Museo Casa Giorgione, the Torre Civica and Casa Costanzo.

The artistic productions exhibited during OMNEFEST constitute a choral reading of views and listenings elaborated and systematized between 2016 and 2018. This is the first phase of a research designed to be expanded through new paths and new themes of investigation, a study aimed at achieving a deeper knowledge of the territory and the environment of the North East through the identification of the different complexities that characterize it.