Friday, November 21, 2025
6:30 PM
Oratory of Santa Cita

Speakers:
Patrizia Monterosso, Gianluca Collica, Helga Marsala and Monsignor Giuseppe Bucaro

Born in Cosenza in 1957, Alfredo Pirri is among the most respected Italian artists of his generation, admired by both audiences and critics in Italy and abroad. His reputation has grown through an intense career that, since the 1980s, has seen him act both as an artist and as a theorist of art. Although he was trained in the cultural climate of Arte Povera, Pirri has developed from the outset an autonomous and unmistakable poetics, centered on the dialogue between matter and spirit. In his work, every element of the world reveals itself at once as physical presence and as spiritual dimension, in a continuous tension between concreteness and transcendence. Since 1988 — when Achille Bonito Oliva invited him to the Venice Biennale in the celebrated Aperto section — Pirri has exhibited in major Italian museums and institutions, including MAXXI, MACRO, the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, and the Auditorium Parco della Musica in Rome; the Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci in Prato; the Museo Marino Marini in Florence; Palazzo delle Papesse in Siena; GAMeC in Bergamo; and the Castello Maniace in Syracuse. Internationally, his work has been shown at institutions such as P.S.1 in New York, the Walter Gropius Bau in Berlin, the Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain in Saint-Étienne, and the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rijeka. Over the past decades Pirri has also created major permanent works of public art, including Passi at the Galleria Nazionale in Rome, Compagni e Angeli in Città Sant’Angelo, and Progetti per Sala Cielo at the Kursaal Theatre in Bari. For Alfredo Pirri, art is born in that subtle space where emotion survives consciousness.
His works move beyond narrative or meaning, giving form to the act of feeling itself — to the capacity of evoking new sensibilities through what is represented. His installations constantly place in dialogue the two dimensions that define our humanity: the weight of matter and the lightness of emotion, physical presence and its spiritual projection, the tangible and the transcendent. In his vision, art transforms personal emotion into collective experience — something that can be felt and understood by everyone, even without words. Painting, for Pirri, becomes a medium capable of projecting light into a shared dimension, where intimacy does not hide but reveals itself in a communal vision.

In recent years, we have been moving light and fast. In this accelerated drift, society has often mimicked a kind of creativity without responsibility, evading the labor of listening — listening to new words, to untamed reflections, to forms that refuse to be consumed.

Art demands an attentive, renewed listening. Only within such a mental and cultural posture can the horizon of the present reopen and new ways of inhabiting the relationship between human beings and the world emerge. Art creates shared spaces for reflection, where its anticipatory energy can be rediscovered — without expecting conclusive answers from it, and without reducing it to pure spectacle.
Art is — first and foremost — a continuous act of questioning.

We must safeguard the cry of art, preserve its narrative, otherwise we shall find ourselves “side by side as chance guests, speaking different languages.” We will become deaf and solitary before artworks, while artists will go on “crying out in the desert,” summoning us to a dialogue that may render our gaze sharper, more alert, more involved.

Hence the questions animating this first gathering: does our way of being together before artworks preserve or suffocate the artist’s cry? What quality of attention and relationship do we bring into the institutions, the exhibition spaces, the discursive practices that surround the work?

Alfredo Pirri reminds us that the artist, through works and words, cries out to affirm principles; the cry grows louder when principles prevail over form, detaching from the work and rising to the level of doctrine. Then the work empties out: it becomes a replicable image, a servile sign, an aesthetic of conformity. It is along this fault line that cultural and intellectual dictatorships begin to form. Pirri’s reflection calls us to an ethics of being together before the work — an ethics of presence, of dialogue, of responsibility of the gaze.

This being together is not a marginal detail: it is one of the practical foundations of democracy itself. To imagine a State or a Society that guards one dominant aesthetic form would be perilous. It is art that has introduced into the world the very need for democracy — not because art cannot exist outside democratic regimes, but because democracy without art is unimaginable.
Democracy carries a debt toward art — a debt that does not end with the aphorism “no poetry after Auschwitz,” but rather rekindles the urgency of poetry after Auschwitz.
Caring for this debt is a political and cultural task: to create the conditions for society not to neutralize art’s demand, but to assume it as its own — to give back to art a space in which form may remain form, irreducible to slogan, resistant to use, open to relation.

Our invitation in this first event is therefore simple yet radical: to begin again from attentive listening; to inhabit the work; to reintroduce the cultural restlessness of thought against the homogenization of forms and meanings; to protect the cry of art, so that it may continue to generate worlds — and, with them, democracy.