Flavio de Marco (Lecce, 1975), artist, reflects on the experience of landscape through the language of painting. In his research, he uses computer operating system screens as a model for a new view of the horizon, the flat and close-up one of the screen. The representation of these “windows” – stripped of their original textual and iconic appearance – becomes a sort of montage of frames, from which images filter through like notes from memory. The work develops simultaneously inside and outside the space of the canvas, often giving rise to installations in which the environment constitutes the margins of the painting. Since 1997, he has participated in numerous exhibitions in galleries and museums in Italy and abroad. His collaborations have repeatedly involved theatre, cinema and literature, through magazines, publications, actions, radio programmes, meetings and conferences. He lives and works between Rome, Berlin and Milan, where he teaches “Extramedial Techniques” at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts.

Vedovamazzei is the name of the artistic partnership formed in 1991 between Stella Scala and Simeone Crispino. Both born in Naples, they live and work in Milan. Their work develops through very different practices and means, escaping definitions and moving freely between painting, sculpture, photography, video, installation and drawing on the most diverse fields of knowledge, depending on what each individual project requires. Through the creation of often alienating images, Vedovamazzei present objects and situations beyond their appearance, with an approach that combines scientific rigour, caustic and pungent irony, and an unconventional, sometimes destabilising reading of reality. After numerous solo and group exhibitions in private and institutional spaces, in 2006 the Madre, Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Donnaregina in Naples, dedicated a large anthological exhibition to them.  http://www.vedovamazzei.it

Andrea Belfi was born in Verona in 1979. He began playing and studying drums at the age of 14. From 15 to 18, he played in various punk/hardcore bands, performing concerts throughout Italy. Between 1998 and 2001, he lived in Milan, where he studied contemporary art with Alberto Garutti, with whom he developed his own artistic language. Since 2001, he has played with the group Rosolina Mar, an instrumental rock trio with which he has performed more than 200 concerts in Italy, France and Spain, and with which he has recorded two albums for Wallace Records. Meanwhile, he studied composition and improvisation, techniques he applies to electroacoustic music. In 2002, he produced his first solo album, Ned n°2, for his own label, Chocolateguns. His second solo album, Between Neck & Stomach, was released in 2006 by the Swedish label Hapna Records. Starting in 2003, he developed a solo live set, where he put his drumming technique and his highly personal approach to electroacoustic devices and synthesizers to good use. His latest solo album, entitled Knots, recorded and produced by Giuseppe Ielasi, was released by Die Schachtel Records in January 2008 and presented in Chicago, Turin, Stockholm, Aalst, Brussels and Oslo. Belfi also collaborates as a musician with HomeMovies, a cultural association engaged in the collection and archiving of home movies. Stillivingrooms is an audiovisual installation/performance that Belfi created in collaboration with Mirco Santi, consisting of an audiovisual device developed in the context of a private apartment. This project was also presented at the 2008 Netmage festival in Bologna and at the inauguration of the Claudio Buziol Foundation (Venice, 2008). Belfi has always favoured the performative aspect of his music, as evidenced by the large number of concerts and collaborations he has undertaken during his 15-year musical career. He has played and collaborated with Giuseppe Ielasi, ≤hadbeeneliminated. Rhys Chatam, Valerio Tricoli, Damo Suzuki, Tony Conrad, Nicola Ratti, Dean Roberts, Atelier MTK (Metamkine), Stefano Pilia, Zimmerfrei, Å, Claudio Rocchetti, Xavier Garcia Bardon (aka Saoule), Alessandro Bosetti. Xabier Iriondo, Mattia Coletti, Renato Rinaldi, Larkin Grimm. He has been teaching drums since 2003.

