The exhibition opens with Bjørn Melhus' video work “Das Zauberglas” (“The Magic Glass”, 1991), a milestone in the artist's work, with which he began his extraordinary creative epic of interpreting alter-egos in filmic image. In this piece, one of the played characters by Melhus shaves in front of a screen trying to mirror himself and interact with his double inside, the character of Dorothy, an artist female representation who hijacks Debra Paget's voice dubbed in German from the 1950 American western film “Broken Arrow”, who lives in her separate dimension also implying to other dimensions she experienced beyond the circumstance of the meeting. She will also be the protagonist of subsequent films. Even the viewer that watches this work is involved in this proliferation of alter-egos that generate the “unheimlich”, caught off guard by the personal identity concepts, where masculine and feminine converge.
The screen, a new magic mirror, creates another impossible self. The characters try in vain to communicate.
In Bjørn Melhus' research the unheimlich hunts us like a ghost, in the same way that the magic is the shadow of the technic world, or rather everything that is placed in the dark by it. 
A "hauntological" case arises, in the prophetic sense given by Derrida and Fisher and by McLuhan with the "medium is the message”.
In the video, the essence of the exchange between the two characters is typical of a love relationship that produces desire, but after his confession desperation takes over because there seems to be no one on the other side and the protagonist has no choice but to search in vain himself in that unconscious, in falling oneself into that world.
In one analogy with the Buddhist tradition, the screen is the object of meditation like a vase of flowers, placed next to it, and cut hairs fall at the beginning and end of the video.
His recent narratives clearly show apocalyptic scenarios not very different from the current ones. “Resolution” (2022) tells about a primordial transcendental state that humanity will reach in 2071-2078, meantime in “Sugar” (2019) a friendly and caring humanoid robot, is sent to cure the HON (Human Organism Natural) and trapped in an advertising spot, reconnects with the energy of nature and the cosmos, its final destination. Humanity lives in a permanent state of emergency at the end of time and is prevented from returning to an original state or “homecoming” in “The End Time” (2019) while in “The Theory of Freedom” ( 2015) the world is tyrannised by objectivism in which are issued theories of freedom.
In this way Melhus simultaneously opposes the worlds of technique and magic by criticising the former and inviting us to cross the threshold of the latter, going beyond the noise generated by the transmission/non-transmission of the screen and in everything that involves being in both. Just as Cronenberg's “Videodrome” that brought us in, Melhus' “Magic Glass” takes us out. The white noise of the video signal absence leads towards ecstasy but also to an unbearable feeling and liberation. All fueled and achieved with the unscrupulous and almost psychedelic use of language, with the pronunciation of cryptic phrases of remarkable emotional impact that are quotes and samples of original film voices, repeated like flashes of light according to an on-off electrical scheme, either full of enchantment and opposition to the story's theme.
Music, voice and lyrics play an important role in his works, producing a rhythm that lets us enter the personal and collective unconscious by repetition.
His original doubles stage a theatre of disguises, animations and nudity of often sickened humanity, caught in the loop of the power of the medium detaching it from which it is dependent, who appears as a healer who travels in space-time, reshaping into his alter-egos like a shaman. 
“The Magic Glass” was also the initial work of Bjørn Melhus's recent screenings series at his Accademia of Villa Massimo residency in Rome where they exhibited an accurate work of his thirty-year research which brought together several works of his narratives divided by themes such as “The Yellow Brick Road”, on the evolution of his alter-egos in parallel with the advancement of technology, “We are at War” on war, “Tainment”, on entertainment, “Capitapocalypse” on the apocalypse of capitalism, which aspire to be, according to its intention, a continuous unicum.

