Place: Bologna University. Department of Cultural Heritage
Curated by: Luca Ciancabilla, Daniele Torcellini
Opening: Tuesday, 24 October | 4 p.m.
Period: 14 October 2023 – 14 January 2024 
Opening hours: public art installation - Monday to Saturday 10 a.m. - 6 p.m.
Admission: libero

The world through the eyes of a child, through a TV screen. No, not just one screen, but twenty, all placed at the same time in via Diaz – one of the main streets of Ravenna – at the foot of the building, which in the 80s and the 90s was the headquarters of the Ferruzzi group, an entrepreneurial reality guided by Raul Gardini, whose stories intertwined with one of the most complex moments of the Italian social, political, and economical history. A kid back then, today Luca Barberini is an artist based in Ravenna who expresses himself through mosaic, embodying the reality filtered by mass media in glass and stone. Clumsy, animated figures, dotted with as few tesserae as possible, inhabit his works, where artistic, photographic, cinematographic, comics, web, journalistic, and television references intermingle. Yes, because everything we know about the world comes, to a far greater extent, from media rather than firsthand experiences that we live through with our bodies, not just our eyes and minds. In his public art project, Catodica, Luca presents twenty mosaics placed in the compartments of the screens strongly connected to a memory of the city that, in the splendor of the period, was at its technological forefront, alluding simultaneously to a child’s imagination dragged by the uninterrupted and superimposed flow of images and sounds. With the widespread dissemination of television and other media, including the web, we have arrived to judge reality according to its representation, so Luca stages an indefinite time where old and current news mix, change meaning, distort, and assume grotesque features to the point of making surreal what is or was real, or real what is, in fact, a dreamlike fruit of the artist’s imagination.