Mediterranean art prize / 3rd edition

Mediterranean art prize is the biennial prize conceived by Porta Cœli Foundation with the aim of producing systematic solicitations in the art of the present time. Map3 intends to set the context to build fruitful relationships with those territorial and social specificities that make Italy a place rich in those experientialities that are essential for contemporary artistic creation. For Porta Cœli Foundation, the prize is also a very important occasion of investigation and relationship with international artistic contexts, even among the most remote and unprecedented ones: each edition is a dizzying and irreplaceable enrichment of the possibilities of acting in the contemporary, both for the Foundation and the artists who participate in it, as well as for the territory and for the international partners involved.

In 2019 Mediterranean art prize chose as the programmatic context of its first edition a masterpiece of Frederician architecture: the Castle of Lagopesole (Potenza). For its second edition, in 2021, the prize moved to another castle of NormanSwabian ancestry: the Castle of Monteserico, in the territory of Genzano di Lucania (Potenza — Italy), confirmed as the central location for the third edition of the prize, in a territorial context changed, however, by the strategic alliance of the municipalities of Genzano di Lucania, Palazzo San Gervasio and Banzi (in the geographical region of Alto Bradano, in Basilicata), which have formed a cultural district devoted to the contemporary thanks to the strategic networking of their cultural principals: places of residence, d’Errico Art Gallery, Civic Gallery in the constitution and, indeed, Monteserico Castle devoted to actions of high symbolic value.

The theme of the third edition is Re—form: in a place such as the territory of Monteserico Castle, strongly connoted by emptiness rather than fullness, by absences rather than presences, by potentialities rather than acts, the insistence of the abandoned, prematurely obsolescent traces of the agrarian “Re—form” remind us how, in today’s times, it is no longer possible to decree and determine once and for all the forms of life and human relations and their relationship with territories from a predetermined image of them. Rather, inhabiting a place, as well as making art, is a complex, necessarily participatory and negotiated processuality, in which form is only the unstable and precarious, inherently impermanent result of a flux that it is possible and necessary to govern, but that it is counterproductive to predetermine or force. In this sense, theories of living at the turn of the twentieth century followed extraordinarily closely artistic theories that speak of performativity, of relationality, of open and indeterminate forms in place of an art of contemplation, whose essential end was the determination of a monumental form, as stable and imperturbable assertiveness

Application for Mediterranean art prize is open to all female and male artists, regardless of age, gender, nationality or other qualification. Indeed, it is the prime purpose of the prize to build a plural and inclusive event. The categories of the prize, in the 2023 edition, are three:
— painting, illustration, chalcographic techniques
— sculpture, installation
— photography, video art, performance
Each artist can participate in the selection phase by filling out the appropriate form prepared on the official website of the award.