Gianni Caravaggio was born in 1968 in Rocca San Giovanni (Chieti) and grew up in Sindelfingen, Germany. He lives and works in Milan. After graduating from the Brera Academy with Luciano Fabro in 1994, Caravaggio has exhibited in numerous public and private venues, including Palazzo delle Papesse in Siena, Palazzo delle Albere in Trento, Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Syracuse, Museo Cantonale d’Arte in Lugano and Fondazione Pomodoro in Milan, Lehnbachhaus in Munich, Tent in Rotterdam and Castello di Rivoli. In 2002, he won the Special Fund Award of the Italian Studio Programme at PS1-MOMA in New York, and in 2006, the Young Artists Award at Castello di Rivoli. Gianni Caravaggio’s sculptures visualise the energies and actions that give rise to the form of the artistic act, specified as a demiurgic and cosmogonic act. The works develop a cyclical process in that they are “actuated forms” that can be actuated again at the same time. In Caravaggio’s work, the formal mutations of the work are linked to the use of obsolete and unexpected materials that generate alchemical processes and perceptual illusions that play on paradox, often combining materials. Combining marble with sugar cubes or cosmetic cream, zinc with talcum powder, all pervaded by seeds as a possibility of life, creates an ambiguous and still nascent perception. The works open up a theoretical reflection by Caravaggio on the mystery of the creation of the work and on the artistic gesture as a generator of renewed relationships with the work itself and its potential constant re-definition.

Andrea Bajani was born in Rome in 1975 and lives and works in Turin. In 2002, he published his first novel, Morto un papa (Portofranco), followed the following year by the novel Qui non ci sono perdenti (Pequod). The publication of his third novel, Cordiali saluti (Einaudi, 2005), which centres on the story of a writer of dismissal letters, was enthusiastically received by critics and the public, and the novel was translated in France. In 2006, he published the reportage Mi spezzo ma non m’impiego. Guida di viaggio per lavoratori flessibili (Einaudi), a journey-investigation into the world of new precarious workers. With the novel Se consideri le colpe (Einaudi, 2007), also published by Gallimard, he won the Mondello, Recanati and Brancati awards. His latest book is Domani niente scuola (Einaudi, 2008), a reportage on teenagers and school, a travel diary of three class trips undertaken by the author as an infiltrator. For the theatre, he is co-author of Marco Paolini’s play Miserabili. He collaborates with Rai Radio Due, the Sunday supplement of Il Sole 24 Ore and the magazine Lo Straniero.

Alessandra Spranzi was born in Milan, where she lives and works. She uses photography and video to convey an alternative or altered vision, either by staging or extracting pieces of reality, or by working with archive material. She records a process, a gesture that transforms meaning and our understanding of things, reawakening the enigma and the other side of the visible, the invisible. Through photography, she highlights differences, cracks that run through reality and its representation, a way to rethink and review certainties and to redefine our relationship with the world around us. Everything is always a little different, close and distant at the same time, reassuring and disturbing, recognisable and unrecognisable, and it is precisely in this deviation from the obvious that it becomes something else that we find the common thread that links his projects. The world is constantly being created through what we think and the gestures we make. Stories, hypotheses, revelations. Intention and chance. The landscape changes, and so does our gaze. Overturning, bringing closer, suspending, turning upside down, lifting, breaking, distancing. Staring, beyond. Alessandra Spranzi ha esposto sia in Italia sia all’estero, in mostre personali e collettive, fra cui: 2008: Selvatico (o colui che si salva), Galleria Fotografia italiana, Milano; Storie immaginate in luoghi reali, Museo di Fotografia Contemporanea, Cinisello Balsamo (MI); 2007:  Collezionismi, Assab One, Milano; 2005: Cose che accadono, Galleria Fotografia Italiana, Milano;Italian Camera, Venezia; 2004: Lo sguardo ostinato, Man, Nuoro; On Air. Video in onda dall’Italia, Galleria Comunale d’Arte Contemporanea, Monfalcone (GO); 2003: In natura, X Biennale di fotografia, Torino; Da Guarene all’Etna, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Torino; 2002: Nel bosco, Galleria Monica De Cardenas, Milano; 2000: La donna barbuta, Galerie Drantmann, Brussels, Belgio e Galleria Emi Fontana, Milano (1999); Museo Entr’acte, Museo Marino Marini, Firenze; Futurama, arte in Italia 2000, Museo Pecci, Prato; 1999: Animals animaux tiere animali, Galleria Continua, S. Gimignano (SI); Alessandra Spranzi, Marti Llorens, Murray Guy Gallery, New York; Dove sei?, Galleria Emi Fontana, Milano; 1998: People, Galleria Monica De Cardenas, Milano; Alessandra Spranzi, Galleria Luigi Franco Arte Contemporanea, Torino; Immagina 2010, Galleria Enja Wonneberger, Kiel, Germania; 1997: Vertigo, Galleria Emi Fontana, Milano; L’angelo del focolare, Care of, Cusano Milanino (MI).

