12,5 Kg of Belgrade

12,5 Kg of Belgrade. Galerjia Remont, Belgrado. 2016 

Friday, 16th of December. „12.5 kg of Belgrade“ *

SARA CIUFFETTA (Italy)

(* 12.5 kg is standardized weight of monetary gold bars)

Sara Ciuffetta is Italian artist who stays and works in Belgrade during November and December 2016 under professional guidance of Remont Artistic Association. Sara won Belgrade artist in residency as a special prize for young talents under 35 years old within PREMIO COBAT PRIZE (http://www.premiocombat.it/2016/it ) with whom Remont collaborates for the third year now.

Her previous artistic research Sara developed in different media – drawing, painting, photography, sculpture, performative actions… but always with an open approach for understanding and learning about herself and people in general who are the actual center of her interest. Regardless of whether it is about her intimate, sometimes even impulsive capture of personal conditions and processes or it is about her more monumental works, sculptures or spacious ambiences, Sara always reaches and magnifies simple and basic human feature. Far from big frames of ideologies, nations, borders, social norms she finds greatness in weaving of individual existences. 

For Sara exploring of the new environment and the city of Belgrade turned to be a new journey through different worlds which her new Belgrade fellows showed her.  Original idea was to find a local stone which could represent Belgrade in a symbolic way and to work in it. She picked stone as a material because stone is favored sculpture material which societies love to use to carve in it values they find important to worship and to transfer to the future generations. Through the history of mankind those values seem like sequence of distractions from the very essence of human power and beauty – such as magnification of particular interests, wars, destructions, individual ambitions and aspirations. Sara wanted to find a local stone as a local value which she would further shape in a standardized form of a monetary gold bar as an international represent of the universal value.

It turned out that a search for the Belgrade stone broth Sara again to the people and to their personal stories which opened the doors of the city for her. People who are value and who are the city.