Context
CGN Servizi is a benefit corporation based in Pordenone that provides software for accountants and employment consultants. Always focused on corporate welfare and sustainability topics, the company is deeply committed to generating a positive impact on the environment and people. The company’s desire was to give a gift to its employees by enriching an area they use daily: the cafeteria, located inside a circular building surrounded by a lush Zen garden.
Intervention
The DMAV Collective designed a series of artist illustrations for CGN, inspired by the company’s values as expressed through nine haikus formulated by the employees. The illustrations were then printed in fine art quality using inkjet printing and displayed inside the cafeteria. Additionally, we enhanced the exterior of the building by creating a mural on the circular roof that features CGN’s mantra, “ionoi.”
Side notes
Both works emphasize the relationship between the individual and the community, a theme that is dear to the company.
Contesto
Villa Russiz is a unique entity: a facility that has been producing high-quality wine since the 1800s, using the proceeds to maintain and expand a shelter for children from critical family situations. Villa Russiz engaged DOF Consulting for a process of alignment and growth for the staff within the shelter, which subsequently led to a desire to intervene in the physical structure and spaces of the company through the DMAV Collective.
Intervento
The Collective worked on defining a series of illustrations and words to be displayed on the façade of the shelter, to evoke the concepts, places, and values of the facility. The façade of the shelter was then decorated, involving the boys and girls who live in the facility in the creation process.
Side notes
In parallel, DOF Consulting organized the Futuribili Festival, which animated Villa Russiz by hosting various workshops during the first Happiness Camp.
Context
Visibilia – Volontariato è cultura is a project promoted by CSV Marche Ets (Volunteer Services Center) that aims to create a space for listening, discussion, and sharing ideas and proposals from associations and volunteers for 2024. This participatory process seeks to foster awareness and collaboration among local associations and create synergies. CSV Marche Ets needed to communicate its intentions to the wider Pesaro territory.
Intervention
The project for Visibilia involved creating a mural that encapsulates the initiative’s key words, intentions, and values. This manifesto is expressed through the use of diverse lettering styles that strongly convey the intrinsic meaning of the chosen words. The mural was then painted on a large 200-square-meter facade within the Pesaro School Campus. This approach aims to make the invisible visible, helping to make the presence tangible, and evoking the assistance and contact that characterize the essence of volunteering through the artistic installation.
Side notes
For the project’s inauguration, the mural area was brought to life with artistic performances by various associations, highlighting the project’s theme: unveiling the invisible.
Context
The project is part of the Bergamo Brescia Capital of Culture 2023 program and was developed in collaboration with the Pasquale Agazzi Institute to highlight the pedagogical experience of the Agazzi sisters in the Brescia context and to emphasize the contemporary relevance of some of their central philosophical principles. The project was presented in October 2023 during the Festival of Education.
Intervention
The artwork consists of a series of three hand-bent neon lights, placed in various locations significant to the lives and work of the Agazzi sisters, including the school where they served. The inauguration featured a series of performances, including contemporary dance, reinterpreted Agazzian songs, and poetry readings.
Side notes
For the first time, a figurative element is introduced in the DMAV neon works. This process is inspired by the “trinkets,” the small objects cherished in the Agazzi sisters’ philosophy. In homage to this beautiful image of “truth in children’s pockets,” a button has been incorporated into one of the neon pieces, along with the stylized figure of a child.
Contesto
“Choose” is a permanent art installation that enriches the open-air museum at Villa Toppo Florio Park. This piece employs the languages and inspirations of public art to address the dimensions and experiences of drought and environmental awareness. The work is based on the premise that, when it comes to environmental issues, we are constantly faced with a crossroads and possible choices, often opposing ones. However, the important thing is not to reflect on the meaning of the crossroads but rather to act, concretely and personally, starting with oneself. The installation invites us to decide, to take a stand, and to act, even if only within the symbolic space opened by the artwork.
Intervento
A physical installation with a significant conceptual component, the artwork is permanently situated, starting from the delicate slope at the base of the first flight of stairs leading from the Villa to the Park, and concluding in the area where the staircase ends. Visually, one is confronted with an ideal triangle that frames the site-specific artistic intervention. At the apex of this triangle stands a large plexiglass “O” pierced by a movable iron arrow, while at the two opposite corners, at the end of the steps, the words “Having” and “Being” are painted, creating an imaginary crossroads. This natural fork in the path appears before the visitor’s eyes as they immerse themselves in the park experience. The bifurcation visually and experientially poses the profound question that governs the relationship between humans and the environment: Having or Being? The crucial move each person chooses to make will help steer us, as a collective, in one direction or the other.
Side notes
TreeArt Festival is an event that spans scientific outreach, culture, cinema, live performances, and contemporary art—disciplines that interact and engage with each other in the name of promoting environmental sustainability and exploring the role that plants and trees can play in the cities of our future.
The artwork seeks to emphasize, echoing the famous text by Erich Fromm, the significant theme of the unstable balance between humans and the environment, without resolving the underlying ambiguity that envelops these two dimensions in the contemporary landscape.
Context
DMAV’s new work continues the path of research and his “neon declarations of love” dedicated to a series of musical projects with a profound generational impact, which have settled deep in the soul and in the history of music. After the most recent installations, Sacred Ground in Turin and Do it yourself in Bologna dedicated to the “Straight edge” movement, it is the turn of one of Coltrane’s masterpieces, Blue Train, associated with a Bolognese project of regeneration and social innovation, ” Boat Stop”.
Intervento
From the freedom of Punk to the different and equally powerful freedom of Jazz to play with the visions, dreams and actions of a project of social transformation.
The common thread that guides the new neon story of DMAV has to do with the shamanic dimension of music, it is linked in particular to those musical projects capable of generating a vision, a sort of dimensional alteration, which vibrates in space and is capable of to change the characteristics of a place, to create immediate and vital involvement within the community, to rekindle the fire in the sacred space of the village.
Bluetrain is dedicated to the album of the same name and created site specific for the cultural animation and urban regeneration project that will be carried out in the evocative space of the “Treno della Barca” in Bologna, the historic building designed by Giuseppe Vaccaro. The choice of Jazz also refers to the philosophies and logics of regeneration, participation and creative realization which are the basis of this path of social and cultural animation.
Side notes
As Lewis Porter recalls, in his beautiful book Blue Trane, Coltrane himself stated: “My music is the spiritual expression of who I am: my faith, my knowledge, my being. I believe that music can make the world better and, if I am capable of it, I want to contribute to doing so. I would like to show people the divine using a musical language that transcends words. I want to speak to people’s souls.”
