curated by Carmelo Cipriani
3rd August—24th August 2025
Residenza Rubina by Ornella Cardillo and Simone Carraro
curated by Elena Forin and Arechi Invernizzi
28th July—2nd August 2025
The IV edition of NUCRÉ | Rassegna di Arte Contemporanea, entitled Il sogno di Icaro (Icarus's Dream), unfolds as a poetic and emotional journey that intertwines myth and architecture, territory and imagination, vertigo and fall, tension and desire to rise. The project, which involves artists from different geographical and generational backgrounds, stems from a confrontation with the history of Ceglie Messapica and takes shape, as usual, in two venues - the stables of the Castello Ducale and the Trullo Rubina -, places that unite city and countryside, different environments that are close to each other, indeed bordering, one marking the other, delimiting it; two sides of the same coin in which human industriousness and sociality are expressed, in all their multiple implications.
With its vertiginous height of 34 metres, the square Norman tower constitutes the inspirational motif of the exhibition and embodies the sense of suspension, of the unstable balance between the desire to fly and the fear of falling. The nearby stables open the exhibition by hosting a selection of works that emblematically interweave the natural and historical dimensions, giving the symbolic start to the path that expands into the trullo. With its recollected form, rooted in the earth but with its spire pointing upwards, this building becomes in fact a metaphor for an inner journey, a path of elevation that on the one hand starts from the earth to reach for the sky, and on the other explores the tension downwards, the fascination of emptiness as a space of possibility.
Moreover, the architecture of the trullo is the setting for the Residenza Rubina, the third important axis along which Nucrè is developed. Conceived to host some of the most interesting voices of contemporary research, this project aims to connect the nature and culture of the place with the directions of the exhibition, and in this edition features the interventions of Ornella Cardillo and Simone Carraro.
In the dialogue between the trullo and the stables, Il sogno di Icaro proposes a narrative that interweaves the work of some 20th-century masters such as Getulio Alviani, Lisetta Carmi, Vettor Pisani and Giuseppe Spagnulo, with tireless experimenters linked to the territory such as Pierluigi Calignano, Giuseppe Caccavale and Michele Zaza, recognised international figures such as Sara Bichão, Flatform, Sonia Leimer, Marzia Migliora and Driant Zeneli, and finally the emerging experiences of Ornella Cardillo, Simone Carraro and Giacomo Segantin. The dialogue between these different languages, perspectives and approaches, evokes the figure of Icarus as an emblem of humanity itself, in continuous tension between desire and limit, ambition and fear. Therefore, between elevation, vertigo and tension, the exhibition creates a path that in the high and the low, in the earth and in the sky, has its points of departure and arrival, marking a path that is not only spatial but also existential and metahistorical.
On the occasion of the opening, the public will also be able to attend the final outcome of the Residenza Rubina: an evocative performance in which some sculptural elements created by Cardillo and Carraro will be activated by light projections and a sound composition created by Carraro by sampling folk and popular tracks with noises coming from the landscape.
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Photos by Marino Colucci
Getulio Alviani
Was a versatile and innovative artist, a leading figure in kinetic and programmed art. His work is characterised by the use of industrial materials and constant experimentation, with a multidisciplinary approach that spans from painting to sculpture, from design to art theory. From an early age, he showed interest in movement and light, influences that led him to develop his renowned “vibratile textured surfaces”: milled metal sheets that reflect light, creating different optical effects depending on the viewing angle. This technique, which combines art and technology, is the basis for research into visual perception and the active involvement of the viewer, placing the observer and the protagonist of the work. Alviani came into contact with important artists such as Piero Manzoni, Lucio Fontana, Max Bill and Josef Albers, and took part in the international Nove Tendencije movement that represented the avant-garde of visual, optical and kinetic art. In the 1970s he extended his interests including also the chromatology and the visualisation of physical and chemical processes, creating three-dimensional structures based on mathematical rules. He participated in numerous internationally important exhibitions such as the Biennale di Venezia (1964, 1986, 1993), Documenta 4 in Kassel (1968) and exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Kunstmuseum in Basel. His artworks are on display in prestigious museums such as the MoMA in New York, the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna in Rome and the Kunstmuseum in Basel.