The exhibition in this instance, allows making comparisons and parallel the focused research of Bjørn Melhus on the video doubles with the apparatus of doubles generated by Vettor Pisani's work drawn from history and art history. Beyond the quotation, other points in common between the two artists' research are the metaphysical narrative, the psychoanalytic and shamanic approach, the humour, and the representation of a humanity and cosmos theatre, in which also Vettor Pisani's research poses as prophesying an overturning of limits and boundaries in his era, although he looks backwards as a link with the future, as he stated himself, meanwhile Bjørn Melhus themes addresses directly the contemporary world. 
In the specific displayed works, the analogy could be compared to Duchamp's "Large Glass", a work that comes back in Vettor Pisani’s work since the “Scorrevole" work, considering that the screen gives life to a bachelor machine.
Vettor Pisani's work on display is a large digital print on PVC entitled "Muse" that is assembled in a collage of Arnold Bocklin's painting "The Isle of the Dead" centred in a background nude photograph by Irina Ionesco. The monochrome image is immersed in a blue fog, “ blue light of heavens and seas, of the very ether of our thoughts. (Mimma Pisani).
The image of Arnold Bocklin's “Island of the Dead” is a constant repetition in Vettor Pisani's work that he clarifies in an interview (published by Flash Art) with Massimo Riposati, a friend, gallery owner and publisher who has followed his artistic journey from the beginning, in which he states "a place that continuously returns also in Dalì's work and talks about of the search for a place of infinity or eternity, of the sublime and the imagination", a place that Vettor Pisani also found in real analogues he built and lived in such as the Virginia Art Theatrum - Catastrophe Museum (Serre di Rapolano, Siena) and in his last residency in front of the Non-Catholic Cemetery of the Piramide Cestia in Rome. And he continues: “Modern man must retrieve own tragedy, his drama. Erasing its dramatic destiny is an attempt at alienation. Art is the creation of one's imagination, the one that builds a mask for being, an attempt, through artifice, to create a representation that hides reality, the matter. We are hybrid beings, we are made of divinity, humanity and also animality."
“On Böcklin's tomb, it is written that not everyone dies and this does not mean that everyone is immortal - even on Vettor Pisani's original epigraph was written “Here lies an immortal” - because things only exist if someone believes in it.”
The image on display also presents another recurring theme in Vettor Pisani's work, the androgyne as a symbol of unification of opposites, addressed by his first exhibition "Masculine, feminine, androgynous. Incest and cannibalism in Marcel Duchamp” (Galleria La Salita, Rome, 1970) and then in the performance “Androgynous (human flesh and gold)” (“Contemporanea”, garage of Villa Borghese, Rome, 1973).
Through taking in Gnostic, Masonic and Rosicrucian doctrines within his total alchemical work “R.C. Theatrum” the art of Vettor Pisani “represents the initiatory wandering of the artistic and magical virtues that access into the cosmic game” (Danilo Eccher. Per un’estetica rosacroce).
There is still an ongoing retrospective exhibition at the Pino Pascali Foundation (Polignano a Mare, Bari) curated by Giovanna dalla Chiesa and Carmelo Cipriani, that traces the ideal figure of the “R.C. Theatrum” with the title “Vettor Pisani. The Enigma and the secret”.
Within the present investigation on prophetic art, "the secret of this world is an enigma that knowledge alone will never solve", Hafez, (Persian mystical poet) quoted by Federico Campagna - as it is a present knowledge that resembles the unfiltered perception of one's pain, where knowing something and being it are inextricably linked", a border where there is no border yet an abyss.

Furthermore, Navid Azimi Sajadi recently made a comparison with Vettor Pisani's work, subsequently further expanded to the one of Joseph Beuys (“Terreno-Ultra-Terreno”, Studio La Linea Verticale, Bologna, 2023).
The hero and the anti-hero figure based Pisani's critical dialectics towards Beuys is more widely a dual conception that can bring to a catastrophe or the conjunction of opposites, it recurs in his research starting from oriental philosophical conceptions and merging with Western ones in a harmonious twist.
“The images of Navid Azimi Sajadi’s works belong to the Museum Hermeticum tradition, an inexhaustible heritage of studies and revelations contained in the sacred, philosophical and alchemical texts in which the West and the East have illuminated and intersected with correlations. In this whole vision, knowledge leads to salvation and awareness leads to access to the truth that man can experience, at the centre of his inner world"
“The use of the five-pointed star - recurring in his symbolic work - is comparable to Leonardo Da Vinci's intent when drew the "Vitruvian Man", setting him at the centre of the universe and to many other examples where the number five defines a change, a transition of a state and from which protection is desired” (“The magical space in the early works of Navid Azimi Sajadi”, Mario Iannelli, 2020).
In his installations and drawings on paper, the five-pointed star that delimits the sacred space is drawn with personal writings related to those religious texts, the cypress foliage, barbed wire or chains. This writing runs through life and destruction symbols such as the skull, the apple, the bird, the trumpet, the eagle, the snake, the atomic bomb, and the rib cage, linking the work to various parts.
Another version of the five-pointed star can be found in the cycle "The Bridge" (presented at the Macro Museum, Rome) where in the star's upper part, the female bodies form arches from whose belly are born symbolic manifestations arise that symmetrically balance the elements of vision.
The new work on display investigates the combination of different series and materials, a method that reflects, on the other hand, his perennial process of mixing and directing the philosophies that he brings into play from time to time.
In the syncretism that his works come into existence, the revelation keeps in the background like a blinding or a shadow that poses the overall symbolic architecture with grace and mystery.