Alessandra Spranzi has exhibited both in Italy and abroad, in solo and group exhibitions, including: 2008: Selvatico (o colui che si salva), Galleria Fotografia Italiana, Milan; Storie immaginate in luoghi reali, Museo di Fotografia Contemporanea, Cinisello Balsamo (MI); 2007: Collezionismi, Assab One, Milan; 2005: Cose che accadono, Galleria Fotografia Italiana, Milan; Italian Camera, Venice; 2004: Lo sguardo ostinato, Man, Nuoro; On Air. Video in onda dall’Italia, Galleria Comunale d’Arte Contemporanea, Monfalcone (GO); 2003: In natura, X Biennale di fotografia, Turin; Da Guarene all’Etna, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin; 2002: Nel bosco, Galleria Monica De Cardenas, Milan; 2000: La donna barbuta, Galerie Drantmann, Brussels, Belgium and Galleria Emi Fontana, Milan (1999); Museo Entr’acte, Marino Marini Museum, Florence; Futurama, arte in Italia 2000, Pecci Museum, Prato; 1999: Animals animaux tiere animali, Galleria Continua, S. Gimignano (SI); Alessandra Spranzi, Marti Llorens, Murray Guy Gallery, New York; Dove sei?, Galleria Emi Fontana, Milan; 1998: People, Galleria Monica De Cardenas, Milan; Alessandra Spranzi, Galleria Luigi Franco Arte Contemporanea, Turin; Immagina 2010, Galleria Enja Wonneberger, Kiel, Germany; 1997: Vertigo, Galleria Emi Fontana, Milan; L’angelo del focolare, Care of, Cusano Milanino (MI). Her work is documented in several books, including Selvatico (colui che si salva), Galleria Fotografia Italiana; Cose che accadono, Galleria Fotografia Italiana; La donna barbuta, Galleria Emi Fontana; Tornando a casa, A&MBookstore publisher; Quando la terra si disfa, Galleria Emi Fontana. From 2003 to 2007, she taught at the Photography Laboratory at the Catholic University of Brescia, Stars faculty. Since 2007, she has been teaching photography at Naba in Milan.

Pathosformel was founded in Venice in 2004, bringing together elements from different disciplines with the aim of rethinking the priorities within the elements that make up a performance score: work on the body and images, craftsmanship and technique, relationship with space and materials, none of which predominate over the others a priori, but only – from time to time – by virtue of a scenic rendering. La timidezza delle ossa e Volta were presented in 2007 as independent works linked by a dual reflection on the presence of a body struggling with its own visibility: two anatomical studies on the need to investigate and reconstruct the image of a body removed from the predictability of its presence on stage. Both works – usually presented independently – were presented in diptych form at the Teatro Comandini in Cesena in February 2008, at the end of the six-month production and residency project «Sezione Autonoma» organised by Societas Raffaello Sanzio and the Emilia Romagna region. La più piccola distanza debuted at the VIE Festival in Modena in October 2008 and was conceived as a further rethinking of the presence of the human body on stage: a metamorphosis of bodies into pure forms, coloured squares that – as individual components of a group – move incessantly on a system of parallel lines.
Pathosformel’s activities are part of the FIES Factory One project – curated by the FIES headquarters in Dro – which supports the production and promotion of young artists. Pathosformel won the 2008 UBU special prize for the creation of «abstract and physical theatre to be pursued with a distinct and layered style, which uses research into matter and the body as a starting point to restore a visionary theatricality, fragmented, deconstructed, highly fascinating theatricality, which has made a disruptive entry onto the national and international scene, creating a significant intertwining of conceptual art and theatre».