Italian Council: better few but good

The Italian Council, a project of the Ministry of Culture’s General Directorate for Contemporary Creativity, has aimed to promote Italian contemporary art since 2017. Over the years, its mission has been renewed and expanded, managing to support and fund different cultural activities and productions with an increasingly broader and redefined offer that allows a wide range of projects to be supported and promoted also and especially abroad; the areas now range from research, residencies, international promotion, and publishing projects.

That Italy has endowed itself, just like other European nations, with rewarding planning for contemporary art is certainly excellent news. On the other hand, for too long contemporary art has been relegated, in the national collective imagination, to an abstruse and self-referential activity, exclusively confined to the attention of insiders (and perhaps to some extent this is still the case). the Italian Council, in this sense, seems to undermine this perceptual distortion, but at the same time stands as a real platform in update that seeks to recalibrate its mode of support and support, and certainly this modus operandi is a sign of a dynamism and attention to the needs of those who work in the field of contemporary art in Italy proposing themselves in a perennially changing system such as that of international cultural production.

Of course, this is a system that can be further refined. For example, one of the issues that in some ways is a bit cumbersome (so I have also been told by many participants in some past editions) is probably the bureaucratic articulation that already from the announcement and regulations tends to generate a number of uncertainties about how to participate and carry out the subsequent paperwork, although the possibility of asking for clarifications and further information to the official contact email tries to repair this typical character of Italian bureaucracy. The most interesting area, in my opinion, turns out to be the one dedicated to talent development. However, in my humble opinion, it is precisely in order to better support and fund worthy projects that a reduction in the number of winners would be desirable, so that resources and attention can be focused on a smaller selection of “talents” with a larger budget.

Aiming for 5 proposals rather than 29, as was the case in the last edition, could allow those selected to have more funding and potential (perhaps even responsibility) in the production and implementation of the proposed projects. On the other hand, we often read in trade journals that in international events in recent years, Italian artists are mostly absent or marginal. Aiming at a few (but good) promising projects could, who knows, reverse this trend, always keeping in mind that it would not hurt to monitor the actual process of growth and success in retrospect of the funded talents, so that we can have feedback with respect to the selections made and public funding invested.

This contribution was originally published in No. 25 of our print magazine Finestre Sull’Arte on paper, erroneously in a shortened form. Click here to subscribe.

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