The real comparison between Roberto Pietrosanti and Giovanni Lindo Ferretti gave life to the project “Fear Not” project. Roberto Pietrosanti in collaboration with Giovanni Lindo Ferretti, Photograph by Leonardo Aquilino” made in Cerreto d’Alpi in 2014 and displayed in some institutions and gallery exhibitions including Galleria La Nuova Pesa di Roma (2016), Castello di Rivara (2016), Artefiera Bologna (2017), Battistero di S.Giovanni in Corte Pistoia (2017), Triennale di Milano (2018).
The two artists come from different backgrounds, the former from visual, the latter from music, they met on the concept of Annunciation, one of the most relevant sacred and pictorial themes in the Western tradition marking out the beginning of their metaphysic, the angel becomes the event, the voice and main character depicting the conceptual works making up the series in one invisible unicum.
“Fear Not” is a motto for the spirit that opens to transcendence, is an “ appearing to Madonna” in Carmelo Bene’s words “ the one who see do not see what they see, the one who flies are the flight themselves …so precisely see the Madonna is more they embody the Madonna’s vision themselves…I manifested .. I am told.. the voice told me, my inner sing the listening”. 
The artwork series contains the ones created by Roberto Pietrosanti, the“pizzini” written by Giovanni Lindo Ferretti, photographs by Leonardo Aquilino and an artist book. All together expresses the mystery of the ineffable becoming light and soul in the landscape, the song in poetry and body in the sculpture. 
Some of Pietrosanti’s works, made with pins on canvas embody an anatomic representation of a singing. Already at the end of the nineties, Pietrosanti started to create pieces on the concept of voice (displayed in the personal exhibition in 2006 at the A.A.M in Rome). In those works, there is a short circuit in the perception of the line, which appears as a mark if observed from afar but is a consistent constellation of dots that enable it to be in and out of a dimension.
The voice clearness researched by Pietrosanti is reflected in Giovanni Lindo Ferretti's words “a Vortex of infinity/seep through/ appeasing / a vortex of finitude”, “ dust of EMPIREUS”. The pin touches the inner self metaphorically causing pain that becomes a singing in an ineffable instant background, a word made flesh, “Fear, Not”.
In two other works, one of the negatives of the other, beauty and terror blend. The weapons, the fear emblem, are engraved in steel plates arranging the iconostasis, the arrows or rays on a bronze bell symbolise the heart. Both represent “monuments of fear” (Giovanni Lindo Ferretti).
On exhibit is displayed one of the iconostasis, a “two-handed work”, born from an intense practical conversation that characterised this experience. Iconostasis traditionally is where the images find their place, in churches set out the sacred space at the entrance making it inapproachable to the believer's gaze and in the exhibition set apart from the gallery room where the arabesque weapons are displayed to the first darker room where Bjørn Melhus video work unreels.
In the exhibition, Giovanni Lindo Ferretti's voice resonates in some notes or “pizzini” marking the various moments of this exchange.
In his words, the prophecy is a proclamation of the incarnation mystery ("promise of good news") but also of a "different figuration" obtained with a new ineffable background where "fear contains beauty"; thus perhaps it will be possible to recover the sense of the "usefulness of borders and teaching of separation", “give meaning to making or interpreting what is in force and asks to come to light”.
The voice echos the rasa to the work, or rather the lights coming in, inviting us to “do not fear” facing such a beauty and fright, absence becomes presence to surrender without hope and fear as a faithful deed as an "instinctive need to search for the truth, a single primordial voice, against all this noise" (Camilla Balbi, Fear Not).
In Pietrosanti’s work, the voice like an invisible medium, arises from a desire for form, as balance in the use of materials, for example making gravity lightweight. In those works the sacred is a classic harmony imprinting on it a vertigo and an aniconic vibration, which arises from a coming back void, like in his other works which monochrome or of color de-construction and re-construction are crossing through a reset.

