The Land seen from the Sea

Little Constellation is a project and an international network for contemporary art, whose research is devoted to the symbolic sensibility of the geographical dimension. It grew out of a survey devoted to the small states and geo-cultural micro-areas of Europe, and is being extended more broadly to all those artistic research projects involved in "territories of high symbolic definition."

In this sense, the various core themes around which the exhibition has been developed—isolation, distance, stereotypes, the primitive and the journey—are various chapters in a single story, one that seeks to interweave and structure the complexities that define the relations between people and the territories to which they belong.

In the articulation of its content the exhibition has grown out of a series of workshops hosted by various European institutions, following two directions within a series of basic travels, including journeys on a symbolic level, leading to the true significance of the project as a whole: the crossing of the Mediterranean (Gibraltar, Malta and Cyprus) and the transversal crossing of continental Europe (San Marino, Luxembourg, Iceland). At the center lies Genoa.

But if it is true that "while critics and theorists build directions and boundaries, artists destroy them" (as Pier Paolo Coro has consistently stressed), this exhibition is a constant undermining of the principles that characterize and identify a territory, the relationship with otherness and identity, hence between interior and exterior.

The exhibition documenting on the one hand contemporary artistic research through works, performances and installations by artists from 15 states and on the other presenting the results of workshops held in 2011, hosted at Library Archive of Little Constellation in San Marino; MUDAM Musée d'Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg and at Casino Luxembourg - Forum of Contemporary Art of Luxembourg, National Gallery of Iceland and Living Art Museum, Reykjavik, and at Brown Project Space, Milan, in collaboration with Malta Contemporary Art.

The exhibition will be enriched by a program of activities, workshops, meetings and discussions to keep the attention on the project and transform the exhibition into a moment of active and involved exchange and discussion.

Finally, on the occasion of the exhibition, MOUSSE Publishing will also issue the documentary-work by Rita Canarezza and Pier Paolo Coro: Small States on un-certain stereotypes. The work, which is the starting point for the whole Little Constellation project started in 2004, is a remarkable boxed set consisting of 14 DVDs: one for each of the thirteen countries dealt with in the research project and a fourteenth containing a film which grew out of the thirteen documentaries and is distributed separately from the boxed set. The video project will be screened in its entirety at the exhibition, as the starting point for the exhibition and also presented to the public during the exhibition period.

The Little Constellation project, started in 2004 as a art research by the two artists Rita Canarezza & Pier Paolo Coro, with the support of the best Institution of their country San Marino, today has created a real network of relationship with many authorities, associations, museums, artists of small States of Europe of Andorra, Cyprus, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Malta, Monaco, Montenegro, San Marino and some micro geo-cultural realities of the European markets including Canton Ticino (CH), Ceuta (E), Gibraltar (UK), Kaliningrad (RUS).

The Land seen from the Sea
Contemporary Art in the geo-cultural micro
exhibition by the network Little Constellation
Kuratoren: Alessandro Castiglioni, Rita Canarezza, Pier Paolo Coro, Roberto Daolio, Francesca Serrati

Künstler: Yuula Benivolski, Justine Blau, Rita Canarezza & Pier Paolo Coro, Martina Conti, Nina Danino, Oppy de Bernardo, Hekla Dögg Jonsdottir, Doris Drescher, Haris Epaminonda, Barbara Geyer, Anna Hilti, Irena Lagator, Jose Ramon Lozano, Ingibjörg Magnadottir, Mark Mangion, Mussoni & Albani, Giancarlo Norese / Umberto Cavenago, Christodoulos Panayiotou, Paradise Consumer Group , Marco Poloni, Pierre Portelli, Luigi Presicce, Agnes Roux, Sigurdur Atli Sigurdsson, Miki Tallone, Xenia Uranova, Martin Walch, Trixi Weis