twocalls: the 1st phase ended, 173 submissions

On April the 30th the first phase of the International Artistic Contest Two Calls for Vajont, launched in June 2014 by Dolomiti Contemporanee drew to a close. The Contest was conceived as an open platform of reflection on the territory of the Vajont and on its terrible history (October the 9th 1963), and as an opportunity to rethink, through the production of a series of renovating images, the landscape and some of the main symbols of that history today, transforming them from still objects-memories of the tragedy into active and shared “construction sites” of the mind and spirit. Twocalls has gathered opinions and ideas from people, and projects from artists for over a year: every word, every project was needed to build a frame of cultural awareness. The contest isn’t a wall nor a dam, but a perspective, a flux of perspectives, a web of purposeful thoughts, morphed into images.

Why have art and culture demanded to come here to say something? Because art and culture, simply have to exist, always, in every context. It is imperative that they do, especially in places of conflict, in critical territories. Art and culture are word and spirit of the human being, and the human being who is the maker of their own destiny mustn’t ever forget, nor extinguish themselves. Art not only has the right to get into every critical context with its vital attention: it’s its duty.

The artists, architects, designers, all the people who took part in the Contest, aren’t strangers to this context at all, since they have responsibly decided to come inside it. The Vajont tragedy isn’t a private one: instead, with its terrible and extraordinary emblematical, involves the human, each human, every human. And now the human beings, armed with their own sensibility, have come back to this land, to talk with its landscape ad inhabitants about the past, present, and future. The history of the Vajont isn’t the history of a tragedy that happened in an instant: it’s the story of a process of subtraction and loss which lasted decades, that has seen the people of this land struck, first, and then abandoned. But no human is abandoned when other humans come to share with them thoughts, memories, and places that keep on existing, like history itself. This is what is, and will continue to be in the next few months, Twocalls: a call for all the human beings, which the artists have chosen to share.

173 the submissions by April the 30th, 108 the projects for a call for a line, and 65 for a call for a wall. The Selection Committee inside of Dolomiti Contemporanee has selected 75 of them: they are the projects involved in the finals, published and thus viewable and open to comments (here the a call for a line projects, and here the a call for a wall ones).

By the end of May, the Jury of the Contest will work on these 75 projects, to determine the four winning artworks, that is to say, the two that are going to be realised, and the two to which the Special Dolomiti Contemporanee Prize will be awarded.

Download the complete list of submitted projects>>