Mediterranea 17 Young Artists Biennale

Mediterranea 17 Young Artists Biennale is the seventeen edition of the Biennial of Young Artists from Europe and the Mediterranean, a project born on 1985 by the International network Bjcem. 58 members from 17 countries, gathering together cultural institutions as well as independent organizations, compose the network, whose aim is to create opportunities for the young artists to produce and showcase their works and to support their mobility and learning process.

Mediterranea 17 is promoted by Bjcem and the City of Milan in the framework of the “Expo in città” programme, and will take place in Milan, Italy, at Fabbrica del Vapore, from October 22nd to November 22nd 2015, bringing together more than 300 artists, which will be present in town from October 22nd to October 25th.

The concept of Mediterranea 17, conceived by the artistic director Andrea Bruciati, is “No food’s land”. The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss sais “If the contemporary artist is omnivorous by definition, the voracity with which the cultural materials are collected, elaborated and recombined, refers to a comparison between this kind of practice and a contemporary version of the science of the Concrete”. In addition to this meaning, the artistic practice, which is a temporal and a transformation process, can be considered similar to the corporal assimilation of food, that turns into nutriment.

The artist passes from the abstract idea to its real and concrete realisation, thus provoking a change of energetic grade, where even the dross becomes an important data as the product of this metaphorical digestion.
The substance transformation is much more important than a finished and static object, therefore forms of art in the making, even potential, contingent, opened to reconfiguration according to an almost organic orientation, are desirable. A sort of “Theory of heat”, quoting Joseph Beuys, that explicit the gateway from raw energy to a significant form, a process that has its roots in the combustion, assimilation, process like alchemy, in a constant balance of powers in dialectical tension. The structural connotations of the artwork are therefore based on metamorphic instances, where the preminent processes are chemical reactions, fermentations, color changes, decomposition, drying of the material, for an image conformation that is permanently unstable.