Ricerca-Creazione – Manifesto per uno spazio necessario, by Novella Olianapublished by Postcart EdizioniNovella Oliana in conversation with Dionigi Mattia Gagliardi – Numero Cromatico

How can the Mediterranean, a complex space, be represented through artistic devices? How can the body and gestures connect with artistic research and be transformed within the spatiality circumscribed by the sea’s surface? In relation to this aquatic surface, how is contemporary photography changing, and what is the role of artistic research in understanding the world today?

These questions, which have driven her research from the beginning and are its focus, allow Novella Oliana to explore the Mediterranean both as an artistic subject and as a metaphorical territory of investigation, not through but together with art. The meaning of research-creation, or “research with art,” is precisely to reveal a fabric, a warp and weft that flows from one’s own work through that of others; these threads intertwine with multiple other intuitions, visions, and concepts to create a dense network of connections.

Oliana considers research-creation as a space of generative creation, a place where contact and relationship emerge. The potential of this practice, which consists in shaping new realms of thought and reshaping the spaces of everyday action through art, is certainly due to its interdisciplinary approach as a complex form of thought.

The Mediterranean thus becomes a necessary space for the fabrication of performative images generated by gestures and a manifesto for an artistic, political, and cultural repositioning.