Light, truth and future are the unpredictable achievements that measure humanity's drives and desires with the yardstick of restlessness in Cyrill Lachauer's recent works.
In his narrative landscapes he carries out anthropological-aesthetic research on the landscape and criticism of Western society and, through his extensive travels in America and Europe, Lachauer landed the “wanderer" philosophy.
The small photographs on display are taken during his recent trips to America that completed his American trilogy.
The wanderer is understood as an ideal of resistance and as a state that makes narratives possible outside of traditional forms of world-making. It is a state or indeed a phenomenon that can manifest itself in a multiple reality, either vegetal, animal or human but it is also a social and political instance. It can manifest itself in the figure of a bird of prey that becomes a bird of decline or the hobo figures and freight train, symbols of freedom and resistance and also of colonisation and migration. 
The loss of a centre and truth is what contemporary wanderer humanity experiences. From a technical and ideological point of view, his works are non-linear narratives. From the first point of view, his original narrative style cannot be defined in one category, it is a unique work in which photography, video, literature and sound works converge in collaboration with musicians. From a second perspective, they clearly show a loss condition that was truly experienced by the leading players. What is possible is not a new world, perhaps the "Hobo Paradise", but above all is the awareness of the current one.
His landscapes are symptoms, last bastions and convergences of a prophetic, extremely demanding movement of transformation. In them, we see the American ordeal but also traces of truth, light and future, "fertile ruins" based on a non-anthropocentric perspective, uprooted from abstract categories and values focused on pragmatic drives and interests, made possible by ethical virtues founded on another being, “on this and that, the shaman's solution” or on another similar example of the wandering evoked by Lachauer in his work, Bruce Chatwin's “nomadic alternative”.

If the metaphysician reconstructs reality in a meaning framework and the shaman converts it by putting different identities on the same level, the mystic does not reconstruct reality as it is, is more a reflecting surface that is acknowledged in "that type of sudden intuition of one's existence”. The ineffable and world bounce back, "they forget and de-create each other in an unforeseeable co-creation". The latter is a way of liberation through the mind found in Pietro Fortuna’s work, which appears neither a language nor a metaphor but rather a status quo, without the claim of building a world but rather commuting it to his intuition. What he called “glory of the inessential", is a mimesis of nature’s language, without directly reminding it, but encountering at every glance. It leaves a space open for a possible reality, of “infinite” realities, as a current state that everyone has as the basis of existence. In his works, for example, consisting of rolled plastic sheets, the printed reality of the magazine wrapped transparently around itself, loses meaning, instead leaving the reality based solely on the folding movement, like his works paintings of the Eighties/Nineties which were merely drafts, processes without an end other than being stretched out. In some other works, he uses poor materials such as cardboard (“Metatron”), the surface has its depth, and a body is first and foremost, a Thing that is highly expressive without the need for representation.
Above all, according to the mystic's position, prophecy is to awaken firstly the presence about anything. 
The first of the two works on display, "Candor" consists of a bronze casting cane and golden sardine cans while the second is a photographic assemblage. In the first, there is a correspondence between the ineffable and language since the object is literally what it is, a golden cane, at the same time what the event is in the object, candour. Its surface not only reflects light but looking at it potentially dazzles if a ray of sunlight falls on it. 
In the second, the recurring motifs of photographic assemblage have no narrative intention, instead reflect an "overabundance of dimensions that overcomes the dichotomy between the ineffable and language". Two apples, a rose, an empty space, a house, "every fragment of reality emerges like a map crossed by intersections between different dimensions that outlines it”.