Giuseppe Caccavale
Liver and works between Bari and Paris. He teaches Art Mural Dessin et Poétique des Espaces at the ENSAD in Paris. After leaving Italy once completed his academic training, during his travels across Europe, he learnt and experimented with different techniques of ancient origin, such as frescoes, miniatures and glass engravings, bringing back to his works the suggestions from these encounters with different cultures, from Flemish art to Byzantine frescoes. A central element of his poetics is the strength of the sign, a trait d'union between the so-called “major” and “minor” arts, and the visual translation of poetic passages, giving form and image to words. Caccavale's works have been the subject of solo exhibitions in Italy at the Fondazione Querini Stampalia in Venice and the Opificio Arte Contemporanea in Benevento, and abroad at the Musée Grobet-Labadié and the Musée d'Art Moderne in Marseille, the Vereniging voor het Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst in Ghent, the Italian Cultural Institute in Paris and the MAXXI in Rome. In 2015, he represented Italy at the Venice Art Biennale.
Sara Bichão
Lives and works in Lisbon. She studies painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Lisbon. Her artistic practice centres on the exploration of identity and travel, using colours, shapes and symbolism to create works characterised by a sense of ephemerality and contemplation. Her work, often sculptural and imbued with chromatic atmospheres, connects with emotional channels and is proposed as an act of resistance and reflection on sustainability and the relationship with nature. She has participated in numerous international art residencies, including Residency Unlimited in New York and the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. Her works have been exhibited at Filomena Soares Gallery in 2025, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon in 2017 and Artopia Gallery, Milan in 2014.
Pierluigi Calignano
After completing his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts of Brera, attends in 1995 the Advanced Course in Visual Arts at the Ratti Foundation (Como), with Joseph Kosuth as Visiting Professor. Between 2008 and 2016 he worked between Italy and the US, where he takes part in programs such as ISCP, New York (US); I-Park Residency Program, East Haddam, CT (US); Art Omi International Artists Residency, Ghent, NY (US) and, in 2016, he produced a permanent public artwork at the PISIS 437K in Brooklyn, NY (US). He has exhibited his work in solo and collectives spaces such as Groninger Museum, Groningen, (NL); Museolaboratorio, Città Sant’angelo (PE); DAFNA Gallery, Napoli; Palazzo Lucarini Contemporary, Trevi; LWZ Projekte, Vienna (AT); Museo MAGA, Gallarate; Röda Sten Museum, Göteborg (IE); Centre Culturel Français di Milan; Antonio Colombo Arte Contemporanea, Milan; Carbone.to, Torino; Salvatore+Caroline Ala, Milan; Fondazione Museo Pino Pascali, Polignano a Mare; Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro, Milan; Wäscherei Kunstverein, Zürigo (CH); Palazzo della Triennale, Milan; Spazio Oberdan, Milan; Tirana Biennale, Tirana (AL), Viafarini, Milano, Assab One, Milan. His work has been reviewed in Artforum, Flash Art, Exibart, Arte e Critica, Segno, and Tema Celeste. He currently teaches Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome.
Lisetta Carmi
Ornella Cardillo
Considered a pioneer of geometric abstractionism, Melotti's style is based on abstract and at the same time figurative geometric creations, in which the influence of the two disciplines that formed him, music and engineering, can be seen. Constantly searching for new materials and creative possibilities, he has left behind a large number of works such as drawings, ceramics and his teatrini, fascinating terracotta compositions conceived as minute living spaces, within which the artist mimes situations of encounters, presences, alienated and absorbed life. He took part in numerous exhibitions at the Venice Biennale (1948, 1950, 1952, 1956, 1966, 1972, 1986, 1995). In the month of his death, he was awarded the Golden Lion in Memory during the 42nd Venice Biennale. The artist's works can be found in museums such as the MoMA in New York and the Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan.
Simone Carraro
After graduating in painting at the Academia of Fine Arts in Venice, he dedicated himself fully to his artistic production. He has taken part in many exhibitions and urban events on national and international scale. Carraro’s work is strongly influenced by the spaces and contexts he engages with. He’s particularly interested in the relationship between humans and environment, investigating the characteristics of the landscape and pop culture elements, translating them with his own allegoric code into figurative and sonorous shapes.
The visual arts and the musical performances are the expressive means through which Carraro brings together symbolic imagery and rhythmic figurations, reviving archaic words and questioning future scenarios.
