MOSTRE DEL FESTIVAL

After a first edition that explored some forms of the multimedia crossover that relies to on sophisticated image technologies, the new edition of Sconfinamenti #2 particularly investigates the relationship between visual arts, music and dance. In contrast to the invasive trend of high-tech technologies, now easily accessible to mass level, the selection of artists and works that can be visited in the spaces of Spoleto's Rocca Albornoz is influenced rather by the search for a poetic dimension that resorts to body language and the use of low-tech, to sometimes naive and disarming technology, certainly surprising for the young hypertechnologized generations.

For the duration of the Festival, the spaces of the beautiful Rocca are transformed into a permanent creative laboratory; to rotation come alive with live performances by actors, musicians and dancers.

In the courtyard and stable spaces on the ground floor the Artistic Research Group "Opera " with its performance "Ma/mains tenant le vide" inspired by Alberto Giacometti's 1934 bronze so beloved from André Breton in which a stylized female figure stretches out her hands as to holding an invisible object.

With an abstract and minimal language, lines, geometries , volumes and architectural environment enter into relationship with theatrical machinery and live sound.

Ascending to the upper floor of the Fortress, black-and-white images by Malaysian H.H. Lim, like fragments of a silent film, narrate the repetitive and exhausting hula-hoop that tests to the artist's own capacity for physical endurance. He does not hesitate to to personally put himself on the line in front of visitors to the extreme limit of his energy, then leaving his canvases as silent witnesses to the ineffable and unbridgeable distance between mind and body, the irrevocable status of the human condition.

In the majestic Hall of Honor, the paths of two artists whose trespasses take the forms of actual cultural contamination intersect. Roberto Paci Dalò, also known in his installations under the name Hanging Gardens, offers his intervention of architectural cinema and live music, the result of his personal encounter with the city of Shanghai, with the testimonies of the most recent history, without excluding the physical and moral wounds inflicted by the events of World War II, between Japanese occupiers and Jewish refugees.

Maïmouna Guerresi with "Akhfa" draws inspiration from an Iranian text dating back to the 11th century to narrate the forgotten lives of Sufi women who lived more than ten centuries ago. The artist makes us reflect on the status of women in a religious world that even today in an obvious and dramatic way is marked by the dominance of male figures. Her ritual action tends to to drop the veils that really and metaphorically obscure the role of women in the Islamic religion, but also in contemporary social reality, without distinction of culture and area both political and geographical.

Jonah Bokaer, with the language of choreography and dance, already boasts a long series of actions and "occupations" of museum spaces. Together to Daniel Arsham creates an original dialogue between architecture, sculpture and live performance. Their intervention, constructed to measure of the monumental space of the Hall of Honor of the Rocca, is inspired by the creations of American sculptor Louise Nevelson, an icon of modernism, celebrated in a theatrical text by Edward Albee; the literary fragments here become the soundtrack in dialogue with the choreographic action among objects of our recent past, in the form of relics of a surprising domestic and post-industrial archaeology.

Finally in the magnificent Pinta Room, **Rachel Libeskind's installation **is a kind of metaphysical station of exile, the place where ideally the paths of all those fleeing violence and wars around the world meet: a ritual in which the artist continues to packing and unpacking, accompanied by the hypnotic sound of waves crashing in a distant ocean, oscillating between hypnotic repetition and frustration of a journey with no return.