10 September - 5 November “Building new identities - Costruire nuove identità” International Art Festival a Villa San Michele

The seventh edition of the international art festival of Anacapri, Il Festival del Paesaggio, is underway: from 10 September to 5 November 2023, the event conceived and curated by Arianna Rosica and Gianluca Riccio returns to animate the evocative spaces of Villa San Michele and various public places in the historic centre of Anacapri, Capri.

Entitled "Building new identities", the new edition is dedicated to the Ukrainian artist Ilya Kabakov who died in May. His wife Emilia Kabakov, who together with Ilya had been among the protagonists of the exhibition in 2022, pays homage to him with the special project Flying Komarov, an unedited animation video made by the couple, which blends virtual dream and reality, both imaginary and tangible.

This year the event questions the concept of identity outside the box, and at the same time redefines the cultural codes of the island beyond stereotypes and its glamorous patina.

The starting point is the lively artistic climate that reigned on Capri between the 19th and 20th centuries, also thanks to the large villa that hosts the Festival, built by the Swedish doctor in 1895. In that period, the island became the landing place for illustrious characters from the international culture: the place where each of these many-faced figures – from the feral mask of the Marquise Casati Stampa to the decadent one of Jacques Fersen, up to the ambiguous and more frivolous one of Compton Mackenzie to name a few – cultivated the hope of a virginal freedom, of a pleasantness that didn't force us to come to terms with the uniformity of bourgeois social behavior, in the sign of an insularity that, from being geographical, was transformed into an existential model.

Starting from this tradition, which identifies the Island of Capri as the privileged territory for experimenting with new social behaviors and recognizes it as the ideal place for the definition of other identities and a new relationship with the landscape, the guidelines of the 2023 edition are developed.

Humberto and Fernando Campana, Paolo Canevari, Goldschmied & Chiari, Ibrahim Mahama, Matteo Nasini, Elisa Sighicelli, Alberto Tadiello, Andreas Eriksson are the artists called to create site-specific installations, special projects and public art interventions, interpreting, through languages and forms of expression diversified, that attempt of fusion between art and life, of union between aesthetic experience and existential dimension, of mutual exchange between artificial and natural forms, which in Capri and precisely in Villa San Michele, found one of its epicenters and a greatest architectural examples..