Lisetta Carmi (Genoa, 1924 - Cisternino, 2022) is considered one of the most significant figures in the Italian photography scene of the 20th Century, able to combine art and social commitment with a unique sensibility towards people and stories on the sidelines. Her search is conceived as a means of seeking truth, documenting marginalised and invisible realities, such as harbours workers and the transvestite community of Genoa. She travelled extensively, realising reportages in Latin America, Asia and various Italian regions, with a strong social and political commitment. The photographic artworks of Lisetta Carmi are shown at the Museo di Roma in Trastevere, Palazzo Ducale di Genova, Museo MAN di Nuoro, Gallerie d’Italia di Torino.
Flatform
Flatform is a collective artist based in Milan. Flatform's work moves along an ideal borderline, that of meaning, articulating the difference between possible and impossible, between movement and pose. An unstable balance between control and chance, between the predictable and the unexpected is the focal point of his work. Flatform's works have been exhibited in numerous museums and institutions
including Centre Pompidou in Paris, Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC, Wexner Center in Columbus, MAXXI in Rome, Fondazione Prada in Milan, EMPAC in Troy NY, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin, Argos in Brussels, Palazzo Grassi in Venice, Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, Yerba Buena in San Francisco, Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam, Museu da Imagem e do Som in São Paulo, PAC in Milan. Flatform's films have been invited to major film festivals including Cannes' Quinzaine des Realisateurs, Venice International Film Festival, IFFR Rotterdam, BFI Film Festival London, LOOP Barcelona, Festival du Nouveau Cinema Montreal, Lo Schermo dell'Arte Florence, IFF Melbourne. Winner of the Italian Council in 2019 and 2024, his works have been awarded at numerous film festivals and one of them was nominated for an Academy Awards nomination in 2021 in the Documentary - short subject category.
Sonia Leimer
She studied architecture at the Accademia of Fine Arts in Vienna. Her artistic research investigates urban and cosmic spaces, exploring how places and objects, shaped from specific historical contexts, transform to make history and social changes tangible. Her works — sculptures, videos and installations — placing themselves between reality and imagination, leave enigmatic traces that invite ongoing reinterpretations. Over the course of her career, she has taught in Vienna and Zurich and collaborated with international institutions such as Cooper Union in New York. Among the awards received are the Italian Council Award (2018) and the Paul Flora-Preis (2011). Leimer has held numerous notable solo exhibitions at the Museion in Bolzano (2020/2021), Galerie nächst St. Stephan in Vienna (2012), Salzburger Kunstverein (2010), Neuer Kunstverein Wien (2022), the MAN Museo d’Arte Provincia di Nuoro in Sardinia (2021) and the ISCP in New York (2019).
Marzia Migliora
Vettor Pisani
Was an eclectic and visionary artist, known for his research that combines art, theatre and esoteric philosophy. He debuted in 1970 in Rome with the personal “Maschile, femminile e androgino. Incesto e cannibalismo in Marcel Duchamp” at the La Salt Gallery, which marks the beginning of a path characterised from the use of artistic language as an instrument for search and quotation. His practice goes from painting to installations, to performance, with artworks that reflect on the labyrinth as metaphor for reality and on the relationship between light and darkness, knowledge and mystery. His work interweaves references to Rosicrucian doctrine, Freemasonry, and mythology, with a theatrical approach that blends irony and depth, reality and storytelling. Among his most significant series are Il Teatro di Edipo, Il Teatro della Sfinge, and Il Teatro di Cristallo, in which theatre becomes both an initiatory space and an existential metaphor. Pisani participated in numerous editions of the Venice Biennale from 1976 to 1995, as well as in the Rome Quadriennale, consolidating his presence on the international scene. His works are held in major institutions such as the Museo Madre in Naples and the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome.
Her artistic practice spans between photography, video, sound, performance, installation, and drawing, through which she explores memory as a tool for articulating the present and analysing labour as an expression of social participation. Recently she has embraced a multispecies approach to create new sensitive relations, imagining how things might appear from animals and plants’ perspective, investigating the existing relationships between the environment and human beings. The artist’s work was shown at the Venice Biennale in 2015 and in exhibition in Italy and abroad, including at: Ca’ Rezzonico, Venice (2017); Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art (2012); MAXXI, Rome (2012); Museo del Novecento, Milan (2011); and Fondazione Merz, Turin (2006). Her works are held in public and private collections in Italy and internationally, including: Museo Madre (Naples), Biedermann Museum (Donaueschingen), Castello di Rivoli Museum (Turin), Museo del Novecento (Milan), Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation (Turin), Fondazione Merz (Turin), and La Triennale (Milan).
