EDOARDO ARUTA
Edoardo Aruta was born in Rome in 1981. He studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti in his native city and at the IUAV University in Venice. During his studies, he also worked as scenographer and stagehand for theatre and cinema productions. Since 2003, Aruta’s work has been displayed in exhibitions in Italy and abroad. In 2013, he founded the artist collective Gli Impresari in Venice, with Marco Di Giuseppe and Rosario Sorbello. Aruta’s artistic practice is based on the examination of the phenomena underlying the experience of daily life, from the interaction with places and the relationship between people and ‘objects’ to the possibilities of exploring the real and fictitious meanings that surround them.

//LA FURIA DEL DIRE
La Furia del Dire was inspired by the expressive register of a social and musical dimension, the posse. Posses came into being to better the existential condition of an entire generation and contributed to defining the role of communities in the city limits and cultivate a cultural revival, street creativity and a horizontal social model. The project aims to highlight a way of protesting, giving rise to social innovation and music, and relating them to what has happened in Italy over the last 40 years. Edoardo Aruta has brought a SoundSystem into Manifattura Tabacchi’s spaces, setting up a series of DJ jam sessions for which he has provided a collection of 12-inch vinyl records, upon which he has recorded samples of radio messages, interviews and television announcements of events that have marked recent political and cultural history. Starting from an archive that is both intimate and universal, the work expands by involving a multitude of sound performances that will in turn be recorded on vinyl, creating a stratified historical documentation of contemporary culture that belongs to all participants and viewers.

FEDERICA DI PIETRANTONIO
Federica Di Pietrantonio was born in Rome in 1996, where she currently lives and works. She studied painting at the Rome University of Fine Arts. Di Pietrantonio graduated in 2019, and based her research on the thesis spending free time at KASK (Ghent), where she developed the project ‘Vacation Spot’. In 2017, Di Pietrantonio was selected for Mediterranea 18 Young Artists Biennale and the following year she started working at Spazio In Situ as artist and web designer. Her work has been exhibited internationally in Las Palmas (Lisbon), Gouvernement (Ghent), and the Una Vetrina gallery and The Gallery Apart in Rome. Her work centres on the relationships and processes which arise from simulations, virtual reality, and social media platforms.

//not so far away
Using research on the virtual environments of video games as a starting point, not so far away aims to establish a method for defining a new state of nature, mediated by the daily experience of devices and the entertainment industry. Federica di Pietrantonio approaches the environment with a scientific method, examining various video games with differing goals, peculiarities and aesthetics for a new study of contemporary wilderness. Her installation superimposes two machinima videos, recorded during collective playdate sessions, which explore urban spaces, natural landscapes, post-apocalyptic environments and the animal and vegetable species they contain. The area of intersection between the two projections reveals an entirely unique topos, the result of an experiment whose investigative capacities necessarily remain open to interpretation. not so far away invites the user to continue to explore real and virtual spaces, extending this field of research through commonly used tools such as Google Lens. We find ourselves in a space with discordant sounds, moving intermittently between reality and virtual reality, between an experienced dimension and one that is merely evoked.

IPER-collettivo
IPER-collettivo (Giulia Landini, Prato, 1992; Lorenzo Romaniello, Pistoia, 1988; Lorenzo Vacirca, Prato, 1988; Marco Conti, Prato, 1988) is a multidisciplinary artist collective formed by four young professionals with different backgrounds. Iper-Collettivo is united by an interest for experimentation, sustainability, and interactive forms of expression. The group shares a vision for art, architecture and ecology and explores the relationship between the territory and its communities through the realisation of socially inclusive projects that invite community participation.

//MICROMEGÀSUONI
How can we re-establish a connection, an experiential bridge between urban and natural environments? Micromegàsuoni is part of an empirical investigation that the IPER-collettivo artist collective has pursued in two different types of landscapes: the city, represented by Manifattura Tabacchi, and a series of nature reserves and forests in Tuscany and Umbria. In the anthropised space, one observes a wooden artefact, whose shape invites one to listen. A totemic element that can be physically entered, the work reproduces and amplifies mysterious sounds that originate from the forest in which the urban artifact’s unseen twin dwells. The pair of wooden soundboxes are united to each other as the sound of one reaches the other: the urban box provides a refuge, a shelter for those who live in the city, but it is also a stimulus to travel along the sound in the opposite direction, from the city towards the outside, in an attempt to reintegrate two spheres that modernity has separated.