The Torino Social Impact Art Award project – conceived by Artissima and Torino Social Impact, in collaboration with Combo and with the support of the Compagnia di San Paolo Foundation – announces the winners of the second edition of the residency call: Monia Ben Hamouda (Milan, 1991) and the MRZB collective.

Selected through a call to the main public and private Fine Arts Academies and Italian Universities, the winners will have the opportunity to live in residence in Turin for 20 days in July to work on the creation of a new video or photographic work, offering through art a contribution to the transformation of the social perception of particularly urgent themes or life stories considered “distant”.
The residency will take place in Combo, the project’s hospitality partner and an innovative format that combines the idea of hospitality with artistic and cultural programming open to experimentation.
The videos or photographs produced during the residency period will be presented at Artissima 2021 (November 5-7).

The artists will benefit from a tutoring service provided by Matteo Mottin and Ramona Ponzini, founders of the art project Treti Galaxie who, together with Artissima and Torino Social Impact, will accompany the winners on their discovery of the city and its most significant cultural and social expressions. The selected talents will be guided through the process of producing their work and will be able to meet the project curators and the Torino Social Impact network active in the area, discovering the world of entrepreneurship and social innovation.

The 2021 call for entries, entitled ZOOM IN/ZOOM OUT, evokes, on the one hand, our contemporary virtual life, which has forced art to be enjoyed almost exclusively from a distance, and on the other, leads to a reflection on the ability to acquire a new and unexpected vision of society if one observes it from very near or very far. The specific history and training of the winners will offer access to these perspectives, which are as diverse as they are valuable, allowing them to tell the story of contemporary society in Turin in a transversal way, as emblematic of a country that is transforming itself.

The Torino Social Impact Art Award stems from the desire to bring art and social innovation into dialogue with the aim of activating actions to impact on the present and contemporary society. Starting from the conviction that art is able to provide tools and physical spaces to question contemporary social urgencies, the project aims to experiment with the field of the arts as a catalyst for the elaboration of new responses and structured solutions. The aim is to offer young people from “other” backgrounds the opportunity to pursue an artistic career, in order to hypothesise forms of social inclusion in the world of Italian culture and the dissemination of messages capable of positively transforming the perception of what may commonly appear to be distant, foreign or different.

The first edition of the project, characterised by the launch in 2020 of the call “Quante Italie?“, was won by Caterina Erica Shanta (Germany, 1986) and Liryc Dela Cruz (Philippines, 1992), who produced, during their residency in Turin, the works Talking about visibility and Il Mio Filippino: Invisible Bodies, Neglected Movements, respectively.

Their shared vocation for experimentation led Artissima and Torino Social Impact to conceive the project with the aim of broadening the scope of social innovation to include contemporary art. Focusing on the space that multiculturalism has in today’s society, the prize aims to propose new relationships and open up unexpected scenarios through the languages and vision of the winning artists.

THE WINNERS

Monia Ben Hamouda wins the Torino Social Impact Art Award 2021 with Adhan to Dora, a movie project based on a performative narrative that aims to portray the complexities and contradictions of the phenomenon of cultural assimilation. A film that contaminates the present through its very origins, to evolve and self-determine by formulating a counter-narrative that does not deny but exalts.

The MRZB collective (Andrea Parenti, Désirée Nakouzi De Monte, Filippo Tocchi, Pietro Cortona) wins the Torino Social Impact Art Award 2021 with the project STILI DRAMA XVIII-XXI. From the collective, Désirée Nakouzi De Monte (1994, IT-LB) will take part in the residency.

THE TUTORS

Treti Galaxie is an art project founded by Matteo Mottin and Ramona Ponzini. Its aim is to work with artists in an expanded way, respecting their projects and ideas and helping them to produce and develop exhibitions in the most complete way.
For this reason she chooses not to have a fixed location but to look for the space that best suits the project she is working on each time.
Since March 2016, it has been developing a series of solo exhibitions in which the artists dialogue with the hidden urban fabric of Turin, reconfiguring the use of historical sites in the city such as the Mole Antonelliana, the Sala Reale of Torino Porta Nuova Station, the Underground Fortress of Pastiss and the Arches of the Ex-MOI, signing collaborations with the National Museum of Cinema in Turin, Grandi Stazioni Rail, the Pietro Micca Civic Museum, Parcolimpico and Acer.