REPLICA is a curatorial and research project founded in 2019 by Lisa Andreani and Simona Squadrito. REPLICA is an archive, a collection and a place where exhibit and exchange artist’s books and independent publications.

Replica project will be presented and on May 30th, from 3-4pm as part of the Islands and Seas art salon pop up at New Spring Garden, Pohjoisesplanadi 25-27.

Sicilian Antigroup: a translocal study is a research project dedicated to the Sicilian Antigroup, a poetry movement born in 1968 and active until the 1980s around three cultural epicentres: Palermo, Trapani and Catania. Moved by the idea of poetry as revolutionary action, this group of poets proposed alternative politics and behaviours.

After a period of study in public and private archives and visits made to heirs and witnesses, in collaboration with PUBLICS, REPLICA will share with the public the international experiences made by the Sicilian movement, focusing in particular on the Convegni fra i Popoli del Mediterraneo, a series of seminars about poetry involving poets from all the Mediterranean area, and the publishing house Cross-Cultural Communications founded in New York by Stanley H. Barkan to spread traditionally neglected languages. After an introduction, a collective reading will open a discursive moment where will be possible to discuss a selection of poems. During the event, archival materials and publications from the Sicilian Antigroup will be available to the public together with audio traces of poems read by Timo Performativo, Adriano La Licata and Carola Provenzano, respectively a performer, artist and curator from Sicily.

The project Sicilian Antigroup: a translocal study is supported by the Italian Council (12th edition, 2023), a programme for the international promotion of Italian art of the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture.

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BIOS

Simona Squadrito

Simona Squadrito is a teacher, critic, editor, and independent curator. She teaches Creative Writing and Phenomenology of Contemporary Arts at the MADE program in Syracuse and Methodologies and Techniques of the Contemporary and Latest Trends in Visual Arts at IED in Milan. She is the co-founder of REPLICA, an Italian archive of artist books, and KABUL magazine, a cultural association, independent publishing house, and magazine of contemporary art and culture. She is the author of essays for Postmediabooks, Skira, AgenziaX, and Nomos Edizioni, and writes for various specialized magazines. With the curatorial and research project REPLICA, she was the winner of the Italian Council XII Edition grant promoted by the Ministry of Cultural Heritage. From 2015 to 2020, she was the director of Villa Vertua Masolo, the civic museum of Nova Milanese.

Lisa Andreani

Lisa Andreani is a curator and art historian.

Currently, she is Curator and Assistant to the Artistic Director at MAXXI (Rome). In 2023 she was Curatorial and Exhibition Coordinator of Panorama L’Aquila, a city-wide exhibition organized by ITALICS. She has been a co-curator of :After. Festival diffuso di Architettura in Sicilia. From 2020 to 2022 she has been Curatorial and Editorial Coordinator at MACRO – Museum for Preventive Imagination (Rome). In 2019 she has been a fellow of the Global Modernism Studies research program at the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation (Dessau) in collaboration with the Victoria & Albert Museum (London). She coordinated the production of Romanistan (2019), a film by Luca Vitone. In 2019 she co-founded REPLICA, a curatorial and research project investigating artist books. She has collaborated with various institutions and publishers including Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro (Milan), Fondation Carmignac (Paris-Porquerolles), Humboldt Books (Milan), and Mousse Magazine & Publishing (Milan), NERO Editions (Rome), Spector Books (Leipzig). Since 2018 she works as an archivist and researcher for Archivio Salvo becoming part of the Scientific Committee.

BIOS OF THE TRACKS

ADRIANO LA LICATA

Adriano La Licata was born in 1989 in Palermo and graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Palermo in 2012. Between 2010 and 2011, he studied photography and video at the Universidad del Pais Vasco UPV in Bilbao. In 2015, he participated in a workshop on performance art at the Headlong Performance Institute in Philadelphia, US. He completed a Master of Fine Arts degree at Avans University of Applied Sciences in 2016 and a second master’s degree in Anthropological Methodologies and Design Theory and Methods at the “Dante Alighieri” University of Reggio Calabria in 2020. He has been represented by Francesco Pantaleone Gallery in Palermo since 2024. His artistic practice includes photography, painting, sculpture and video works, exploring the boundary between the rational and the illogical. He has participated in numerous exhibitions in Europe, both group and solo.

TIMO PERFORMATIVO

Born in Palermo in the fervour of the summer of Manifesta12 in 2018, he trained in the streets and studios of the Palermo artists he looks up to Manfredi Beninati and Laboratorio Saccardi. His studio is from the beginning a non-physical digital place: WhatsApp, where he strengthens his main tool, nomadic painting, en plein air. Continuous research of the screen, inside the party, in the community, in the performative act of taking off a garment becomes a constant practice. The performance: I’ll make you a t-shirt if you get naked leverages provocation but is based on research that focuses on sexuality, the body and its exposure, which is still a taboo despite continued commercialization by advertising. Hence then the project on advertising, its language and form.

CAROLA PROVENZANO

Carola Provenzano was born in Palermo in 1993 and graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Palermo in Fashion Design. She studied Visual Arts and Curatorial Studies at Naba in Milan earning her master’s degree in 2021 in Painting at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts with a master’s thesis in Art Criticism. Her drawing activity is aimed at the repetition of gestures, whose signs, defined as doodles, tend to break free from structure to unhinge language. The abstract sign is a retroceding of the written language, not to deny it but to emphasize through a backward work, the value that writing assumes in its stratification.

He currently lives and works in Milan, collaborates for a fashion house and is involved in writing about contemporary art in dialogue with philosophy,