In “Victory” Marina Abramovic pays homage to one of the most paradigmatic films of Italian neorealist cinema, Bitter Rice, directed by Giuseppe de Sanctis in 1949.

In this work, Abramovic takes up one of the most iconic scenes of the film in which the protagonist, a young socialite played by Silvana Mangano, raises her gaze to look towards the horizon under the midday sun. The Serbian artist holds a knife, a recurring element in various performances and sculptural works, to emphasize the watchful gaze, but at the same time proud and full of hope. A look of victory.

The Ideal City is a work by Victor Burgin in which already the title reveals an explicit reference to the three Renaissance paintings of “The Ideal Cities” (the one preserved at the National Gallery of Urbino, the one at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore and the one at the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin). Starting from these famous works, Burgin realizes a video using 3D modelling software, starting a very personal journey through the history of architecture. Classicist and Renaissance architectural theories – governed by geometric rigour and perspective organization – are taken up and readapted to 3D processing, of which they are fundamental aspects.

The suggestive path of the associations generated by those images leads the artist to the sophisticated and alienating sequences of Michelangelo Antonioni’s film “La notte”. The woman protagonist of Burgin’s video is a clear reference to Jeanne Moreau who, in Antonioni’s film, walks through the streets of Milan.
In the video, however, she wanders around this Ideal City invented by the artist, where classical and Renaissance architectural structures blend with the symbols of Italian modernism. Realized with the “loop” technique, the work is in fact a continuous narration in which the visitor is able to perceive the story and interact with it starting from any sequence of the video. Finally, the video work is accompanied by two reproductions of “The Ideal City” – one depicting the Ideal City preserved in Berlin and the other depicting the work preserved in Baltimore.
Both are rendered by the artist using the 3D technique through an appropriation and at the same time a re-invention of the original images.

In this work, Michele Guido pays his personal tribute to Renaissance art, trying to reveal the geometric complexity that lies beneath the “pictorial film”. In this work, the Annunciation of Leonardo da Vinci is analyzed and treated by the artist as if it were a natural plant, bringing – through an operation of dissection – the geometric structure in the foreground.
In this way, the process of the anthropization of space, rendered by the artists through perspective, is reduced to flat geometric figures, as if they were flowerbeds, and consequently, its figurative dominance and spatial illusion are annulled.

With the work “Per una Nuova Teologia della Liberazione (For a New Liberation Theology)” Domenico Antonio Mancini composes a sort of diffused library, an open collection of books written by those thinkers considered a source of stimulus and guidance in a process of consciousness and personal resistance.
The artist, using the pages of the collected books, builds papier-mâché that kept inside this case, inside a recent publication of Aristotle’s Politics, the artist hides the papier-mâché magazine of a P38: the text, the culture, the knowledge become weapons of liberation.
Art takes on a value of civil responsibility.

‘Texts for Nothing’ Samuel Beckett, in play” is the project realized in 2010 by Joseph Kosuth. It is based on a selection of phrases from Samuel Beckett’s ‘Texts for Nothing’ made in white neon with warm light and painted black. The ‘Texts for Nothing’ have been for years underestimated by the most important critics of Beckett’s work, considered at the margins of the main strand of his production and rarely included in anthologies of his works. While in the past these texts have often been considered a pause in Beckett’s oeuvre, for Kosuth they represent the quintessence of the Irish playwright’s work, a perfect example of his exceptional artistic integrity. Beckett’s intellectual and artistic project paralleled Kosuth’s in one precise and fundamental aspect of their work: in both, artistic practice shows a strong interest in the relationship with meaning. Beckett addresses the question of meaning from its absence, while Kosuth on the contrary focuses towards the production of meaning.

For the American artist, Beckett reflects some of the origins of his research, and it is evident that this common starting point has had repercussions on Kosuth’s intentions and initiated the development of this project first exhibited at the Lia Rumma Gallery in Milan in 2010. The ‘Texts for Nothing’ are also the least narrative of all Beckett’s writings and therefore the most useful to Kosuth as material for his work. For both, it is a process that has a beginning and no end. Constituting language in itself, the work is self-describing as an absence, an absence from which our questions about meaning can flow. The sentences, because the neon lights are painted black, can only be read clearly from the side, shifting our point of view. Frontally, we can see points of light.

The lightbox “Searching For Gramsci,” is part of the project that Alfredo Jaar dedicates to Antonio Gramsci one of the intellectuals and political thinkers whose legacy has most profoundly innervated the culture of the twentieth century, not only in Italy; Gramsci’s writings, mainly those of the prison, have in fact known a wide diffusion, among others, in South America. Jaar’s work is a photograph taken in Rome and represents a situation of schism. Jaar believes in a correlation between ethics and aesthetics and in an active and socially responsible role of the artist, this work that goes photograph the places of Gramsci is an invitation to recover the ties and values of the society that the work of Gramsci implies and represents.
To Gramsci, Jaar has also dedicated a recent public project “Chiaroscuro” in which, in collaboration with the MAXXi Museum in Rome, green and red posters with a quote from Gramsci have been put up in the streets of the city “The old world is dying. The new one is slow to appear. And in this chiaroscuro monsters are born” The same phrase has been declined by the artist also through a photographic image and a neon sign.

In this series of works Wiliam Kentridge pays homage to the mythological figure of the Sibyl, the priestess also mentioned by Dante in the Divine Comedy who, when questioned, transcribed the oracles on oak leaves, forced, against her will, not to be able to transmit the prophecies to the right recipients, since the leaves were dispersed in the wind, confusing destinies.
In this work, in particular, the homage to the Sibyl is also accompanied by a tribute to the work of a great Renaissance master, Michelangelo, whose face Kentridge takes from the Sibyls present in the vault of the Sistine Chapel.