The young participants had the opportunity to live in Firenze for six months and draw inspiration from the artistic masterpieces located in the city center and the Manifattura’s industrial space.

Six different cultures and artistic backgrounds — Mongolia, Turchia, Iran, Emilia Romagna, Puglia e Molise — met and worked with prominent artists who shared their knowledge and experience through workshops and talks open to the public with: Stefania Galegati, Ra Di Martino, Pantani-Surace, Goldschmied & Chiari, Elena Mazzi e Robert Pettena.

“I believe these works created collectively produce some of the most interesting results and these give the Residences at Manifattura Tabacchi a unique identity”, Sergio Risaliti, the curator.

D’Amelio’s work focuses on the structure and history of image and vision, developing a dual conception between the normative and expressive phenomena of narratives. This gives rise to an interest in the questions of childhood and sexuality, conceived as entropic elements of social structures.

Her research focuses on the manipulation of surfaces and the identities of objects and bodies. Through combining various artistic techniques (usually painting and photography) she takes fragments, scraps, short texts, forgotten or lost notes, and old photographs, to which she adds her own touches, or from which slow and continuous accumulations are able to reconfigure the objects’ original identity and regenerating its meaning. An affective and semantic action re-elaborates small events originating from randomness, loss or abandonment.

Bekhbaatar performs artistic research revolving around the an idea intrinsic to all things: change.

With the passing of time, every object and every being loses its original meaning to take on a new significance, a new function. Energy never runs out but only changes its form over time, in turn creating a different energy. Though the significance of its being may change, the essence of an object or body remains the same.

Ilter’s research questions the meaning of identity, understood as interaction with the surrounding environment, the environment itself and the our understanding of it. Works include site-specific installations, projections and sculpture.

Ilter’s art is modeled around the axis of history and around memory that resides and finds its form in space.

Her work, brazenly hot and material, is imbued with symbolic references that relate to intimacy and mystery. Poppi employs synthetic materials and artificial light to create a plurality of images. These images, along with various objects and sketches of artefacts, are orchestrated in complex environments in order to generate bodily and tactile sensations.

The physicality of the works often requires the viewer to reinterpret the character and the very experience of being in a given space which consequently triggers mechanisms of attraction and repulsion.

Sh is an Iranian artist and graphic designer. She completed her studies in graphics in 2014 and currently attends art school in Italy. Through her artistic commitment she engages in a silent rebellion against the lack of personal and cultural freedom in Iran.

Sh was born after the islamic revolution. In childhood an ambivalent feeling took seed that would later influence her life and artistic research.

Sh left Iran in 2011, but her artistic production still reverberates with reflections on the political and religious conditioning exerted by the regime.