THE PROJECT

A DREAM IN STONE

The Digital Castle Project Collection

By Francesca Fini

Produced during her art residency at Rocca Sinibalda Castle

 

A THOUSAND-YEAR OLD ITALIAN CASTLE 

ITS RENAISSANCE FRESCOES 

OVID’S METAMORPHOSES 

A TOP INTERNATIONAL VIDEO ARTIST 

A DIGITAL PHILANTROPIC PROJECT

A REWARD

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An avant-garde yet Renaissance architectural achievement in its own right, the Rocca Sinibalda Castle has always hosted over the centuries highly innovative artists, architects, saints, writers, poets, performers, film makers, utopians, and patrons of the arts. 

Some name dropping. The Renaissance and Mannerism painters of its frescoes: Perin del Vaca, Polidoro da Caravaggio, Giovanni da Udine, Girolamo Muziano. More recently: Caresse Crosby, Peggy Guggenheim, Ezra Pound, Salvador Dalì, the Living Theater, Allen Ginzberg and Gregory Corso, Gregory Markopoulos, Lilian Lijn, Tachis, Marcos Cei, Claudio Silvestrin, Martin Amis, Francesco Dimitri.

 

Spearheading modernity, the Castle has now turned digital. The four editions of its art residency and festival Endecameron have been steering towards digital art.

This is when Francesca Fini gets into it. An internationally known video artist, Francesca has become a protagonist and the curator of both Endecameron and the Castle’s current artistic identity: digital humanism through digital video art.

 

Francesca is the driving force behind the 2022 project. Focus on Girolamo Muziano’s depiction of some episodes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the overall visual theme of this zoomorphic castle. Morphing as the digital path to metamorphosis.

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THE DIGITAL ART COLLECTION - A DREAM IN STONE 2022

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Eight video works inspired by a key SciFi theme, Earth after the vanishing of humanity. The Rocca Sinibalda Castle stands out as an intact and silent survivor to the catastrophic reversals of History. Still there to testify what we were and open a chasm into a maybe future. The frescoes become a relic, carefully preserved inside the womb of futuristic, self-sustainable and self-powered devices, which keep functioning unaware of their surrounding void and of the disappearance of their makers. 
A collection of premium short high-definition 3D films. Due to be published on the Sedition digital arts platform.

The Castle as an Ark, a densely written stele that merges with the rock and crosses time, transforming it and self-transforming. 

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ART PHILANTROPY AND PATRONAGE

 

The sale proceeds from the collections will concur to the long-awaited restoration of the Girolamo Muziano’s  1553 frescoes. A fraction of the proceeds is due to remunerate the artist for her July 2022 residence at the Castle while creating the collections.

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COLLECTORS REWARD

 

Patrons deserve a Reward. Getting the full Collection entitles to a two-day&one night stay in the Castle. An inspirational and not-to-be-forgotten experience.

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THE CASTLE

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A powerful standing monolith. The only full-bodied form surviving in a formless time/space blue hole.

Only fragments of past forms are left fluctuating in its vacuum. Relics. Chaotic testimonials of a disjointed by-gone reality. Bizarre entities. Splitters. Parts. Disembodies limbs. 

Formless, but living.  Unendingly absorbed in their quest for new forms. Always unsuccessful, and always trying. They haphazardly assemble and disaggregate, producing nameless transitional entities and meaningless signs. Due to quickly fall apart through space and time. Striving to last and somehow live.  Pursuing former identities nested in confused and unreliable memories. Morphing new identities in search of would-be definitions in dictionaries to come. 

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The Castle is there. A reminder that forms can still exist if a new gaze can reinvent or conjure them up. A fertile nostalgia breeding desire, fragile ghosts of reality, amd dreams eager to become maybe true. 

The Castle as a repository of wonder, a Metamorphoses agent, an Arch of forms waiting for an Artist’s eye and ear to pull them out of their dystopian dissolution into the boundless liquidity of a pre-birth amniotic deep blue ether. 

The Artist brought back to her most primordial function, extracting forms – old and new – from the all-encompassing maternal womb of Chaos and the Moon. Giving birth. 

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