Articles by: F.g.

  • Events: Reports

    Angelo Musco's Parthenogenesis. From a Personal Experience to a Universal Language

    Angelo Musco is a Neapolitan artist born in 1973 and residing in New York since 1997. These facts, as all the facts of his life, are not as relevant to explain his art as his prenatal history is.

    Born after an 11-months-long pregnancy, weighing approximately 14.3 lbs, Musco was violently extracted from his mother’s womb, causing a tearing of the neck, arm and shoulder nerves known as Erb’s Palsy, a permanently damaging birth injury that diminished the mobility of the right side of his body. After a childhood of rehabilitative physical therapies and sports, Musco is now 50% recovered from his paralysis.

    The theme of motherhood, pregnancy and its complications, along with the visual impact ofthe physicality of the naked body, multiplied ad infinitum in stunningly dense architectural collages and intricate weaved designs, are the recurring topics Musco addresses in his artistic production.
     

    A 360° visual artist, Musco transitions from photography to video-art with flexibility, elaborating on the very personal sources of inspiration he bases his work on in visually overwhelming and universal messages.
     

    Human bodies become for Musco the vehicles for natural metaphors: from beehives to ant colonies, to procreation related symbols such as eggs, nests and amniotic fluid. His photo mosaics that are themselves artistic performances in the making, with the participation of volunteer models who pose naked in interlocking combinations.
     

    i-Italy met Angelo Musco last Thursday, on the occasion of the presentation of his latest video-artwork, Parthenogenesis Sequence, at the Italian Cultural Institute in New York.

    Parthenogenesis Sequence, which will be exhibited at the ICI until Sunday, March 11, is the final outcome of seven years of artistic and personal research on his prenatal history, expressing the sense of desperation and frustration deriving from the urge of delivering.

    The video installation depicts all the fears and nightmares of his mother, his relationship with whom he defines “a pretty intense one,” like the one with his work.
     

    Parthenogenesis Sequence is a collage of eleven videos, simultaneously played on a split screen, for an eleven-minutes-long total length. The videos were all shot at 7:32 am, the very moment in which Musco was born, in eleven international locations which fall on the 41st parallel, the one connecting the two cities of Musco’s post-natal life, Naples and New York. The editing is the exact same in all of the clips, featuring eleven pregnant women,  frantically running while holding their bellies in search of a safe place to give birth.
     

    Curated by Ombretta Agrò, the project presents the audience with an extremely personal take on the experience of pregnancy and on the power of motherhood in the making, disrupting and creative at the same time, while being both a state of the body as it is a condition of the soul, which through it is exposed to great distress and to great joy at the same time. Joy, however, is the emotion that is most often connected with the experience of birthing, and that in the personal history of Musco has coexisted with a series of contrasting, negative feelings and traumas, that he exorcised and reconnected with through his artistic work.
     

    Musco told i-Italy that “my body is a constant memento of what happened, and using the body as an artistic means keeps my relationship with my mother constant. She was not able to have kids after me. All her pains and my pains became my language,” a language that enables him to tell stories that expand beyond his very particular personal experience, to a universal level.

    For more information on Angelo Musco’s art visit his website: www.angelomusco.com
  • Facts & Stories

    Does the Next Google Come From Italy? The Volunia Case

    If we asked our readers who Massimo Marchiori is, they’d probably turn to Google to search his name. They’d find out that Marchiori, 41, is an Italian computer scientist and professor at Padua University, and one of those people whose inventions inspired the way Google itself works today.
     

    Marchiori created the HyperSearch algorithm in the 1990s, which was later cited by Google’s Larry Page and Sergei Brin when they introduced PageRank, the algorithm actually used by the world’s most popular search engine. In 2004, Marchiori was awarded the TR100 prize by Technology Review, magazine of the Massachusets Institute of Technology (MIT), where he used to teach.

    Yesterday, Marchiori challenged Google with Volunia, a new search engine and social media network, launched during a webconference at 12:00 GMT+1 from Padua University.

    According to Marchiori, Volunia aims to fuse the Web 1.0 and 2.0, information and people, freeing the latter from their virtual cages, being those the contemporary social networks. Surfing the web through Volunia will allow people to socialize with others navigating on the same pages, integrating chat qualities throughout the web. “Seek and Meet” is the motto of the company.

    The user experience on the search engine will be different, as the Volunia sidebar will always be visible after the search results are loaded, allowing a map-visualization of the content, whose hierarchies and graphics can be reorganized or selectively searched as for multimedia content.

    The project is fully Italian: the supercomputers come from Scandiano, the servers are located in Sardinia and the engineers, all former students of Marchiori’s, are all based in Padua. Marchiori spent four years working on Volunia after turning down job offers from Google and giving up on a more high-profile career in the US.

    Even if his salary in Italy is 2,000 euros ($2600) a month, Marchiori is very proud of “having done everything in Italy, demonstrating that here we still have good ideas and the infrastructure to develop them.”

    Volunia is available 12 languages, including Arabic, Russian and Japanese. Starting today, users can register on Volunia.com and 100,000 of them will be selecter as “beta-testers,” or “Power Users,” as they are referred to on Volunia’s website.  
  • Life & People

    Drink Italian “Bubbles”

    Italians would say that Franciacorta is a tiny “fazzoletto” (napkin) of land in the heart of Lombardy, which embraces the territories of nineteen municipalities in the Brescia province. It is the land where the finest Italian sparkling wines come from.
     

    “Bubbles” from Franciacorta, as they are referred to by their 191 producers, who joined efforts and created a Consortium in 1990, are produced according to a very restrictive protocol that earned the Consortium’s wines the prestigious “DOCG” denomination – the quality denomination that the Italian government awards to the specialty products whose original production location is certified and guaranteed.
     

    Franciacorta’s wines are now available on the American market, and the official introductions were made with a luscious four-courses lunch at Eataly’s Manzo restaurant. Oscar Farinetti flew to New York for the occasion, and he really wanted to be present at the event, he tells i-Italy: “Eataly is the only restaurant in this city that doesn’t serve French Champagne. Eataly, however, is the restaurant with the highest total sales, and it’s the third most visited place in New York City after the Empire State Building and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We don’t sell Champagne, because we want to sell Italian products and tell their stories.”
     

    The history of Italian sparkling wines is long and glorious, Farinetti explains: “Italian ‘bubbles’ were first produced in the 1850s. The Piedmontese learned the techniques from the French, but then Ferrari picked them up in north-eastern Italy, and over the last fifty years the producers from the Brescia province took over. Today they are number one.”
     

    Selling Italian ‘bubbles’ to the American consumers will be a challenge. “Americans drink Prosecco, but they are not familiar with these premium sparkling wines. It’s easier to speak Chianti and Barolo with them,” Farinetti tells i-Italy.
     

    Franciacorta CEO Giuseppe Salvioni is confident that the American bet is one the Franciacorta wines can win. “With all due respect for our French cousins’ product, but they bottle Peugeot and Citroen, we bottle Ferrari and Maserati. The quality of our wines is a hard fact, and the passion we put in them is extremely high.”
     

    Before moving over to the four gourmand courses of the menu created by Chef Michael Toscano, Farinetti said to be very excited about his first return to the United States after Berlusconi resigned. “È una figata!” (“It’s so cool!”), he broke out. “We finally have a group of capable people in charge, you’ll see, we’re going to make it, even if here they all believed we were hopeless!”
     

    He then toasted to Prime Minister Mario Monti’s sake, raising a cup of the finest ‘bubbles’, or ‘bollicine’, as Italians call them.