Arteles Catalogue 2023-2020

Back to Basics program / JULY 2022
Antonio Caruso
Italy
About
I am an aspiring curator living among Venice, Italy, and
Aarhus, Denmark, but with southern Italian roots.
My main interests are in conceiving and curating
contemporary art, mainly visual arts, and how they relate to
cultural heritage, as well as the very definition of cultural as
everything that comes from the human sense, including the
way the perceptions and interactions with the surroundings.
Art as a practice of transversal relationship and
unconventional investigation is the creation of a hybrid
space where contents find new hierarchies, skills have to
be transformed into practices and thus a context has to be
generated. It is often a matter of finding new questions rather
than giving old answers.
Engaging the community and observers through arts-based
interventions is another relationship practice that interests
me. It helps to constantly redefine the role creativity has for
society and individuals and thus its dynamic transmission as
a vehicle of civilisation.
Inspiring Butterflies
My time at Arteles was extraordinary for the inspirational
quietness it brought me and for the contact I recovered with
myself, paradoxically precisely through interactions with
others. These interactions are ontogenetically based on
original and transversal bonds, the deepest manifestation of
the conflict between Ego and Es that occur both inwardly
and also outwardly. And where for once the role of the artist
in the hic et nunc counts more than that of the art work in the
space of reality.
As social animals, we often forget the importance of returning
to the essential, not in the sense of solitude, but as the
essential of the relationships of affection and understanding
on which the bonds of creativity should be based. The search
for the obsession proper to the contemporary artist never
fails, and so the curator’s eye never ceases to look and really
see what is part of a creative process. The artist, in fact, is
not only a creative person, one who brings creativity and
invective. The artist is above all a creator, those who create,
who have the ability to mould the mind and bind it to matter.
In this period of my life, I have been able to talk, confront,
research, experiment, participate, help and perhaps even
advise. Always aware of my role and what belongs to it, as
well as what does not.
Every young person who works or wants to work in the field
of art, creativity and culture should have such an experience
in a small catalytic universe as Arteles Creative Center is.