With the Competition for the Three Thresholds – an international invitational art competition organized by Eight Art Project – the project to enhance the landscape of Ca' Corniani, the historic Genagricola estate which extends over 1700 hectares in the hinterland of Caorle , in the province of Venice, is one of the largest Italian farms.
Five European artists – Monica Bonvicini, Alberto Garutti, Carsten Höller, Tobias Rehberger and Remo Salvadori – were invited by Elena Tettamanti and Antonella Soldaini – artistic curators of the competition – to conceive as many site-based interventions for the three access points of Ca' Corniani specific, with the aim of marking the entrance to the estate and narrating the richness of this area with a strongly agricultural and productive vocation. The awards ceremony is scheduled for October 12, 2017, at the Milan Triennale.
The winning project will be officially inaugurated at the end of May 2018, on the occasion of the 16th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale. The idea of using contemporary art to establish a new relationship between the culture of agricultural production, the nature of the places and the community arises directly from the landscape master plan, the planning of which was started in 2014 by the international architecture firm of the landscape LAND and Andreas Kipar, author with Giovanni Sala of the entire enhancement strategy and landscape curator of the artistic competition.
Ca' Corniani. Vanguard land
“The ability to look ahead – underlines Giancarlo Fancel, President of Genagricola SpA – is historically the fil-rouge that in Ca' Corniani holds company, territory and population together. Talking about the avant-garde referring to agriculture, the oldest productive economic sector of our society, might seem ambitious. Yet this sector, still fundamental for life today, has always lived on the cutting edge and innovation.”
“With this spirit, Ca' Corniani is now ready to take a new and still unexplored path, integrating its business model with new activities with a cultural vocation. And Culture will be the new avant-garde of Agriculture” adds Alessandro Marchionne, CEO of Genagricola. “Embracing the idea of an art competition as a piece of a broader valorisation plan for Ca' Corniani – reiterates Andreas Kipar – demonstrates the attention that Generali Italia and Genagricola give to their heritage: landscape, art and agriculture are today together for trigger a cultural process of knowledge and sharing of a place beyond its geographical value, which empowers the community and which grows over the years to bear fruit."
The Competition for the Three Thresholds
The competition represents a moment of confrontation and relationship between the artists and Ca' Corniani: on the one hand it brings them closer to the high historical and productive value of the place, on the other it triggers forms of sharing with the local and wider socio-cultural context, because art and agriculture can integrate permanently as a new trend of development and revitalization of the territory. “We have thought of these five artists – declare Elena Tettamanti and Antonella Soldaini, artistic curators – certain of the fact that they will be able to experiment and deal with the specificity and uniqueness of this environment. Thinking about the peculiarities of the territory, we asked them to focus on the concept of "threshold", a theme that clearly highlights its character, together with the hospitable and welcoming attitude always adopted by the property."
In fact, Ca' Corniani has the interesting peculiarity of being a completely flat area surrounded by water, whose borders are delimited by the banks of the Livenza river and by the artificial canals created at the time of the reclamation of 1851. The three points are therefore strategic for the estate of access, reachable by land and by water: Three Thresholds, physical and symbolic, whose meaning is to be interpreted in the meaning given by Robert Venturi of "point of tension between two polarities".
The works created for these three key points will be able to attract interest and trigger a process of discovery of the place, taking into consideration the reality of Ca' Corniani, what it has represented in the past and what it will become in the future. An international jury – made up of: Gabriella Belli (Director of the Venice Civic Museums Foundation), Pippo Ciorra (Senior Curator of the MAXXI Museum), Philippe Donnet (Managing Director and Group CEO Assicurazioni Generali), Giancarlo Fancel (President of Genagricola and Chief Financial Officer of Generali Italia ), Andreas Kipar (Founding Partner LAND), Beatrice Merz (President of the Swiss Merz Foundation and of the Mario Merz Prize), Marco Sesana (Country Manager and CEO of Generali Italia), Elena Tettamanti (Founder Eight Art Project) and Vicente Todolì (Artistic Director Hangar Bicocca) – will have the task of evaluating the five projects presented and identifying the winning artist, who will be assigned the task of creating three works for the Three Thresholds.
