The health emergency has not only conditioned the flow of our daily life, but has imposed new rules, dictated by regulatory constraints and fears, but accompanied by expectations and, above all, the desire for rebirth.
Sometimes the rooms have felt like closed cells, sometimes open spaces in which to wander looking for ourselves and others, imagining the future. But this vocation for the vision of the future is an inherent part of being an artist. Artists are those who believe that the impossible is something that has to still be determined, those who tackle isolation and physical limitations through their visions for the design of a new reality.
RUFA – Rome University of Fine Arts intends to make its contribution to building a new way of interacting with the arts, taking into consideration their complexity and diversity. In following this path, RUFA has kept faith with its educational mission: to escape what is trivial by changing the circumstances, thus generating the best possible conditions for reaching innovative outcomes.
It has given form and substance to a working group to imagine the next thousand days of art: three years to adapt to the evolution, to rethink the fruition, to urge public and private institutions and bodies to operate synergistically. But above all to give students a voice: the future protagonists of art and of the creative and cultural industry.
The group was overseen by Maestro Alfio Mongelli, the President of RUFA, the one who in 1998 started an educational project that in recent years has always been able to renew itself. He was supported by The Director Fabio Mongelli and the lecturers Emanuele Cappelli, Davide Dormino, Nicolas Martino, Raffaele Simongini. And above all by the students who have won RUFA Contest over the past five years: Francesca Salvati, Riccardo Quattrociocche, Alain Parroni, Yunfeng Liu, Francesca Cornacchini. And it was precisely the students who were entrusted with the task of thinking and writing a Manifesto for the arts after the apocalypse. To represent the expectations and feelings of a community that goes beyond RUFA.
“O2 – Manifesto for the arts after the apocalypse” – this is the name of the project dedicated to the work of Maestro Alfio Mongelli, recently placed in Wuhan, China, where the pandemic began – is a Manifesto that describes the art world from now until the next three years, placing itself as a point of reference especially for the new generations who, in this historical phase, are faced with decisions that are certainly not simple. The relationship between art and education, analyzed with the aim of identifying a key to interprete the world and future professions: it is intended to be a preparatory document to start a debate in society between artists, intellectuals, journalists, curators, critics, professionals and art experts. A document that can generate an exchange of ideas and that can be of support and help those who believe in the universal values of beauty and wonder.
O2 – Manifesto for the arts after the apocalypse” aims to be a document of cultural resistance “powered by RUFA”, but brought to the attention of the world of culture and politics. A document of action, a common action to fly high, to explore new opportunities and act together to indicate new and unexplored paths.
