[accessibleimage] Italian Sculpture Show

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Ansa.it, Italy
Monday, March 06, 2006

Blind date with Italian sculpture 

 Visitors get touchy at show revealing art's unseen side 

(ANSA) - Bergamo, March 6 - An innovative new exhibition in this northern
Italian city enables blind and sighted art lovers to enjoy the unseen side
of modern sculpture .

Visitors to 'Un senso per l'arte' (A Sense for Art) can opt to be taken
around the exhibit blindfold, led by blind guides, who help them discover
the works on show via touch.

"We aim to take able-bodied people into the world of the disabled and use
personal experience to sweep aside many stereotypes," explained Giovanni
Battista Flaccadori, the president of the provincial section of the Italian
Union of the Blind, which helped organize the exhibit. "It's not so much a
matter of getting sighted people to understand what it means to be blind,
it's more one of helping them appreciate the extraordinary sensorial
possibilities certain physical limitations open up".

At the end of the tour visitors can take off the blindfold and go around
comparing the sensations they got from touching with what the works actually
look like.

The exhibition, which runs at the city's Sant'Agostino church until March
26, also has explanations and descriptions in Braille, so blind visitors can
enjoy it on their own.

There are 39 works on show by a range of Italian artists.

"We chose different figures and materials too," said Eugenio Benaglia, the
exhibition's curator. "They go from cold bronze to warm wood, from smooth
figures to rougher ones; all united by the same theme - touch." The
highlight is a piece by Bergamo sculptor Giacomo Manzu' (1908-1991),
considered one of the most important Italian artists of the 20th-century.
Manzu' is probably most famous for his creation of the doors of St. Peter's
Basilica in Rome and for the eight-meter bronze statue of mother and child
standing outside the United Nations headquarters in New York.

Although a committed leftist activist, he had an excellent relationship with
Pope John XXIII, who was also from Bergamo.

The Manzu' piece on show here, entitled La Pace (Peace), also depicts a
mother and child.

There are works by Elia Ajolfi, Piero Brolis, Alberto Meli, Franco Normanni,
Ferruccio Guidotti, Gianni Grimaldi and Gregorio Cividini too .

The exhibition is open Tuesday to Sunday; blindfold tours must be booked in
advance.


http://ansa.it/main/notizie/awnplus/english/news/2006-03-06_1033062.html


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