Centro Benessere is an experimental visual-performative concept created together with the artists Francesca Balsamo and Nicola Bianco, that has so far taken place at the cultural association Sfera and BASE in Milan.

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Curatorial statement

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Struggle is violent, passionate, and destructive. There is beauty in the rupture struggling produces. It can validate broken, neglected, and oppressed identities. But when talking about the struggle, the importance of care is often overlooked. The significance of compassion and listening as an integral part in creating a sustainable change. The need of benessere, understood as bodily, social, and spiritual well-being, in order to resist. 

 

Centro Benessere introduces an illustrated and performative path projected by two emerging artists, Francesca Balsamo, and Nicola Bianco, curated by Liina Ilona Särkkö. The works are based on a research of aesthetics that are not superficial, but that aim to rethink the basics of an exhibition as an area dedicated to reflection on the contrast of fear and well-being, at the service of an emancipated audience.

 

There are heavy weights. A snake wrapped around a tombstone, melting into a butterfly next to a rolled-up receipt approaching a nose with breasts as its eyes. Images and figures entangling like roots, twisting on themselves, penetrating our nervous system. And then, all of a sudden, a relief. A gentle feeling of presence, of tranquility. Someone beside us, a warm, friendly touch. Suggesting how pain takes the most varied and multiple forms, while the idea of well-being is rather uniform. An introspective space that enforces encounters and where the meaning is elaborated collectively. A space that allows us to feel good, to feel that soul and body are connected, declaring that the role of an artwork is no longer to shape imaginary and utopian realities, but to form patterns of action within the existing real.