This is James Joyce's writing method for "Ulysses" and above all for "Finnegan's Wake" that Mario Diacono also dedicated a short translation essay ("La Tartaruga", 1st notebook, 1961, reprinted in "I Lilliput ”, 1970). 
His exhibited work is an exhibition talisman. This is the framing of his book “Thotality” created in 1973/74. Subsequently, the publication containing his writings from 1954 to 2014 was released in 2017 with the same title. 
From god Thoth or Hermes hint and also to totality, it lies as a writing statement that dissects and frees language from the descriptive word to reveal the interpenetration of dimensions, a "writing of the totality of being" (Diacono. La parola esiliata). 
According to Diacono's thesis, however, this "radical/advanced writing intimately overwhelmed by the nostalgia of the Thing" (Diacono, Gesamtkunstwort), evolves towards the visual, object and performance, the hyperwriting and post-verbal works remained as avant-garde not having changed the verbal-syntactic writing fate, that become impoverished to the absolute language or "entropy language" (Deacon, "Thotality") also undermining the spirituality itself. 
Diacono has always studied forms of spirituality that come from the past, incorporating them into his hyper-writing as in "Thotality" of 73/74 which contains as well samplings from reality. Indeed, are pulled together with geometric figures, Chinese ideograms, words in different languages such as Hebrew, Russian, English, Italian, and Latin, extracts from dictionaries, books, cartoons, esoteric essays, advertising, stamps, numbered tickets, crossword puzzles, lists, playing cards, industrial brands and inscribed stone tablets. 
The critical essay is framed in columns between pages full of signifiers. It is not just visual text but a multifaceted and magical composition. Writing, art and worlds occur simultaneously in the proliferation of languages, symbols, and signs that are not indistinct but organised in a polymorphic language that places language and existence in balance. We find evidence in the alchemical texts - “Thotality” is a contemporary example - which are dark and often grotesque, concealing searches for the truth behind elaborated constructions not devoid of humour. 
The book installation shows only the cover and the first page where the text begins together with the esoteric symbol "et sic in infinitum", a Chinese calligrams text and the most prompt signs, the heart, together with a newspaper article on the workers quality of life setting the question of whether humanity exists for production and profit or for the good of humanity itself. 
As Diacono wrote about Marcel Duchamp's work, Thotality also consists of "a 'hermetic' writing that flares up the logical thought in magical ambition, conveying into the object the unexpected of an ultra-sense" (Diacono, Thotality ).

Text by Mario Iannelli

All quotes without citation in the text are by Federico Campagna

Navid Azimi Sajadi (1982, Tehran, Iran) is a visual artist and researcher in the Middle Eastern arts. In 2005 he graduated in Painting from the Tehran University of Art and Architecture. In the same year, he moved to Rome, where he obtained another degree at the Academy of Fine Arts of Rome in 2009. He was awarded by the Amedeo Modigliani Foundation and subsequently obtained in 2013 the Master of Fine Arts in Multimedia Sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome. In the same year, he received an invitation to exhibit his works at the 9th Shanghai Biennale. 
His artistic practice moves between installations, drawings and ceramics, exploring the experience of navigating between two cultures and embracing cross-cultural codes. He has developed an esoteric language of signs and symbols taken from different mythologies, cults and religions. By constantly relating images, shapes and memories, he creates a metaphorical setting in which viewers can attach a wide range of meanings to markers of time and space. His works follow the logic of a labyrinthine narrative or interconnected vessels in which symbols, archetypes, meanings and stories transform and flow into each other, giving life to a new visual configuration and a kaleidoscopic perspective. Through the corridors of his ideas, time becomes fluid, mixing past, present and future. Echoes of ancient cults blend with contemporary themes, illuminating the cyclical nature of existence and the interconnection of human migrations.
His exhibitions in museums and institutions include MACRO Museum, Rome; Getty Center, Los Angeles; Monumental Complex of Monreale, Monreale; Zisa Castle Museum, Palermo; Foundry Downtown, Dubai; Maraya Art Center, Sharijah; Brunei Gallery (SOAS University), London; Pejman Foundation, Tehran; Carlo Bilotti Museum, Rome; Palazzo Bevilacqua Ariosti, Bologna; Center for Print Research (CFPR), Bristol.
Living and working between Rome and Tehran, Navid Azimi Sajadi continues to create artworks that fascinate and connect people, exploring the boundaries of expression and interpretation.