Giuseppe Spagnulo
Was one of the leading figures in Italian sculpture in the second half of the twentieth century. After training between Faenza and Milan, where he worked as an assistant to Arnaldo Pomodoro and Lucio Fontana, his early works in stoneware, exhibited since 1965, soon evolved into monumental sculpture, using industrial materials such as iron and steel. In the 1970s he actively took part in the protest movements, creating urban installations in dialogue with working-class environments. His artistic research was rooted in material, gesture, and spatial tension, as highlighted in the Archeologia and Paesaggi series. He participated in numerous international exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale (1972, 1976, 1982), Documenta in Kassel (1977), the Rome Quadriennale, and held solo museum exhibitions at the Museum Bochum, Neues Museum Nürnberg, and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. His works are part of major museum collections, including MART in Rovereto, Museo del Novecento in Milan, Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Bologna, Museo Internazionale delle Ceramiche in Faenza, and the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie in Karlsruhe.
Driant Zeneli
He studied Sculpture and Multimedia at the Academy of Fine Arts in Macerata. He lives and works between Turin and Tirana. Over the course of his career, he has been the subject of numerous solo and group exhibitions in international institutions and biennials, including: the Venice Biennale (in 2011 and 2019); Sharjah Biennial (2025); Havana Biennial (2024); Ruhr Triennale, Essen (2024); Dhaka Art Summit (DAS) (2023); 59th October Salon, Belgrade Biennale (2022); Manifesta 14, Prishtina (2022); 39th EVA International Biennial, Limerick (2020); Autostrada Biennale, Prizren (2019); IV Bienal del Fin del Mundo, Chile (2015); and the 5th Prague Biennale (2011). His works have been exhibited in a wide range of museum contexts, including: EMST, Athens (2025); Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb (2024); MAXXI Museum, Rome (2023); National Gallery of North Macedonia (2022); Teatrino di Palazzo Grassi, Venice (2021); Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art, Riga (2019); National Gallery of the Republic of Kosovo, Pristina (2019); Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Bergamo (2019); MuCEM, Marseille (2016); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2016); Villa Medici, Rome (2016); GAM – Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art, Turin (2013); ZKM, Karlsruhe (2012); MUSAC, Castilla y León, Spain (2012); and the National Gallery of Albania, Tirana (2008).
Giacomo Segantin
He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Verona and completed the two-year Master’s programme in Visual Arts and Curatorial Studies at NABA, Milan. His practice aims to deconstruct stereotypes linked to landscape and territorial identity, offering a vision of complex reality, constantly in flux. He has taken part in various residencies and research projects, including Mustarinda, Hyrynsalmi, Finland (2023); Uncivilized Paradigms, promoted by BJCEM, curated by Alessandro Castiglioni and Simone Frangi; progettoborca, Borca di Cadore, Dolomiti Contemporanee (2020); and Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, Venice (2019). Her work has featured in several exhibitions, including We Are the Flood, curated by Stefano Cagol, Spazio Archeologico Sotterraneo, Trento (2022); Cantica21, a production award supported by MAECI and MiC, Canada (2021); To See, To Know, To Play, curated by Eleonora Reffo, Villa Borromeo, Fontaniva (2020); and 51zero, International Moving Image and Contemporary Art Festival, Rochester/Canterbury, UK (2019). In 2024, his work became part of the collection of MuSe Museum of Science in Trento, thanks to the PAC (Contemporary Art Plan, 2023 edition).
Michele Zaza
trained at the Art Institute in Bari and later at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan, where he studied sculpture under the guidance of Marino Marini. His artistic research developed primarily through photography, with a conceptual approach that reflects on the human condition and power dynamics. Among his major bodies of work, Cristologia (1971) in which he documents the illusion of freedom between the individual and authority; Dissidenza ignota(1973), which explores themes of authoritarianism and everyday life through emotionally charged imagery; and Anamnesi, Universo estraneo, and Racconto celeste, which investigate the realm of dreams, the incorporeal, and domestic space as a celestial dimension.
His evolution towards more abstract and monumental forms became established in the 1990s, with works focusing on the face and sculptural forms inspired by Cycladic art, while maintaining an intense expressive style. Among his most important exhibitions are his participation in Documenta in Kassel (1977, 1982), the Venice Biennale with a solo room (1980), and exhibitions at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1981). His works are held in prominent international museums, including the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, as well as in significant public and private collections across Italy, Europe, and the United States.