Promoted by Torino Social Impact in collaboration with Fondazione Compagnia di San Paolo and conceived and curated by Artissima, the Torino Social Impact Art Award announces the winners of the third edition of the prize aimed at two young talents with a background in contemporary art and a multicultural and migrant background. They are Federico Pozuelo (Madrid, 1992) and Natália Trejbalová (Košice, Slovakia, 1989), who will begin a one-month residency in Turin at Combo, the hospitality partner of the project, with the aim of creating a video work.

The Torino Social Impact Art Award was created in 2020 out of the desire to bring art and social innovation into dialogue with the aim of activating actions aimed at influencing the present and contemporary society. Starting from the conviction that art is able to provide tools and physical spaces to question the social urgencies of contemporaneity, the project aims to experiment with the field of the arts as a catalyst for the elaboration of new responses or structured solutions.

Federico Pozuelo and Natália Trejbalová will benefit from a constant tutoring service by the curators of the project, Matteo Mottin and Ramona Ponzini, founders of the art project Treti Galaxie, and will be accompanied by Torino Social Impact in their exchange with the territory thanks to a workshop aimed at getting to know the local context, with meetings and visits to places significant for the production project they propose.

The videos produced during the residency period will be presented at Artissima 2022 (4-6 November).

The two winners were selected by the “Torino Social Impact Art Award” Committee composed of Luigi Fassi, Director of Artissima, Mario Calderini, Politecnico di Milano and Spokesperson for Torino Social Impact, Alberto Anfossi, Secretary General of Fondazione Compagnia di San Paolo, Lorenzo Sassoli de Bianchi, President of Fondazione ICA Milano, Ilda Curti, President of Associazione IUR Innovazione Urbana Rigenerazione, Matteo Bergamini, Editor-in-Chief of Exibart, Matteo Mottin and Ramona Ponzini, founders of the art project Treti Galaxie and tutors of the third edition of the award.

The call 2022 entitled Rebellions and rebirths: the creative potential of confrontation invites us to reflect on the theme of social conflict in its various manifestations and latent forms: a tangible and concrete phenomenon that has always found in art a peaceful means of expression, but at the same time one with a strong potential for denunciation. Contestation and dissent can become a generative and creative tool if the confrontation does not lead to destructive attitudes and behaviour, but is mediated in order to provoke the development of new visions and social transformations. Social conflict, in fact, in addition to highlighting issues of justice, is generative of new representations, ideas, exercises in negotiation and contamination, resistance and mutual aid, which lead to the emergence of innovative practices and novel languages. Within the complexity of social confrontation, art plays a great role in this challenge of recomposition and regeneration.

The Torino Social Impact Art Award was born out of Artissima and Torino Social Impact’s shared vocation for experimentation, 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 award aims to propose new relationships and open up unexpected scenarios through the languages and gaze of the winning artists.

The first edition of the project in 2020 entitled “Quante Italie?” was won by Caterina Erica Shanta and Liryc Dela Cruz, who respectively produced the works Talking about visibility and Il Mio Filippino: Invisible Bodies, Neglected Movements during their residency in Turin. The second edition of ZOOM IN/ZOOM OUT in 2021 awarded the projects Adhan to Dora by artist Monia Ben Hamouda and STILI DRAMA XVIII-XXI by the MRZB collective.

THE WINNING ARTISTS

Federico Pozuelo wins the Torino Social Impact Art Award 2022 with a project involving the creation of a video that will investigate the various historical narratives of Northern Italy, focused on Turin, from the 1970s to today. Letting himself be inspired by the ferment of the Piedmontese capital, the artist will work on historical materials to construct a fiction through the cinematographic language of thriller and horror. The aim is to generate a new narrative that explores new meanings of the way we conceive the present and the reality that surrounds us. The work will present several scenes in which fiction, history and mythology meet, attempting to open up new visions of the world we live in.

Pozuelo’s artistic research has recently focused on the leaden years and the culture produced during those years. From a series of historical research, interviews and fieldwork, she has been able to address the hegemonic construction of historical events, thus realising the potential of fiction and film language in challenging dominant perspectives and showing what is hidden, unrepresented, on the margins.

Natália Trejbalová wins the Torino Social Impact Art Award 2022 with a project investigating the network of underground spaces, a meeting place for marginal communities and a place of rebellion against the hegemony of the world and systems of the surface. Underground spaces also function as time capsules, archives of the human and non-human traces that have passed through them. The artist’s work will be transformed into a journey into the parallel world of underground networks to discover the hidden face of Turin, one of the Italian cities with the largest network of artificial cavities and underground passages: Fortezza Pastiss, the military tunnels under the Pietro Micca Museum, under Palazzo Madama, under Piazza Castello and also the Galleria Reale that connects Turin with Rivoli. The underground city is par excellence the representation of the unconscious and the repressed of the city on the surface. Furthermore, the artist develops the link between speleological exploration and the colonisation of space.

Trejbalová’s artistic practice focuses on the creation of moving images. In recent films she has explored the possibilities of science fiction, our individual perception of transformations on a global scale, possible future interspecies relations and changes in the planetary environment. The film production is usually developed and structured as a work in progress over a longer period of time and includes scenes and settings produced in different residencies and exhibitions.

ARTISTS’ BIOGRAPHIES

Federico Pozuelo

Federico Pozuelo (Madrid, 1992) is a visual artist who explores the construction of historical and cultural narratives through different languages. In his latest works he has reflected on the construction of the historical event, the aesthetisation of political violence and the theatricalisation of cultural narratives through the language of film. He is also a founding member of the Amsterdam-based Prom Collective, where he has been developing audiovisual projects and the publishing project Prom.Run since 2017.

Natália Trejbalová

Natália Trejbalová (Košice, Slovakia, 1989) is an artist who devotes her research to the interference between cultural production and digital languages, in a multidisciplinary approach that includes video production, installation, sculpture and performance. She has participated in exhibition projects in various institutions including: Palais de Tokyo, Paris; MUDAM, Luxembourg; Power Station of Arts, Shanghai; Fotomuseum Winterthur; The 16th Quadriennale in Rome; 35m2, Prague; PAV Turin; Regional Art Museum Pardubice; Gossamer Fog, London; Galerie Charlot, Paris.
Trejbalová has been artist in residence at Schafhof-Europäisches Künstlerhaus Oberbayern, Freising; Kunstststiftung Baden-Württemberg, Stuttgart; AIR Futura, Prague; Sim, Reykjavík.

His most recent solo exhibitions include Isle of the Altered Sun at Promise of Kneropy, Bratislava.

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, he chooses not to have a fixed location but to seek out each time the space that best suits the project he is working on.

Since March 2016, he has been developing a series of solo exhibitions in which artists dialogue with the hidden urban fabric of Turin, reconfiguring the use of the city’s historical sites 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 Cinema Museum of Turin, Grandi Stazioni Rail, the Pietro Micca Civic Museum, Parcolimpico and Acer.
In 2020 he curates the project Endless Nostalghia, dedicated to the work of film director Andrej Tarkovskij, among the winners of the Toscanaincontemporanea2020 call for entries. In 2021 he is co-curator of Supercondominio3 for the Castello di Rivoli Museo di Arte Contemporanea. In 2022 he inaugurates the exhibition season of NAM – Not A Museum at Manifattura Tabacchi, Florence, and curates the sixth edition of the ClubGAMeC Prize.

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