Mario Diacono (1930, Rome) lives and works in Boston. Poet, artist, writer, critic, gallery owner, professor at the University of Berkeley, curator, and translator, Mario Diacono's activity stands out for having crossed and spread avant-garde culture in all its forms. In Rome's cultural environment, he immediately formed partnerships with figures such as Giuseppe Ungaretti, Sandro Penna, Emilio Villa, and Edoardo Sanguineti, collaborating on numerous magazines (including Bit, Ex, Continuum, Quaderno) by his curated (Tau/ma in collaboration with Claudio Parmiggiani), participating in the verbo-visual poetry experience and visual new artistic expressions. His artistic activity focuses on object writing that bounds from the creation of object words to object books. 
The activity of critic evolves in support of that of gallery owner and also is encountered by partnerships such as those with Achille Maramotti, Jannis Kounellis and Vito Acconci, documented in “Towards a new iconography” and “KA. From Kounellis to Acconci. Art matter concept 1960-1975” and in numerous essays he wrote on the artists' work with publications of his galleries in Bologna, Rome, Boston and New York.

Pietro Fortuna (1950, Padua) lives and works in Villanova in Umbria where he recently moved his Archive. He studied architecture and philosophy and while still very young he collaborated on important scenic creations for the San Carlo in Naples, La Scala in Milan and the Fenice in Venice. In 1977 his first solo exhibition was held at the Cannaviello Gallery in Rome, and then he was in Milan from 1978 to 1983 with other solo exhibitions: at Luigi De Ambrogi, Luciano Inga-Pin and Massimo Minini. He moved to New York for a few months where he exhibited at Serra and Di Felice. In the 1980s he displayed his works at the XVI Biennale of São Paulo, at the Galleria Comunale d'Arte Moderna in Bologna, at Ville Arson in Nice, at the Kunstler House in Graz, at the Frankfurter Kunstverein, at the XII Biennale in Paris and exhibitions such as “Italiana: nuova immagine” at the Municipal Art Gallery of Ravenna and “Anni '80” at the Municipal Gallery of Modern Art in Bologna. Many other exhibitions followed in international galleries and museums such as Annina Nosei Gallery in New York, Otmar Triebold in Basel, Montenay – Delsol in Paris, Ville Arson in Nice, Kunstler House in Graz and at the Frankfurter Kunstverein. In Italy, his work is represented by the Galleria Giuliana de Crescenzo in Rome, Eva Menz and Ippolito Simonis in Turin and Studio Guenzani in Milan. In the 90s he created new cycles of works in large format and with installations which he presented at the Palais de Glace in Buenos Aires, at the Gallery of Modern Art of San Marino, at the Museum of Modern Art in Bogota, at the Municipal Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome, at Le Carré Musée Bonnat in Bayonne and the Pecci Museum in Prato, and in exhibitions such as “Cadenze” and “Italia-America, l’astrazione ridefinita”.
In 1996 he founded "Opera Paese", a place for culture where important art, music and thought exponents met, from Philip Glass to Jan Fabre, from Pistoletto to Kounellis, from Carlo Sini to Kankeli. 
From 2000 to 2006 other solo exhibitions followed, including at the Palazzo del Capitano del Popolo in Todi, at La Nuova Pesa and the Stefania Miscetti Studio in Rome. He also participates in "Exempla II, arte italiana nella vicenda europea 1960-2000", Pinacoteca Civica of Teramo and in “Enclave 1", CAMEC, Center for Modern and Contemporary Art of La Spezia.
In more recent years, other solo exhibitions have followed at the Watertoren Center for Contemporary Art in Vlissingen, at the XII International Sculpture Biennial in Carrara, at the Tramway in Glasgow, at the Morra Foundation in Naples, at the Macro in Rome, at the Marca in Catanzaro, at the Quadriennale in Rome and at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome. 
In 2019 he exhibited at the Murgia Park in Matera and in 2020 for the “Geografico” cycle at Palazzo Landolina in Noto, at the Farm Cultural Park in Favara and the Teatro Garibaldi in Palermo. This was followed by the participation at Manifesta 13 in 2020 in Marseille and the solo exhibition "Glory VI Au temps où nous n'étions pas des hommes" at BPS 22 in Charleroi in 2023.
Recently he displayed a personal exhibition at the Galleria La Nuova Pesa in Rome where he held several personal exhibitions (1998, 2003 bi-personal exhibition with Vettor Pisani, 2006, 2023) and group exhibitions.

