Art Destinations Sarah Rhodes and Sicily Art Residency Program (SARP)

Cosimo Ferrigolo dissolves boundaries to challenge us to live in a more inclusive and inter-connected way. He speaks to us from his home-studio in Venice about how fluidity permeates his work.
We met when I visited the Venice Biennale Architecturra last year. I was in Venice as one of five creative directors of the Australia Pavilion 2023 exhibition unsettling Queenstown.
 
In this episode we cover:

how living in Venice takes on a political meaning


how Cosimo’s passion for architectural spaces shifted his career from theatre set design to performance art as he was more interested in listening to abandoned spaces than creating a set in a blank canvas


Cosimo’s involvement in Metaforte, the former Austrian naval fort turned artists live-in studio, in the Venezia lagoon


blurring the boundaries on fact and fiction,


the periphery’s relationship with the centre, and


Cosimo’s shared feeling between his work and childhood

 
Biography
Cosimo Ferrigolo is a theatre stage manager and performance artist who studied architecture and urban design.
His interest in how artists work in urban spaces and the stories they reveal is influenced by his background in theatre set design and performance studies. He always works collaboratively and uses an interdisciplinary approach to dissolve the boundaries of how we experience the world, raising more questions than providing answers.
Since 2021 he has been the stage manager for the OHT theatre company. In 2020 he co-founded BARdaDino, a shared studio and cultural space in Venice. Since 2017 he has collaborated with MetaForte Association, a cultural urban regeneration project through art and housing in Cavallino-Treporti VE, Italy.

Independent curator Alice Ongaro Sartori collaborates with artists across the archipelago in the Venetian lagoon to develop site specific projects that focus on how art, ecology and the public sphere intersect. 
 
In this first episode we cover:
TBA21s Ocean Space, an arts foundation advocating for ocean literacy through art. With an international focus, it has found its home in Venice, and tries to find a balance between the global and local by working with Veneto artists, alongside those further afield,
examples of site-specific arts projects in the lagoon; such as The Garden of the Unaccompanied Children and the Floating Cinema (people came together in 300+ gondolas in the lagoon to watch films),
the importance of collaboration in Alice’s practice and how she values female power,
how fascist imagery from the 1960s and 70s can be seen in popular culture today,
and new African fiction being published by Venice-based publisher wetlands.
Whether you are interested in how artists and curators respond to the social, political and environmental tensions within a place, or you are fascinated by the beauty and mythology of Venice, this episode promises to reveal another layer of Venice that can only be experienced by immersing yourself in the lagoon.
Tune in to hear how the islands in the Venezia lagoon influence the psyche and the artistic imagination.

Welcome to the first season of Art Destinations. Artists, curators and publishers reveal something special about Venice and the surrounding islands in the Venezia Lagoon. 
In this introduction, we spend time sharing the connections between those interviewed, including: curator Alice Ongaro Sartori, performance artist Cosimo Ferrigolo, one of the 2023 Venice Biennale's Ireland Pavilion creative directors Mary Laheen, publisher Enrico Bettinello of Wetlands Books, and multi-disciplinary artists Nuvola Ravera and Carolina Mazzolari. 
For show notes and transcripts, please go to artdestinations.org.