Arte Povera

Marisa Merz, Giuseppe Penone, Luciano Fabro, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Fabio Sargentini, and Pino Pascali appear before our eyes, revealing—through the immediacy of moving images—the places where they lived, alongside the ideas, stimuli, and multiple connections that shaped their artistic practices.

CURATORIAL TEXT

Each film bears witness to choices, relationships, and encounters that gradually outline the portrait of a period of intense creative ferment, unfolding into a collective, engaging narrative capable of sparking unforeseen interpretations.

Thanks to the different approaches through which each director translates the work of the artist they engage with into images, our attention is drawn to strong or delicate elements, to minimal or explosive details of each practice, allowing us to fully enter the multifaceted universe that is the personality of the artist being portrayed.

This documentary programme aims to be an open mapping of one of the artistic movements that most profoundly shaped the second half of the twentieth century, and which continues to be the subject of passionate scholarship and inspiring exhibitions today.

Through the six films, we can get to know the shy Marisa Merz as told by her friends, retracing the first experiments of Arte Povera from the kitchen of her home in Turin; we can immerse ourselves in the landscape in which Giuseppe Penone’s artistic action takes root; we encounter the sly irony of Luciano Fabro, an artist capable of creating each work as a surprise, an open question outside recognizable codes, or the composed portrait of Michelangelo Pistoletto in his Cittadellarte signed by Daniele Segre.
Two other goodies give us unique access to the places and characters that took part in this moment of radical change: a portrait of Fabio Sargentini and his Roman gallery l’Attico, shot with an amused look by his daughter Fabiana, a child spectator of that unbelievable world, and the special relationship that united her father to Pino Pascali, an artist also recounted in the poetic and award-winning film Pino by Walter Fasano.