Cyrill Lachauer (1979 Rosenheim, Germany) studied filmmaking, ethnology and art in Munich and Berlin. In 2011 he founded the Flipping the Coin label together with other colleagues. He has received numerous scholarships and awards including recently Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg, Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, New York, German Academy of Rome Villa Massimo (Premio Roma 2020/21).
His original narrative style cannot be defined in one category as it is a unique work in which photography, video, writing and sound works converge in collaboration with musicians. 
He lives and works in Berlin and partially in Los Angeles.
His "narrative landscapes" require a distinct reading of the landscape and border notion in the context of anthropological-aesthetic research on Western society observed during his extensive travels. 
Recent solo exhibitions have been organized by the Goetz Collection in Munich, the Haus der Kunst in Munich, the Berlinische Galerie in Berlin and Video Art At Midnight in Berlin.

Bjørn Melhus (1966, Kirchheim/Teck, Germany) is a German-Norwegian media artist. In his work he has developed a singular position, expanding the possibilities for a critical reception of cinema and television. His practice of fragmentation, destruction, and reconstitution of well-known figures, topics, and strategies of the mass media opens up not only a network of new interpretations and critical commentaries, but also defines the relationship of mass media and viewer anew.
Originally rooted in an experimental film context, Bjørn Melhus’s work has been shown and awarded at numerous international film festivals. He has held screenings at Tate Modern and the LUX in London, the Museum of Modern Art (MediaScope) in New York, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, amongst others. His work has been exhibited in shows like The American Effect at the Whitney Museum New York, the 8th International Istanbul Biennial, solo and group shows at FACT Liverpool, Serpentine Gallery London, Sprengel Museum Hanover, Museum Ludwig Cologne, ZKM Karlsruhe, Denver Art Museum among others.
He is currently in residence at the German Academy of Rome Villa Massimo (Roma Prize 2023/24).

Roberto Pietrosanti (1967, L'Aquila) lives and works in Rome where he moved at the end of the 1980s and from where he began his intense exhibitive activity in Italy and abroad, including Paris, New York, London and Madrid.
His monochromatic pictorial research focuses on the de-construction of spatial concepts to turn his gaze to the architectural complex, creating monumental works, environmental works and site-specific installations in exhibitions such as “Monocromos. From Malevic to the present” at the Reina Sofia Contemporary Art Center, Madrid, “Confines” at the IVAM Museum in Valencia, at the X edition of the Venice Architecture Biennale, at the Archaeological Area of the Palatine/Roman Forum, at the Ara Museum Pacis in Rome, at the Triennale in Milan, at the Castello di Rivara, at the offices of Sorgenia in Milan, of SIDIEF in Rome and in Ravenna in collaboration with the Compagnia del Progetto together with the architects Franco Purini and Carlo Maria Sadich and the artistic direction of Professor Francesco Moschini, A.A.M. ArchitectureModern Art, Rome. He wins the ideas competition for the redevelopment of Piazza Augusto Imperatore in Rome. 
Simultaneously he also tackles a series of projects for theatre and contemporary dance. Recently his work has been exhibited by the Galleria La Nuova Pesa in Rome in personal exhibitions (“Fear Not” in collaboration with Giovanni Lindo Ferretti, photography by Leonardo Aquilino, “Spinarium”, “Codici / GOYA”) and group exhibitions.

