CURA.

On June 24, 2023, the Forte Belvedere hosts MELMA, an original exhibition by Nico Vascellari curated by Sergio Risaliti, director of the Museo Novecento, promoted by the City of Florence and organized by MUS.E. The exhibition is the first stage of a great year-long project that the artist has conceived for the city of Florence and that will involve some of its most emblematic places: Piazza Signoria, Palazzo Vecchio and Museo Novecento. An ambitious project and a special occasion that arrives twenty years after the artist’s first exhibition, held in Florence on 25 June 2003.

The exhibition MELMA at Forte Belvedere (until 8 October 2023) includes a selection of previously unseen works, specially conceived for this occasion and created with different media, such as video, sculpture, collage, installation and sound. On the outside of Forte, on the ramparts and in the garden, nine sculptural works – aluminium castings – from the series Horse Power (2023) are installed, accompanied by two videos, Fossil of Experience (2023) and Horse Power (2019), presented inside the ‘gunboats’ and a work, Falena (2022), set up on the façade of the building. The interior rooms are occupied by an exhibition with over thirty works, many of them previously unseen, which, playing on very different registers, offer a broad overview of Vascellari’s work, focusing on the relationship between man and nature, existence and transcendence, corruption and regeneration.

“Melma is similar to mud, mire, mush.” Sergio Risaliti, director of the Museo Novecento and curator of the project, comments. “Literally it means earth soaked with a lot of water, like that which settles at the bottom of a river, a swamp or a lake. In a figurative sense, however, it means abjection, corruption and moral degradation. In this sense slime can seem like something dirty, sordid, impure, repulsive, even referable to the sphere of the negative, the sinful and the vile.”
“The public walking through the exhibition will be able to recognise a certain sense of rejection in the works,” Risaliti continues. “In Nico Vascellari’s poetic intentions there is no desire to express a moral judgement. Man is muddy and yet something angelic lives in him. He is violent, brutal, yet sweet and naive like a child. Thus life is one with death, for at bottom there is only endless corruption and regeneration.”

“Mud is a primordial material, something that conceals the view and projects onto the unknown, understood both as an inner world and as a tension towards the outside world,” explains Vascellari. “I have always spoken of art as fishing with bare hands in the mud, where it is possible to find what you do not know but try to recognise. Mud recalls for each of us something messy, swampy, magmatic and ‘shitty’, but it also refers to certain mythologies for which both mist and slime are portals that allow access to the magical and the mysterious. On a sensory level, it recalls a prenatal state, because it is from the earth, from the humus, that the human is moulded.”

The second stage of the year-long project will be inaugurated in October with various interventions in some of the most prestigious sites of the city’s historical-artistic heritage. Piazza della Signoria, Palazzo Vecchio and the Museo Novecento will host a series of works, including a new installation for the Arengario, a site-specific performance conceived by the artist for the Salone dei Cinquecento, and a series of works in the former Leopoldine building, taking into account the peculiar relationship between the Renaissance and the contemporary, between the public space of the piazza and the political venue par excellence represented by the Salone dei Cinquecento in Palazzo Vecchio.

In Piazza della Signoria, contemporary art returns to the fore after the interventions of Jeff Koons, Jan Fabre, Urs Fischer and Francesco Vezzoli in past years. Nico Vascellari will realise a site-specific installation conceived for the Arengario of Palazzo Vecchio: a poetic and delicate action at the same time, inspired as much by Renaissance images – such as those of Botticelli – as by the verses of Poliziano and Pasolini. The installation will be inaugurated on 3 October 2023. On the same day, Vascellari will present a performance conceived for the Salone dei Cinquecento that reflects on the conventions and codes of non-verbal communication.