A dialogue between art and imagination
A project that celebrates the convergence of tradition and innovation, past and future, reality and imagination, creating a space where art continues to evolve, provoke transformation, and surprise.
THE PROJECT
“Imaginaria” springs from a children’s dream and from a lifetime’s experience weaving together Art and Theatre through Performance.
We have always believed that artworks are alive, that in museums they weave relationships among themselves and with the public, creating dialogues, stories, and paths of thought across multiple levels, on different planes, capable of sparking fertile contemporary connections with History and those who inhabit it – those people who, standing before the works, have the desire and sensitivity to enter into resonance, allowing themselves to be offered insights of knowledge and stimuli for reflection.
Our experience as performers, which for many years has seen us collaborating alongside contemporary artists to give life to bridge-works, making the nodes of artistic inspiration reverberate through our interpretation with a multiplicity of languages, has allowed us to reach the audience by engaging them not only on an intellectual level, but on a deeper, interpersonal and absolute plane.
Our project emerges from relationship, to create relationship.
Our relationship/collaboration as artists with the artworks we interact with, which we observe, feel, study, and interpret, along the thread of knowledge and imagination. In dialogue, we give body and voice to suggestion, creating our digital video works that, through poetic language, make everything the pictorial work has inspired in us resonate. The ideas of the authors emerge, the spirit of the time – theirs and ours – bringing into play History and stories. Challenges, balances, space, forms, rhythm, and colors come to life. We reverberate the meaning of art that is seed, and we offer it to the encounter with the audience, so that they in turn may bring something of themselves into play. Our interpretation aims not to assert but to suggest. We set the tone with our imagination in action so that visitors can liberate their own, establishing a personal connection made of references, memories, and projections of imagination.
“Imaginaria” is the fruit of inspiration but also of complex, articulated work, which involved in-depth study, combining investigation and research, following the traces of the painting’s History and stories, and of its author. Sometimes through the artist’s living voice or at least their exact words, when we were fortunate enough to find period interviews or statements; other times, research led us to encounter the thoughts of art historians and the artist’s fellow travelers, who give us back the ideas behind the work and inevitably add their own vision in layers which, rather than obscuring the image, enrich it with additional lights.
This is art: the work springs from an artist’s imagination and ignites imagination in those who encounter it.
We therefore studied extensively in order to internalize, to make our own, what we discovered, and then abandon ourselves to conveying, through poetic language, the vibration of a deeper suggestion – one that was nourished by knowledge but liberated through inspiration.
We created the digital works of “Imaginaria” to convey the elements of this deep knowledge without dampening the emotion of a first encounter, of love at first sight, simultaneously a sign of both surface and profound attraction, which stirs both senses and soul.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
AND TECHNOLOGY
Our artistic-technological chimera project investigates the interaction with new media, weaving a dialogue of diagonal crossings between art, thought, and contemporaneity.
A work that inscribes itself in the field of Performing Media, using technology ‘intensively,’ but never gratuitously.
Thus we use technological and poetic languages in an interconnected way. Ours is a writing through words, ideas, images, signs, actions, sounds and suggestions, inextricable threads of a single discourse.
Actress Gaia Riposati brings voice and vibration to the texts written for our digital performative works.
Actors are the forms, figures, colors, rhythms, and animations of the digital performative works.
The paintings themselves become actors, inspiring this artistic action.
The viewers themselves become actors as they engage with the works, their imaginations set into vibration, completing the performance in its entirety.
Gaia Riposati and Massimo Di Leo
NUVOLAPROJECT
Ours is an immersion in the relationship with the artwork, finding the path to reach its heart and enabling the soul of the work to emerge and reach the audience. Choosing augmented reality is part of the writing. We designed the viewing experience of ‘Imaginaria’ as part of the work, as a work in itself.
For us, it is essential that the audience can discover our digital work without losing contact with the painted work that inspired it, in a play of perception that does not overwrite, but multiplies the depth of contact, of experience.
Thus, to the eight digital performative video works is added the installation work ‘Imaginaria,’ which encompasses the entirety of the works and their modes of viewing, the performance of the audience moving through space and time from vision to encounter with the works, moving from one work to another, creating their own direction in framing details, delving into particulars, regaining an overall view enriched by personal experience.
“For the Open Merulana project, the artistic duo of Gaia Riposati and Massimo Di Leo, NuvolaProject, were the natural choice for creating a museum accessibility project and enhancement of the permanent collection that is technologically innovative, brilliant in content, and illuminating in its results. The work proceeded with synergy and enthusiasm in creating an intimate connection between the artists and the museum’s art historians, a connection that is reflected in the bond of expanded investigation and regeneration of content, produced on the works that were the subject of research.
“Connection” is not a casual word in this context as it is through relationship and mutual trust that NuvolaProject’s digital interventions were directed, enabling the creation of Imaginaria, the exhibition within the exhibition, a broadening of the conscious and scientifically articulated gaze on the works of Antonio Donghi, Felice Casorati, Giuseppe Capogrossi, Antonietta Raphael, Franco Gentilini, Giacomo Balla.
The Roman School and beyond, renewed in its peculiarities thanks to NuvolaProject: with delicate touch and poetic sensibility, Riposati and Di Leo have become heirs to an artistic thought and sensitivity that they re-elaborate with profound care and respect for the past on one hand, and with great creativity and originality in the present on the other.
Through Imaginaria, NuvolaProject thus constitutes the Roman School that still lives and renews itself, between San Lorenzo and the Esquilino, in a contemporaneity that already knows how to dialogue with the future.”