REMOTO project, 2022

REMOTO is a research project by Francesco Di Tillo which started from the invitation for an artistic residence by Galeria Metropolitana, historical independent space in Santiago de Chile. The project is realized thanks to the support of the Italian Council (10th edition, 2021) a programm fostering the international promotion of Italian art as part of the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture, to the cultural partners Centex-Centro de Extensión del Ministerio de las Culturas, las Artes y el Patrimonio di Valparaiso e Escola de Arte, Faculdad de Artes, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile de Santiago and the collaboration of NOS Visual Arts Production.​

REMOTO investigates seismic events as a metaphor of the motions and dynamics of the contemporary human being in response to the current difficult relationship between human societies and Nature. In their much-discussed unpredictability seismic movements challenge man’s aptitude to adapt, making the vigour of Nature resound. The harmful impacts of an earthquake can compromise the very stability of the human society: triggering a direct connection with the most irrational part of the human being the quake questions our ability to capture and control the reality.​

​A bad earthquake at once destroys our oldest associations: the earth, the very emblem of solidity, has moved beneath our feet like a thin crust over a fluid; – one second of time has created in the mind a strange idea of insecurity, which hours of reflection would not have produced.
Charles Darwin, 20 February1835, Voyage of the Beagle

While adopting different media (installation, sculpture, video and photography) in his investigation the artist always starts from an attention to the material and to the vital processes that form and transform it. The curator Marcello Tedesco writes “For Di Tillo, the strictly sculptural processes will become more and more part of life, freeing themselves from a reductionist vision of thought, to move towards a new dimension of the creative fact”. The earthquake and the Chilean context, which has a familiar relationship with it, give rise to a dialectic that now permeates the local culture, acting as a connecting element with the original peoples of that area and, at the same time, becoming a metaphor for the unstable balance in which today’s global society is confronted, always poised between the condition of victim and executioner.​

Starting from Santiago the artist will explore territories and communities during a journey that will be documented in a multifaceted logbook where interviews, film and photographic notes, artistic interventions, will be brought into dialogue, while the final exhibition at Galeria Metropolitana, scheduled for October 2022, will offer the occasion to share the research. REMOTO will also be a publication that the artist will develop by maintaining a constant dialogue with Italy thanks to the collaboration with the curators Elisa Del Prete and Silvia Litardi (NOS Visual Arts Production).

The cultural partners Centex-Centro de Extensión del Ministerio de las Culturas, las Artes y el Patrimonio di Valparaiso e Escola de Arte, Faculdad de Artes, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile di Santiago, will welcome talks and in-depth activities.