Insideart: the experience of the Rome Media Art Festival.
Curator Valentino Catricalà, interviewed by Guido Talarico for InsideArt, describes the beginning of his international experience with the Media Art Festival organised, for the first time, by the Fondazione Mondo Digitale in 2015.
GT: Important Italian curators have not always been lucky enough to work abroad. You seem to represent an exception. What does it mean to be an Italian curator abroad and how is your work influenced by Italian cultural heritage?
I began working in Italy, in Rome, and took advantage of the incredible potential of this city. Rome has a formidable power, even in terms of communications, at the international level. Basically, everyone wants to come to Rome. So, I founded a festival that was held at the MAXXI (promoted by the Fondazione Mondo Digitale) and began working on an international network to address issues that were still under the radar in Italy: the relation with new technology and the new languages of digital art. I had the intuition that Rome’s attractiveness would be a magnet for international speakers to join the event.
Valentino Catricalà, curator and professor at the Manchester Metropolitan University and previously Artistic Director of the MODAL Gallery at the SODA-School of Digital Art in Manchester, promotes the relation between art and technology through the curation of the Art Section at the Maker Faire-The European Edition, the most important fair on creativity and innovation in Europe. Moreover, he is Art Consultant at the Paris Sony CS Lab. Since February, he is on the board of the German XKM Museum, the Centre for Media Art and Technology. Valentino Catricalà was interviewed by the editor of Inside Art, Guido Talarico, at The Art Symposium Conference held at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome, last May.
