On Saturday, June 21, 2025, Villa Fürstenberg International Sculpture Park in Mestre will be transformed into an art stage for a special evening opening. For the occasion, the park will host an event combining cinema, poetry and sculpture. The star of the evening will be U.S. director and actor Abel Ferrara, who will perform verses by Italian poet Gabriele Tinti, reciting a text inspired by Igor Mitoraj’s work Icarus Winged, part of the Banca Ifis collection. The event, open to the public and free admission subject to availability, is part of the broader Art Night framework, promoted by Ca’ Foscari University of Venice in collaboration with the City of Venice and the Veneto Region.
The Villa Fürstenberg Park, immersed in nature and its forms of biodiversity, will be illuminated by a light designed to enhance the lines and shapes of the sculptures, creating a rarefied atmosphere in which Tinti’s poetry comes to life thanks to Ferrara’s voice. It is an experience intended to allow the rediscovery of the ancestral aura of works of art, immersing the audience in a visual and sound narrative at the same time.
The work featured in the performance, Igor Mitoraj’s Winged Icarus, draws strength from its mythological subject, Icarus, a central figure in Greek mythology and a universal symbol of daring and fall. The son of Daedalus, a famous Athenian architect and sculptor, Icarus was locked up with his father in the labyrinth designed by Daedalus himself for King Minos. Their escape was through wings of wax and feathers handcrafted by his father, but legend has it that Icarus, driven by the exhilaration of flight, came too close to the sun, melting the wax and falling into the sea.
This image, rooted in ancient myth, has over time become a warning against pride and arrogance, the so-called “hybris” that leads man to ruin. Mitoraj’s work takes up this eternal theme, with his sculpture capturing the tension between aspiration and fall, between beauty and tragedy. Gabriele Tinti’s poem, read by Ferrara, aims to amplify this dimension, restoring new nuances and suggestions to the myth, in an emotional and reflective journey for the audience.
The evening at Villa Fürstenberg is part of the itinerant ecphrastic writing project conceived by Gabriele Tinti, who for years has dedicated himself to rediscovering and reinterpreting works of art and mythological figures through poetry. The goal of this initiative is to enhance the relationship between image, word and myth, creating a living and contemporary dialogue with artistic and cultural heritage. Tinti’s poems, often interpreted by well-known faces of international cinema such as Willem Dafoe and Kevin Spacey, are thus transformed into real “performance texts” that animate the works and places where they are declaimed.
Abel Ferrara, a well-known New York director and actor, joins the group of artists involved in the project on this occasion. Born in 1951, Ferrara began his career at a very young age with short films denouncing the war in Vietnam and then established himself as one of the most interesting voices in American independent cinema. His path is marked by cult films such as “The Driller Killer,” “King of New York” and “The Addiction,” up to the most recent 2022 “Padre Pio,” starring Shia LaBeouf, which deals with spiritual themes dear to the author.
The event at Villa Fürstenberg Park is an integral part of the Ifis art project, conceived by Ernesto Fürstenberg Fassio, president of Banca Ifis. This initiative represents Banca Ifis’ attempt to combine its economic activity with the promotion of culture and contemporary art, collecting and enhancing works of high artistic value. The Banca Ifis collection, displayed in part right in the Villa Fürstenberg Park, is the beating heart of this project, which is developed through events, exhibitions and performances such as the one planned.
In the photo: Gabriele Tinti and Abel Ferrara
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| Abel Ferrara and Gabriele Tinti enliven Villa Fürstenberg Park with "Icarus" |
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