the theme of the third edition
The third edition of the Mediterranean art prize (Map3) with the exhibition of the finalist works, in an effort to evoke the success and cultural reach of its first two editions, will take place from Aug. 05 to 13, 2023. After the themes of the first edition (Thinking Mediterranean) and the third edition (Common ground), the third edition too is equipped in a motto, a trace, a polar point that offers the possibility of reading events through a shared filter without claiming to determine or direct them.
The theme of the third edition is Re—form: in a place such as the territory of Monteserico Castle, strongly connoted by emptiness rather than fullness, by absences rather than presences, by potentialities rather than acts, the insistence of the abandoned, prematurely obsolescent traces of the agrarian “Re—form” remind us how, in today’s times, it is no longer possible to decree and determine once and for all the forms of life and human relations and their relationship with territories from a predetermined image of them. Rather, inhabiting a place, as well as making art, is a complex, necessarily participatory and negotiated processuality, in which form is only the unstable and precarious, inherently impermanent result of a flux that it is possible and necessary to govern, but that it is counterproductive to predetermine or force. In this sense, theories of living at the turn of the twentieth century followed extraordinarily closely artistic theories that speak of performativity, of relationality, of open and indeterminate forms in place of an art of contemplation, whose essential end was the determination of a monumental form, as stable and imperturbable assertiveness.
Through the choice of this thematic track – in no way prescriptive of participation proposals, which are hoped instead to be as free and open as possible – Map3 intends to pursue the suggestions of an ongoing discourse about and with territories, with their symbolic and metaphorical valences and their role in the necessary re-shaping of contemporary living. We believe that the fruitful indeterminacy of a place that questions us by its own powerful solitude that still vibrates because of the history that has passed through it is an unmissable experience for artists of the present time.