DIVAGO Festival

The program:
Exhibitions: Thursday, Friday and Sunday 23, 24, 26 from 15.00 to 19.00. Saturday 25 from 15.00 to 18.00.
Talk in piazza Don Gallo “Public art and social commitment”: Saturday 25th from 6.30 pm.

On show:
Marina Arienzale (1984, FI), Camilla Gurgone (1997, RO), Giuseppe Mirigliano (1972, GE), Niccolò Masini (1989, GE), Pengpeng Wang (1991, MI), the duo Letizia Artioli (1993, MO) and Atōmi, the duo Beatrice Caruso (1995, BO) and Rebecca Sforzani (1990, BO) and the collective Mefistofeledocumenta.

The areas:
Via del Campo, Piazza del Campo, Piazza San Marcellino, Piazza Vacchero, Piazza don Andrea Gallo and the Church of San Marcellino.

DIVAGO is a biennial festival of contemporary art that takes place in the urban space of via del Campo in Genoa. It opens up to itinerant exhibitions and relates to public, private and commercial spaces. It is an urban interaction project through artistic practices such as environmental installations, performances, street art and happenings.
It proposes a new face of the city through the artistic study of the dense and complex fabric of via del Campo - the urban residue of the Ligurian capital, a metaphor for contemporary cities and a new center from which to spread a collective feeling of cohesion and civic collaboration.

THE FESTIVAL is the conclusion of an intense work on the territory. The selection committee chose eight context-specific projects, each of which has a different development methodology, detailed during the first self-produced residency in February. An essential common line is the interaction with local communities and resident citizens, initiated thanks to the intermediation of the neighborhood committee, and the realities active in the area. Our purpose is twofold: to listen to the voice of a neighborhood that has not been heard for a long time and at the same time to open the borders of the ghetto neighborhood and to allow young people and artists to enhance the area by giving it a new vitality without supplanting its pre-existing identity.

THE sound INSTALLATIONS and environmental installations integrate with the public space together with floor interventions and curious surprises. Visual suggestions and stimuli for reflection are not only reserved for an audience trained on the theme of contemporary art: as in the last edition, guided tours are organized to discover the works, stories and curiosities during the entire duration of the event.
The four days of the Festival are the opening to all citizens without exclusion or distinction, with a specific interest aimed at young people and artists who live or pass through the city.

THE CONTEXT:
The area of ​​action of the project corresponds to the area of ​​the ancient Genoese Jewish ghetto, an area geographically inserted in the historic center but gradually becoming more and more marginalized to the point of being today a residual context, a field of underworld and decay. Divago Festival ed. 2 is located in the urban area corresponding to via del Campo, piazza del Campo, piazza Don Andrea Gallo, piazza Vacchero, vico del Campo, vico and piazza San Marcellino and vico Untoria.
The exhibition is set up in the outdoor urban spaces mentioned above and also inside the Church of San Marcellino, located in the square of the same name. The final talk of the event will be held in piazza Don Andrea Gallo.

THE SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE:
The selection commission was made up of MIXTA, the Pinksummer Gallery and the expert critic and curator of public art Gianluca Marziani, evaluating the projects that in their realization activated citizenship and that therefore had an ethnographic system in their methodology more relevant to the proposal. Therefore, Lorenzo Domaneschi, Researcher in the Department of Sociology and Social Research of the University of Milan-Bicocca, collaborates with the project, who has followed the artists in the ethnographic developments of their projects with face-to-face and online lessons.
During the development and implementation of the projects, the artists were followed by the MIXTA curatorial team and the advice of the curator Stefano Antonelli. The work of the residences was carried out in situ, in the spaces of San Marcellino, with the scientific support of Lorenzo Penco, a social worker active in San Marcellino, who not only acts as a direct link between artists and the community of via del Campo, but it provides skills and information on the social fabric of the territory and on how to establish a fruitful relationship with it.
In this sense, the Festival in its second edition is a multidisciplinary project that sees the participation of experts in the field of urban regeneration through artistic practices (Stefano Antonelli and Gianluca Marziani) and cultural mediators with specific consolidated skills in the field of social integration. (Lorenzo Penco, Ass. S. Marcellino); and in the field of sociological research on the theme of integration (Lorenzo Domaneschi).