Giovanni Lindo Ferretti (1953, Cerreto Alpi) is an Italian singer-songwriter, writer, actor and former activist, best known for having been a singer and lyricist in the band CCCP - Fedeli alla linea and in its subsequent "incarnations" (CSI, PGR). He is considered one of the fathers of Italian punk. In the following years, he continued to bring various theatre shows around Italy and to create solo albums, including recently "SAGA-IL CANTO DEI CANTI", "Bella gente d'Appennino, di madre e di famiglie". In 2014 the “Giovanni Lindo Ferretti SAGA il canto dei monti Foundation” was founded in Collagna, the upper valley Secchia, in the Reggio Emilia Apennines. The Foundation present itself as "a place of training and development of a humanistic, physical and mental, historical and geographical discipline, identifying in a barbaric and mountain theatre, of horses men and mountains, the main structure of his work”.

Vettor Pisani was born in Bari in 1935. “Born already famous” in his auto-biographies in which reality and fiction are mixed, he overlaps his identity on that of the fourteenth-century Italian admiral with the same name, captain-general of the Venetian fleet, one of the many others identities generated from his relentless research on the double. 
He arrived in Rome in 1968 where he worked throughout his life until 2011, "founding a theatre and an RC school." (quote Vettor Pisani's autobiography). In 1970 he held his first solo exhibition at the Galleria La Salita and won the Pino Pascali prize awarded by the National Gallery of Modern Art. This was followed by personal exhibitions at the Modern Art Agency, Naples, Galleria Gian Enzo Sperone, Rome, Galleria L'Attico, Rome, Palazzo Taverna, Rome, Framart Studio, Naples, Galleria Pio Monti, Rome, Galleria Mario Pieroni, Pescara, Galleria Salvatore Ala, New York, “R.C. Theatrum. Theater of Artists and Animals”, Museum Folkwang, Essen, “El pequeño Teatro de la Virgen”, Sala Parpallò, Valencia, “Il Teatro di Cristallo”, Galleria Civica d’Arte Contemporanea, Trento, Castello di Rivoli. His work has been presented in numerous group and biennial exhibitions in Italy and abroad including Documenta, Kassel (1972), La Biennale di Venezia (1978, 1984, 1986, 1990, 1993, 1995, 2007 “L’Isola Interiore. Isolamenti e Follia” - Eventi collaterali), S. Paolo Biennial (1979), Paris Biennial (1971, 1973), "Arte Povera. 13 Italian Künster. Dokumentation und neue Werke", Kunstverein, Munich, “Italian Art Now: An American perspective” and “Emerging Artist 1978-1986”, Guggenheim Museum, New York, “Images of the Unknown” MOMA PS1, New York, “Arte Italiana 1960 -1982” at the Hayward Gallery, London, “Terrae Motus” at the Grand Palais, Paris, Rome Quadrennial (1973, 1986, 1992), “Art and criticism 1980”, National Gallery of Modern Art, Rome,” Vitality of the negative in Italian art 1960-1970, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome, “Avanguardia/Transavanguardia 68-77”, Mura Aureliane, Rome, “Open Mind Close Circuits”, Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst, Gent.
From 1995 until 2006 in the landscape of the travertine quarries of Serre di Rapolano near Siena, he was involved in the project “Virginia Art Theatrum (Museo della Catastrofe)", in which he set “R.C. Theatrum”, Rosa-Croce Theatre, a name given by the artist to the ideal theatre figure that inspires all of his research.
In recent years, other solo exhibitions have followed in collaboration with the Morra Foundation, Naples, “Mimma e Vettor Pisani. L’angelo dell’Occidente”, “Vettor Pisani. Nostalgia. Volo di ritorno”, Torre di Guevara, Ischia, “Apocalypse Now”.
In 2012 the MACRO Museum in Rome organised the first homage, followed by various solo exhibitions, including the large retrospective “Eroica/Antieroica” at the MADRE Museum in Naples (2013-14) subsequently held at the Teatro Margherita in Bari. 
Currently, it is ongoing the retrospective exhibition “Vettor Pisani. The Enigma and The Secret” at the Pino Pascali Foundation (Polignano a Mare, Bari).