CONDOMINIO MEDITERRÁNEO – VISUAL & PERFORMING ARTS

May 20, 2026 – Al-Tiba9 Gallery, Barcelona

Al-Tiba9 Gallery is pleased to present, in collaboration with the Accademia di Belle Arti di Reggio Calabria, on May 20 at 7:00 PM, the project Condominio Mediterráneo – Visual & Performing Arts, a performative proposal developed by students from the Accademia di Belle Arti di Reggio Calabria, Italy.

The performance is presented within the context of the group exhibition Terra Incognita (Unknown Land) – Part II, featuring works by artists Andy Storchenegger, Ching-Ke Lin, Dal Molin & Milani, Dongbay, and Nicolas Vionnet.

This new collaboration opens a space for exchange dedicated to the work of Fine Arts Academies, fostering a dialogue between Italy and Barcelona, between gallery and academy, while emphasizing the importance of artistic research as a shared and collective practice.

The students will activate the gallery spaces through a performative intervention that marks a new stage in the Condominio Mediterráneo project, leading them not only to present themselves to the public, but also to develop a new performance in direct relation to the exhibition space and the artworks on display.

The performance will be accompanied by an Art Talk dedicated to presenting the project, reflecting on its challenges, and expanding the dialogue around the Mediterranean as a shared cultural space. The discussion will be moderated by Savina Tarsitano and will feature the presence of academy director Pietro Sacchetti, as well as curator and project leader Marcello Francolini.

The Barcelona edition of the project is coordinated by Savina Tarsitano in collaboration with Al-Tiba9 Gallery and the Accademia di Belle Arti di Reggio Calabria.

Adrian Paci, Chords, frame da video, Condominio Mediterraneo, Reggio Calabria, september 2025

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

Condominio Mediterráneo – Visual & Performing Arts, funded by the European Union – Next Generation EU, is produced by the Accademia di Belle Arti di Reggio Calabria, supported by its director Pietro Sacchetti, and conceived and curated by scientific coordinator Marcello Francolini.

The project is part of the PNRR Performing PRMG program (June 1, 2024 – March 31, 2026), led by the Accademia di Belle Arti di Catanzaro.

CONCEPT

From the Latin CUM + DOMUS (“shared property”), the project investigates the performative dimension within contemporary arts through the activation of participatory processes between artists and students, developed through a shared journey of conception, creation, and production.

Condominio Mediterráneo is an educational experimental project conceived by Marcello Francolini and focused on building active participation processes between artists working within the contemporary art system and academy students organized into working groups.

From the outset, the performative aspect was approached as a double line of research: on one hand as a contemporary artistic practice, and on the other as an experiential pedagogical methodology centered on performative action, where the student becomes the active protagonist of the educational process.

The project involved 60 students: 50 integrated into working groups and 10 dedicated to audiovisual documentation. It is a multidisciplinary initiative bringing together different departments — including Painting, Cinema, Sculpture, Communication, and Art Education — as well as faculty members and professionals who fulfilled operational and management roles.

Among them are Rosita Commisso (head of audiovisual documentation), Davide Negro (head of photographic documentation), and Fabrizio Sebastiani (visual designer).

Five international figures from the contemporary art world also participated: Adrian Paci, Romina De Novellis, Michele Di Stefano, Giulia Piscitelli, and curator Lucrezia Longobardi.

All participants were invited to think about the Mediterranean as a shared space between territories connected through the same cultural basin, understood as a common geographic and aesthetic landscape shaped also by the artistic practices of those who inhabit it.

The workshops with invited artists (June – November 2025) became the core of the project and the epicenter of active participation processes: spaces of encounter and collective production where each participant surrendered part of their individuality in favor of a plural construction.

The final workshop on performative curatorship (April 2026) organized the staging of the processes developed during the previous encounters and made it possible to gather the final outcomes in the exhibition Condominio Mediterráneo, which will take place at the Castello Aragonese di Reggio Calabria from June 6 to August 23, 2026.

From a pedagogical perspective, the performative process becomes an applied field where artistic practices are transformed into research — art based research (ABR) — opening new forms of embodied and experiential knowledge.

MICHELE DI STEFANO – BERMUDAS / CONDOMINIO MEDITERRÁNEO

Michele Di Stefano, Bermudas – Condominio Mediterráneo, ABA RC workshop, November 2025.

The work Bermudas – Condominio Mediterráneo is a performative experiment developed together with students from the Accademia di Belle Arti di Reggio Calabria within the Condominio Mediterráneo project.

The piece represents a reinterpretation of Michele Di Stefano’s acclaimed choreography, awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale Dance in 2014.

The participatory process developed during the workshop led performers toward the creation of complex configurations generated from the elemental nature of their own bodies, rediscovering a democratic dimension within the performative process.

Bermudas – Condominio Mediterráneo functions as a movement organism based on simple and rigorous rules that generate perpetual movement, adopted by each performer as a condition for coexisting with others and building a rhythmically shared world.

The final result creates an intense energetic field crossed by an immediate need for communication, generating a space permanently open to new presences.

The group of performers includes:

Andrea Albanese, Giorgia Foti, Davide La Gamba, Angela Gargano, Roberta Giamboi, Maria Guarnera, Selene Pulejo, Domenico Ventre, and Denise Violani.

PROGRAM – MAY 20th | 7:00 PM

Performance: Bermudas – Condominio Mediterráneo

A work born from the participatory process developed during workshop no. 4, directed by choreographer Michele Di Stefano together with students from the Accademia di Belle Arti di Reggio Calabria in November 2025.

7:30 PM | Art Talk

Presentation of the project Condominio Mediterráneo – Visual & Performing Arts, moderated by Savina Tarsitano.

Participants:

Marcello Francolini — Curator of the Condominio Mediterráneo project
Rosita Commisso — Head of audiovisual documentation
Pietro Sacchetti — Director of the Accademia di Belle Arti di Reggio Calabria
Savina Tarsitano — Art Manager for the internationalization of the project

8:00 PM | Closing Performance: Spazio Mediterráneo

Closing performance resulting from the work developed by the performative group created within the Condominio Mediterráneo project.

Description

Spazio Mediterráneo is a choreographic research project exploring the Mediterranean as a space of transit, displacement, movement, and permanence.

Understood as the border between the lands surrounding it, the Mediterranean appears here as a mystical and metaphysical territory crossed by dense geopolitical, cultural, economic, and religious borders.

Its routes have always carried goods, but today — more than ever — they also carry human destinies. From Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East toward Europe, the Mediterranean becomes a dense mass that resists passage, transforming requests for help into a struggle against invisibility.

The choreographic research is based on the somatic translation of Morse code, used not as a simple reference but as a rhythmic and spatial generator.

The work thus combines a binary and mechanical language with the organic fluidity of wave-like movement, creating a powerful contrast between the precision of communication and the unpredictable instability of water.

Condominio Mediterráneo – Visual & Performing Arts